ABSTRACT
Blanchot’s work maintains throughout its concern with this ‘uninhabitable non-thought’ and the relation of literature to it. Thought pursues ‘the one, unity, sameness’, it aims at ‘a clear and defined coherence of actions and objects, relations and forms – the work of tranquil man’.2 Thought is the very character of human life, and characterizes the ‘speech of the universe, speech of knowledge, of labor and of salvation’.3 Comprehension is thus ‘a grasp that gathers the diverse into a unity, identifies the different, and brings the other back to the same’.4 The life of the ‘tranquil man’ is the movement of establishing intelligibility, bringing the world and man himself to concepts and so creating knowledge, control and the purpose of his existence. Language is ‘a power according to which when I speak, it is the world that declares itself, the clear light of day that develops though tasks undertaken, through action and time’.5 When thought reflects on itself, it directs itself to ‘the central question’, ‘the question of the whole’.6 Directed towards unity, thought is governed by the notion of finality, the end, which gives it the power ‘to limit, separate, and thus to grasp’.7 In this reflection, addressing the ‘central question’, the ‘day’ of intelligibility appears in relation to the end, to finality, in which world and man would be brought into the daylight, and so in relation to ‘the night’, the ‘exterior’ or beyond of intelligibility. This exterior appears as the ‘first night’, the ‘night of day’, the night as end of the day, night understood from the side of day. ‘Day makes the night . . . Night speaks only of day . . . Day is linked to night because it would not be day if it did not begin and come to an end.’8 This night is ‘welcoming’ for here ‘language completes and fulfills itself in the silent profundity which vouches for it as its meaning’,9 making ‘of the world the future, the culmination of the world’.10 Thought, what is said, the realm of language, tends towards finality and only so do we have understanding as determinate, or
partial in relation to its fulfilment. There is only intelligibility because there is an end to it, and so a reference to its ‘other side’. By the same token, what is thought, spoken of, ‘being’, what is, is only possible in relation to ‘nothingness’, the end of being and its ‘other’. ‘But when everything has disappeared in the night, “everything has disappeared” appears. This is the other night.’11
For thought thinking the whole, the ‘first night’ is the ‘nothing’ which gives sense to illumination, that against which there is illumination, which cannot be illuminated. But in this thought, the ‘nothing’, the ‘everything has disappeared’ is itself thought as the necessary other of illumination. Its appearance as the ‘other night’, its repetition, marks the impossibility for thought to avoid thinking its ‘other’ which, according to thought’s own project, should be beyond, exterior to it. Thought, language, is only possible in relation to its ‘other’: but this is now shown to be within thought, language, itself. When thought thinks everything has disappeared, then ‘everything has disappeared’ appears: the words themselves. The ‘exterior’ of thought, language and the world inhabits them, but for there to be thought, language and world, this must be forgotten. The ‘exterior’, and so the end of intelligibility in terms of which intelligibility has sense, must appear to the world of day as beyond it. In thinking this, however, it must appear within language. This ‘other’, this ‘exterior’, which is interior, is the essential failure of thought and world to be thought and world, to be oriented towards the unity that gives them determinateness. The condition of their possibility, the other, the exterior, is at the same time the condition of their impossibility. This is the ‘presence-absence’ with which thought torments itself. Thought, directed towards the whole, finds it cannot terminate itself. In its attempt, it passes beyond and so defeats itself. The very nature of thought is such as to defeat its own ambition (which means that there is no nature, essence, of thought, since its ambition is precisely to think the whole and so bring everything, including itself, within determinate limits). The ‘other night’ is not something beyond thought, as if there were something but thought couldn’t think it. It is simply the appearance of what thought thinks when it thinks the whole, the end, the repetition of ‘everything has disappeared’ so that these words appear in their very resistance to understanding. Thought in thinking the whole defeats itself: that which makes thought possible, the idea of the whole, finality, makes thought impossible since thought cannot thereby avoid thinking the ‘other’ of the whole. This failure manifests itself in the repetition of what thought thinks, in the mere appearance of the words ‘everything has disappeared’ where they are deprived of sense. In this ‘the very category of the whole – the one borne by the “general question” – is unseated and made to falter. We are here at the juncture where the experience of the whole is shaken.’12 In thoughts and language aiming at unity, coherence and ultimately at the whole of the ‘day’, ‘one shall always sense an entirely different speech, liberating thought from being always only a thought in view of unity’.13 Thought, language, is indeed the realm of daylight and cannot be
