In His Voice

David Appelbaum

Description

In His Voice considers the idea of the neuter in Maurice Blanchot's work, and seeks to work out through an exercise of literary impersonation, or ventriloquism, how and why Blanchot relied on this form. Neither active nor passive, the neuter expresses a kind of third voice beyond the command of the author, one that speaks paradoxically of what lies outside of speaking but nonetheless exerts an irrepressible influence on thought. The neuter is exilic, messianic, and fragmentary. Since it cannot be directly accounted for, Blanchot uses a number of indirect approaches—notably, myth—to announce the key elements of his view. Orpheus, Odysseus, and principally Narcissus figure his conception and elaborate the operation of giving voice. Through a distillation of Blanchot's narrative and critical texts—focusing on the late works, The Step Not Beyond, and The Writing of the Disaster—and through an emphasis on performance, In His Voice enacts the event of writing in search of how author's inscriptive reality appears in the world.
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction

1. Narcissus

2. The Mirror

3. Death as Instance

4. Echo

5. Voice Eo Ipso

Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Lycée
• Philosophie
• Literary theory
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438459813
• Langue: English

Extrait

In His Voice
In His Voice

M AURICE B LANCHOT’S A FFAIR WITH THE N EUTER
DAVID APPELBAUM
Published by
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Albany
© 2016 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Appelbaum, David.
In his voice : Maurice Blanchot’s affair with the neuter / David Appelbaum.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5979-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5981-3 (e-book)
1. Whole and parts (Philosophy) 2. Perspective (Philosophy) 3. Nothing (Philosophy) 4. Blanchot, Maurice. I. Title. BD396.A67 2016. 843'.912—dc23 2015012445
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Kate Stroud Hamilton
Ah this blind voice, and these moments of held breath when all listen wildly, and the voice that begins to fumble again, without knowing what it’s looking for and again the tiny silence and the listening again, for what, no one knows, a sign of life perhaps, that must be it, a sign of life escaping someone, and bound to be denied if it came, that’s it surely, if only all that could stop, there’d be peace, no, too good to be believed, the listening would go on, for the voice to begin again, for a sign of life, for some one to betray himself, or for something else, anything, what else can there be but signs of life …
—Beckett, The Unnamable
Contents Preface Abbreviations Introduction 1 Narcissus 2 The Mirror 3 Death as Instance 4 Echo 5 Voice Eo Ipso Conclusion Notes Selected Bibliography Index
Preface
In His Voice: Maurice Blanchot’s Affair with the Neuter has a twofold aim. The first is to deepen a post-phenomenological investigation of authorial voice, the voice that appears on the scene of writing. The second is to utilize as frame and resource Maurice Blanchot’s discoveries vis-à-vis voice. They represent crossings or chiasma between his thinking and my own. His prolonged fascination reveals, in its principal insight, that the writer’s voice in a literary work lacks a direct presentation and has one given in response to a second voice—the other’s voice or the otherwise than voice. Only with this responsiveness does the singularity of authorial voice make its appearance.
Blanchot conceives of the alterity as a murmurous null point of vocalization. It is the sirens’ song, with allusion to Homer, or the cacophonous resonance of unadorned being, the il y a of Levinas, a motile chaos that precedes subjectivity, consciousness, and the properly human. Normally suppressed in the name of linguistical efficacy and worldly reality, its irrepressibility is the quilting point of literature since Romanticism. Writers such as Hölderlin, Rilke, Kafka, Mallarmé, René Char, and Beckett lead Blanchot to speak of the authorial voice that embodies otherness as the neuter . The neuter voice, avoiding the repressive tendencies both of everyday language and philosophical discourse, reveals a menace to our appropriation of being and the order of things. Confronting it as reader, one falls under an exigency quite different from that of worldly comportment.
In accordance with current views, voice itself also has a twofold nature. It declares, yielding statements about the world, and it performs, presenting enactments of what it has power to do. To secure its signature, authorial voice is faced with a paradoxical task in relation to the alterity that speaks through and constitutes it. Since no statement of what lies beyond meaning is possible, it relies on performance to do the trick. Thus, the “logic” of how to present a performance of inscription is never far from my concern. By the same token, naked criticism, analysis, and explication of Blanchot’s texts are less useful and more peripheral facets of the current study. Instead, it would debut an exemplary performance of the scene of writing, who, where, and what takes place—with Maurice Blanchot as designated writer.
Abbreviations
Maurice Blanchot AO
Awaiting Oblivion. Tr. John Gregg (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1997) F
Friendship . Tr. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997) FP
Faux Pas . Tr. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) I
The Instant of My Death (with Demeure: Fiction and Testimony by Jacques Derrida). Tr. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000) IC
The Infinite Conversation . Tr. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993) LM
The Last Man . Tr. Lydia Davis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987) SL
The Space of Literature. Tr. Ann Smock (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1982)
The Station Hill Blanchot Reader . Ed. George Quasha, Tr. Paul Auster, Lydia Davis, and Robert Lamberton (Barrytown, NY, Station Hill Press, 1998): This anthology includes translations of Thomas the Obscure (TO), Death Sentence (DS), The Madness of the Day (MD), When the Time Comes (WTC), and The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me (TOW). SNB
The Step Not Beyond. Tr. Lycette Nelson (Albany, SUNY Press, 1982) UC
The Unavowable Community . Tr. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, NY, Station Hill Press, 1988) WD
The Writing of the Disaster . Tr. Ann Smock (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1986) WF
The Work of Fire . Tr. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1995)
Jacques Derrida A
Aporias . Tr. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993) AL
Acts of Literature . Ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 2002) D
Dissemination . Tr. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) DE
Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (with The Instant of My Death , by Maurice Blanchot). Tr. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) EO
The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation . Tr. Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988) G
Glas . Tr. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986) GD
The Gift of Death . Tr. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) MB
Memoirs of the Blind . Tr. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) P
Parages . Tr. Tom Conley, James Hulbert, John P. Leavey, and Avital Ronell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011) PM
Paper Machine . Tr. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005) SM
Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International . Tr. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994) SP
Speech on Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs . Tr. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973) WM
The Work of Mourning . Tr. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)
Emmanuel Levinas EE
Existence and Existents . Tr. Alfonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001) EN
Entre Nous . Tr. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) OB
Otherwise than Being: or, Beyond Essence. Tr. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998) OG
Of God Who Comes to Mind . Tr. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) PN
Proper Names . Tr. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) TI
Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority . Tr. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1961)
Martin Heidegger BT
Being and Time . Tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010) OWL
On the Way to Language . Tr. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971) PLT
Poetry, Language, Thought . Tr. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971)
Others AC
Leclaire, Serge, A Child Is Being Killed . Tr. Marie-Claude Hays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) IE
Bataille, Georges, Inner Experience . Tr. Stuart Kendall (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014) MB
Foucault, Michel, Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside. In Foucault/Blanchot . Tr. Jeffrey Mehlman and Brian Massumi (New York: Zone Books, 1990) TIC
Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Inoperative Community . Tr. Peter Connor, Lisa Barbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991)
Introduction
The present study offers a close reading of Maurice Blanchot’s texts. It keeps in mind his counsel to read lightly and without recourse to a critical mind that burrows down for “the crux of the matter.” “Close” is measured in degrees of proximity, a perilous word since Blanchot takes it to mean “touching not presence, but rather difference” (AO 60). Different moods or attunements help keep closeness at arm’s length, like annoyingly close, threateningly close, tantalizingly close. I mean close as interior to the work signed by Blanchot, and, therefore, near to heart, dear, a privileged investment, an expense.
Lightness dictates a pursuit of traces of the signing