William S. Allen - The Absolute Milie - Blanchot's Aesthetics of Melancholy 2015 PDF

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86 Research
in
Phenomenology
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The Absolute Milieu: Blanchot’s Aesthetics

of Melancholy
William S. Allen
University of Southampton
W.S.Allen@soton.ac.uk
Abstract
Unlike his other fictional works Blanchot’s 1953 narrative Celui qui ne m’accompagnait
pas has received comparatively little attention. The reasons for this would seem to lie
in the intense abstraction of his writing in this work, which is forbidding even by his
own standards, but as I will show, this intensity can be understood as comprising a sin-
gular topography of the experience of writing. Blanchot’s narrative thereby becomes
a very precise and concrete form of aesthetics, which can be usefully compared to the
understandings of melancholy developed by Benjamin and Adorno, but transposed
into a more stringent modernist context.
Keywords
Blanchot – Adorno – melancholy – aesthetics – topography
Blanchot’s 1953 narrative Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas has attracted much
less critical attention than his other narratives, and the reasons for this are
likely to lie in the extraordinarily rarefied and reflexive nature of his writing
in this work, extraordinary even by his own standards.1 What this paper will
1 M. Blanchot, Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1953); translated by Lydia
Davis as The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader:
Fiction and Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1999); hereafter
cited as CQ, followed first by French then English page numbers. Although available English
translations of French and German texts used in this essay will be cited, translations have
been amended throughout.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi 10.1163/15691640-12341302

54 Allen
demonstrate, however, is that this reflexivity exposes the aesthetics of the

work, an aesthetics that is crucially subjective and objective, cognitive and cre-
ative, that is, both Kantian and Hegelian, insofar as the narrative is not just an
experience of literature but also its exploration, not just an analysis of its con-
ditions of possibility but also a working out of how these express themselves.
But the literary focus that Celui qui brings to this double-sided sense of aesthet-
ics is fragmentary and prosaic, which short-circuits the idealism of Kantian
or Hegelian aesthetics and instead reveals a form of melancholy in which the
narrative becomes a singular topography of its own experience. But in doing
so, the experience of space and time is confused with the forms of linguistic
description so that, inverting the conventional order, it yields a concrete topog-
raphy of its experience of abstraction. This form of melancholy appears in a
paradoxically material experience of negativity that Blanchot calls désœuvre-
ment, which may afford a critical analysis but only to the degree that it also
undermines its ability to be generalized as it remains contingent to its experi-
ence. Melancholy thereby has its own aesthetics, as an exploration of its own
experience and vice versa, which has implications for the nature and place of
aesthetics more broadly.
Celui qui holds a pivotal place in Blanchot’s writings, for in it the form of the
narrative (or récit) is pushed to its most extreme point in terms of reflexivity
and sparseness. Through the 1940s his fictional writings became more com-
plex formally but more reduced narratively as he moved from novel to récit,
which was then pushed even further in Celui qui.2 But despite its explicit rar-
efaction of the narrative form, there is still an enormous amount of density to
Blanchot’s récit; in fact it is precisely because he pushes what little is left of the
narrative to such an extreme of reflexivity that what we are left with is almost
bottomless. As a result, it is not possible to do any more than examine a few
pages of this récit, but to do so it is necessary to approach the locus of its reflex-
ivity by trying to understand the relation between the space of the work and
the form of its sentences, which are interleaved or cross-wired as it were. Such
2 Michael Holland first sketched out the dimensions of this change in Blanchot’s writings in
his editorial commentaries for The Blanchot Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 103–6, 254–60.
Writing in 1953 Blanchot already recognized the risks inherent in the course he had taken, as
the fact of the writer’s obsession, “which obliges him to say again what he has already said—
sometimes with the strength of an enriched talent, but sometimes with the prolixity of an
extraordinarily impoverished repetition, with ever less force, with ever more monotony—
illustrates the necessity in which he is apparently coming back to the same point” (L’Espace
littéraire [Paris: Gallimard, 1955], 14–15; translated by Ann Smock as The Space of Literature
[Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982], 24; hereafter cited as EL; page numbers refer
first to the French, then to the English editions).
research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

The Absolute Milieu 55
an approach reveals how the narrative constitutes its own mode of legibility,
a gaze whose form is both generated by and grounded in the narrative itself.
While such a sense of reflexivity might lead to banality or solipsism, Blanchot
manages to anchor it in the ambiguity of apparently prosaic words and things,
which prevents it from becoming sterile.3 It is in this way that Celui qui brings
into view, for perhaps the first time in his writings and certainly in its most
intense form, the reality of désœuvrement: the nature of what is at issue when
nothing is going on. The gaze that emerges from this thinning out of the nar-
rative is thus a modern variant of the melancholy gaze, with all its ontologi-
cal and epistemological implications, for in bringing this situation to a level of
tangibility it also provides a rigorous analysis of it.
The interleaving of the space and the language of the narrative can be
ascertained most concretely by seeing how the conventional situations of
continuity and discontinuity are reversed in Celui qui such that the ordinarily
discontinuous positions of tense or subject are made into transitions, as utter-
ances that appear introspective are responded to as if they had been uttered
aloud, or statements in the subjunctive or pluperfect are treated as if they were
actually ongoing. While, conversely, the sense and order of spoken words are
suspended or disrupted such that what would ordinarily seem to be a state-
ment of banal transparency becomes ambiguous and problematic, rendering
the progress of the conversation uncertain, as when the question “won’t it
be winter soon?” receives the response “What winter are you talking about?”4
The spatial metaphors underlying the expected movement of time and lan-
guage, its steady linear progression from one point to the next, are ungrounded
and give way to an inverted or evacuated form of position where the continuous
and discontinuous are reversed. To understand this better we need to examine
the topological descriptions in the récit, for just as conversation now seems
fragmented by the doors and windows that open and close within it, leaving
3 Rodolphe Gasché, in “The Imperative of Transparency: Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas,”

in Clandestine Encounters: Philosophy in the Narratives of Maurice Blanchot, ed. Kevin Hart
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 216–40, seeks to make sense of this gaze
in terms of the ideality of phenomenological vision, but as will become apparent in this
essay, I believe that such an approach is inadequate to the materiality of Blanchot’s text,
to the explicitly concrete deformations of space and language that disrupt the descriptive
intentions of the narrative, implying that this gaze is not some inverted eidetic vision but
is rather gripped by the forms of melancholy that take place in writing. Closer to my own
reading are the brief but lucid comments by Lydia Davis on the interactions between the
concrete and the abstract in this récit; see Proust, Blanchot and a Woman in Red (Lewes, UK:
Sylph Editions, 2007), 32–33.
4 Blanchot, CQ, 20/269.

56 Allen
expected courses of navigation hesitant and obscure, so the space of the house
seems fluid and open, with rooms and stairways sliding into each other and the
passage of time collapsing into a confusion of hours and seasons. The space of
the house, like that of the narrative, is one of inverted transparencies, which
thus affects the position and movement of the figures who inhabit it in a way
that empties space and time of conventional dimensions and coordinates. For
if what is inner has begun to communicate with what is outer, then so too has
exteriority insinuated itself into the interior. But this is not simply a playful
or arbitrary inversion or even some pathological experiment; rather, it follows
from a rigorous exploration of the aesthetics of language in both its Kantian
senses, that is, not only in terms of (the conditions of ) its sensible experience
but also its indeterminate expressions.
In the Transcendental Aesthetic Kant insists that time and space are neither
concepts nor intuitions but the pure forms of intuition, that is, some entirely
different form of representation that necessarily precedes experience. But,
as Adorno points out, such pure forms are “speculative constructions,” which
indicates the additional problem that if these forms are non-conceptual, inso-
far as they are not generally derived from experience, then they are also not
intuitive, as they cannot be experienced as such. What this means is that the
general forms of space and time cannot be understood except in reference to
particular spaces and times, and vice versa, that space and time can only be
considered in relation to the spatial and temporal as such, which can thus no
longer be thought of as purely given infinite magnitudes. The aporetic contra-
diction between these understandings, in which the forms of space and time
are neither conceptual nor non-conceptual, neither intuitive nor non-intuitive,
indicates for Adorno that there is an inescapable mediation between the form
and the material of these experiences5—a mediation that expresses itself dia-
lectically in/as the forms of space and time in their generality and specificity,
that is, form is the mode in which the materiality of these experiences pres-
ents itself. It is as such that the sensible aesthetics of the work of art give way
to an analysis of their own transcendental grounds, in which the forms and
deformations of the spatial and temporal as such are inseparable from their
expression in the form of the work. In terms of the work of literature, the pure
5 T. W. Adorno, Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone
(Oxford: Polity, 2001), 230–32; cf. Adorno, Against Epistemology, a Metacritique, trans. Willis
Domingo (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 146–47. A more Kantian reading of this problem can
be found in Lorne Falkenstein, Kant’s Intuitionism: A Commentary on the Transcendental
Aesthetic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), chapter two, which nevertheless finds
the same difficulties in resolving the meaning of a “pure form of intuition.”

forms of its experience are neither pure nor entirely formal but indicate the
conditions of its actual rather than possible experience as these are examined
through the work itself.6 So we could say that language in Blanchot’s récit is the
mode in which the formations of space are examined insofar as the space of
the work is the mode in which language experiences deformation.
Par Désoeuvrement
The narrative orients itself around a receptacle of transparency, a glass of

water, whose meniscus marks the opacity of transparency by which it shows
that it is not nothing but imperceptibly refracts what goes on around it. It is
this refraction that communicates itself through the supposed immediacy of
the forms of time, space, and language, a refraction that is as conceptual as it
is material. Blanchot’s language, like the house of the narrative, is one that is
open to the elements, as we say, a receptacle of transparency that is, as Jean-
Yves Lacoste puts it in a discussion of the structure of Dasein, “nothing but
doors and windows,” and as such the text acts like an Aeolian harp of language:
allowing language to take shape through it as a form of negative space.7 It is
perhaps for this reason that so much of the narrative is concerned with both
borders and approaches, since they are the terms of any relationship with the
other, and also with attempts to describe them in order to find a way of com-
ing to terms with the other so that it is possible to communicate. It is thus that
communication with the other is made both possible and impossible by such
reflexivity and that the conversation seems at times like a soliloquy and, at oth-
ers, to be immeasurably dissociated. For as the attempt to approach the other
proceeds alongside an attempt to describe this approach—just as the explora-
tion of the space of the récit also seeks to bring this exploration to words, to
sustain it with its own commentary—then without this its space would remain
unarticulated, although through it the space becomes complex and refractory.
6 See also, G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994),
56–57, 68. Despite his wide-ranging studies of cinema, literature, music, and painting, it is
doubtful whether Deleuze achieves the level of material and transcendental specificity that
Adorno is aiming at in his (negatively) dialectical aesthetics.
7 Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man,
trans. Mark Raftery-Skehan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 11. Lacoste is refer-
ring specifically to Heidegger’s notion of Erschlossenheit (disclosedness) and the effects this
has on the fundamental topology of Dasein.

58 Allen
It is particularly interesting in this regard to focus on a key moment that

starts thirty pages into the text. After tentatively circling around the uncertain-
ties of the opening statement of the narrative (“I sought, this time, to approach
him”) and failing twice to restart the conversation, the narrator in frustration
releases a “flood of words,” his longest speech thus far, in which he expresses
his doubt over whether he is able to decide between himself and the other
(CQ, 30/274).8 This sudden outburst seems to release a key, for in its aftermath
there appear the first concrete details of the narrative. As if animated by the
disorderly rush of his words, the wind begins to blow, a harsh, cold wind that
even the narrator’s companion seems to feel, a companion who up until this
point had appeared to be disembodied, as if he were no more than an echo of
the narrator’s thoughts and words. But with the entrance of this specific affect,
a threshold seems to have been crossed, for now the attention of both figures
turns outwards, towards the house, which has not been mentioned before,
and the narrator is asked if he can describe it “again.” This request is repeated
throughout the narrative and arises from a desire to examine the “foundations”
of their situation, but these foundations are not revealed in the narrative as
much as by it as it explores its own conditions of possibility in their actual lin-
guistic specificity (CQ, 31/274)—a point emphasized, by contrast, in the silence
that follows the companion’s offer to do “everything” for the narrator (in his
attempt to describe the house), for in the generality of this offer the narra-
tor only finds a silence into which he feels everything solid should slide (CQ,
32/274). Nevertheless, these thoughts find the narrator standing or sitting near
the foot of the stairs, by accident as it were, since this first point of spatial
determination appears in passing, in parentheses, and is as uncertain as it is
specific, but from here the description begins:
I looked at the room that seemed to extend quite far, I couldn’t see its
limits clearly, I remembered the space instead, as I remembered myself.
I stood up to go to the kitchen for a glass of water, but I must have mis-
taken the door, I saw below me a disorderly, poorly lit room, which I didn’t
have the strength to go down into (probably the cellar).
I found myself again a little further on. I heard a door bang, no doubt
the one I must not have closed and that the wind was flinging back. But
the noise appeared very distant to me. Everything was extraordinarily
calm. Looking through the large bay windows—there were three of
8 The aporias of this opening statement are examined by J. Derrida in Parages (Paris: Galilée,
1986), 96ff, 103ff; translated by T. Conley et al. as Parages, ed. John P. Leavey (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2011), 82ff., 89ff., as exemplifying the logic of the pas (step/not).

them—I saw that someone was standing on the other side; as soon as I
noticed him, he turned to the window and, without stopping at me,
stared rapidly, with an intense but rapid gaze, at the whole expanse and
depth of the room. I was perhaps in the center of the room. I couldn’t see
the garden clearly that had to be found outside, but I recalled it with great
intensity [puissance], with a force that resembled desire. I could make
out the surroundings. While I was inside this image, I tried to look again,
a little further, to see if someone was still there, but I didn’t manage to do
so or not altogether. Yet I remembered these words: “People, people,”
which led me to say softly: “I think someone is there.”
“Someone? Here?”
“Just now someone was looking through the window.”
“Through the window?” Words pronounced in a tone so unusual, so
low, that I began in turn to feel a kind of fear. What frightened me was
that he seemed to repeat my words without altogether understanding
them, and this thought occurred to me: Does he know what a window is?
“Someone was looking from outside into the room.”
“Here?”
“Where we are.”
He said again: “Who was it?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t see him well enough.”
“And did he see you?” I reflected; this question, I don’t know why,
gripped at my heart; I could only say to him: “Perhaps he didn’t see me,
perhaps he didn’t see anyone.” (CQ, 32–34/275–76)
It would seem that as soon as there is space, there is the possibility of peo-
ple, and thus the possibility of interaction or failed interaction. This scene
quickly introduces a complex of relations that will be at the center of what
follows in the narrative, so it will be worthwhile to proceed through it care-
fully. To begin with the relation of the narrator to the space that he finds
himself in is made problematic as his gaze proves less helpful to his attempts
to orient himself than his memory and later his imagination. It is as though
vision can reveal only some elements of his surroundings, which then
must be enhanced with other modalities, suggesting that the space is not
entirely objective and that there is an intrinsic uncertainty about how and
in what modes it is explored and made manifest. Unsurprisingly, as soon as
he gets up he becomes disoriented, and although sound seems to bring him
back to himself, it does not do so without also indicating how remote he is
from its source, for as a mode of reflection sound only offers a relative and
indeterminate location.

60 Allen
The figure seen outside the window could be considered to be the narrator’s
own reflection, but this would fail to register the fact that it is not recognized
as such, and insofar as it is not recognized it remains the figure of a stranger
and thus is enigmatic. In doing so, and as with the spatial confusion that the
narrator endures, these phenomena cannot be resolved through simple expla-
nations, for such explanations are irrelevant to the persistence of the enigma.
As such, these are not merely descriptions of thought-experiments but are the
ways in which the narrative explores and expresses the conditions of its own
experience in their concreteness: the fact that space and vision do not resolve
themselves according to conventional coordinates but remain uncertain and
changeable. Indicative of this approach is the fact that the narrator does not
immediately react to the presence of the other but instead tries to see if he
“was still there” in his memories. That is, he does not try to gaze directly at the
figure in order to see it more clearly but instead tries to examine the possibility
of its appearance by seeing if it was (retroactively) still there in his memories.
As if its current reality was to be ascertained not just by its appearance in his
memory but by its continued existence therein, like an active form of déjà vu,
which in overlaying the present reflects or doubles it and thereby seeks to sub-
stantiate it, although, significantly, no confirmation is found here. This is to
analyze the conditions of possibility by way of sensible memory, much as he
remembered the space in the same way that he remembered himself, as if each
gaze required a recollection of its own situation in order to see, which only
removes it further from itself, into a receding exteriority of ambiguity over the
position and nature of the gaze.
The fact that this recollection is described as having a great intensity, a force
that resembled desire, not only indicates the overpowering physicality of its
experience but also suggests that it is operating like the force of imagination
(Einbildungskraft), a point supported by the way that the narrator goes on to
describe how he was inhabiting this image, was inside it ( j’étais à l’intérieur
de cette image), insofar as it had become something that could be inhabited;
although only recalled, it has a spatial substantiality. The construction of the
narrative image as merely ideal has been undercut to the extent that the image
exteriorizes itself as a memory, which grants it the same degree of substance
as an actual perception, while also making sensible its conditions not just in
terms of what the narrator experiences but also in terms of the reading of the
text through the discovery that these images have a concrete linguistic ambi-
guity that cannot be resolved through a determination of their essence but
rather have to be navigated; it is not so much a question of what they are, but
how and in what form. It is perhaps this ambiguity that confuses the narra-
tor’s companion, who seems not to understand the notion of someone looking

in from outside; not the fact of the window as such but what such an object
implies about the nature of vision, what it would mean to look through a win-
dow (par une vitre), as if the transparency and exteriority inherent to such an
object were unfamiliar notions.
The manner in which the exteriority of space has started to infiltrate these
observations is made apparent by the way that comments and perspectives
seem to follow each other paratactically, without convergence or conjugation,
and so without reducing the distance between them, leaving them in their
otherness. But while this movement of exteriorization might suggest a form
of temporal progression, in that what is outside is also after, here the lack of
firm conjugation merely places these observations beside each other without
assimilating them, as there is no origin or aim that would provide a sense of
direction. That is, statements and perspectives are repeated but in doing so
they remain apart, the narrator and the figure outside the window do not see
each other in an exchange of glances, and the narrator and his companion
may engage in conversation but its turns are eccentric rather than concentric,
at each point they turn away from each other, each reiteration providing more
ambiguity rather than less, estranging their terms rather than gathering them
into a harmonious accord. This is a text without center or direction, which
produces a profoundly unfamiliar topology.
Conversely, this sense of pervasive exteriorization affects the nature of inte-
riority in terms of those thoughts and words that the narrator keeps to him-
self, for his conversations with his companion often pass by way of ellipses
that seem to communicate themselves, to the extent that it is through what
is unspoken that there is a sense of agreement or community between them,
however limited. The following moment is particularly resonant on the diffi-
culties and instabilities of this point:
I remember a period when I would constantly ask him a question that

I could only address to him from the depths of my unconcern: “Do you
know that?”, to which he would respond: “Yes, it’s true, I know it very well,”
and from these answers I derived a joyful pleasure, a strange lighthearted-
ness, the impression that reduplication was not the frame of memory, but
the opening of space. At present, I lacked unconcern, I remained silent.
I certainly wanted him to speak, but not in order to say, as he so often did,
almost at random: “Well, another day has passed, hasn’t it?”, because for
whom had it passed? I could have asked him this, but he couldn’t have
answered that it had for us: it would pass later perhaps; as I waited, I bore
the weight of it and I didn’t bear the fruit of it. I couldn’t help expressing
my reservation: “Passed? But for whom? I’m asking myself that.”

62 Allen
“Ah! One can certainly ask oneself that.”

I keenly pushed my advantage: “Why do you repeat that phrase?”
“Do I repeat it?” and he seemed less surprised than eager to let me, in
turn, repeat my protest, to lead me to raise it to a higher degree by saying:
“Yes, you repeat it all the time. Yes, I’m tired of it and you ought to stop
saying it,” words that I kept to myself and I was in a certain way rewarded
for that, as he made this remark: “But it’s to help you.” (CQ, 26–27/271–72)
The temporal status of this sequence appears straightforward to begin with, as

it starts with the memory of an idyllic period of communication. This memory
is then abruptly terminated by the deictic (“at present”), which is itself dis-
placed by a casual recollection of a generic phrase that quickly takes on the
force of an actual pronouncement, leading the narrator to express himself in
response to it. But this is a response to what has only taken place as a generic
possibility, what has not actually occurred but has merely been pre-emptively
echoed in the narrator’s thoughts and which his companion can thus only
reiterate. The fact that this exchange is then itself repeated only intensifies its
disorientation, but it also suggests that this movement of possibilities bears its
own actualization insofar as the repetition of what has not happened leads to
a moment of communication. Out of the emptiness of a present without issue,
a movement has nevertheless been found to emerge by restating the non-
coincidence of this emptiness with itself.9 There is no transition here from
stasis to movement, instead, by expressing his reservation about the recalled
statement the narrator finds, as he had remarked earlier, “that this reduplica-
tion was not the frame of memory, but the opening of space.” It is in the incom-
mensurability of past, present, and future that this space opens up, in which
the narrator then finds himself, as this sequence leads into the one discussed
above where he finds himself near the foot of the stairs. There is a disjunction
between the moments of time as if they existed as separate rooms between
which lie no natural routes or connections, hence the manner in which the
narrator finds himself in such a detached space as the stairway.
As the scene then develops there is a sense that this fragile notion of com-
munication leads to the space collapsing, as if it lacked the substance to keep
it open:
“That helps me?” To which he answered right away with a joyful eager-
ness that was also a reminder of his own fate: “It helps both of us!”
9 Hans-Jost Frey is particularly good at explicating the temporal disjunctions of this récit, see
Maurice Blanchot. Das Ende der Sprache schreiben (Basle: Urs Engeler, 2007), 77–96.

“You too? You mean we’re connected?” He seemed prepared to study

the question, but the examination promptly led to these words: “Well,
you know that very well!”, which were addressed to me in a tone that
returned me to myself. (CQ, 27/272)
And so the conversation seems to have devoured itself, turning back on itself
so as to leave nothing behind, but this is not quite true as the narrator immedi-
ately counters this apparent resolution with another rejoinder: “In fact, I didn’t
know it.” Something remains, which is doubt, scepticism, uncertainty, which
keeps the conversation from disappearing entirely, but nevertheless the frus-
tration of this mode of dialogue is expressed by the narrator who remarks on
the disappointment of a conversation that is so closed that it keeps returning
to its point of departure, as if it lacked a sense of necessity or urgency that left
it “dangerously immaterial [indifferent],” abstracted from any specific time into
a nondescript “whenever you want” (CQ, 30/273). These are important points
of self-doubt that indicate how the disjunctive repetition of possibilities leaves
room for its own disruption, for an element of chance that can create mate-
rial instances of irresolution, or in which the ambiguity of meaning in each
statement gives way to an ambiguity about its ambiguity, that its uncertain
meaning indicates an uncertainty about the very status of words: whether they
bear meanings or are things themselves. It is thus that the narrator promptly
abandons these reflections and restarts the conversation precisely by ques-
tioning whether he and the other have become too close, a reframing question
that opens space in the subsequent “flood of words.” The possibility of con-
versation in this attenuated arena seems to pass between the extremes of this
material clinamen and its endless night of indifference, irresolvably oscillating
between them as the night cannot be rendered impermeable to its material
rupture just as this chance event cannot prevent its loss through comprehen-
sion or incomprehension. As such, the focus of the récit would seem to be its
attempt to come to an understanding of the right distance for communication
to occur, to come to a sense of its measure when that which it is drawn from
is without measure, which is why it is unable to find a firm foundation for its
movements or the terms of their relation. Crucially, the nature of this relation
is described as a question of writing, which comes to exemplify and exacerbate
its difficulties:
According to him—but I must add that he never declared this to me

with as much precision as I am doing—I came closest to his help when
I decided to write. He had assumed a strange ascendency over me in all
these things, such that I had let myself be persuaded that to write was the

64 Allen
best way of making our relations bearable. I admit that for some time this
way was quite good. But one day I noticed that what I was writing con-
cerned him more and more and, though in an indirect manner, seemed
to have no aim but to reflect him. I was extremely struck by this discovery.
I saw in it what might paralyse me the most, not because I would hence-
forth try to avoid this reflection, but because I might perhaps, on the con-
trary, make even greater efforts to make it manifest. (CQ, 9–10/264)
Sinking into this uncertain relation in which the writer gives way to the other,
who is neither there nor not there but remains apart, is not without conse-
quence. Indeed, Blanchot describes it as disastrous: “Not only did I have to
renounce what is called a normal life, but I lost control of my preferences.
I also became afraid of words and I wrote fewer and fewer of them, even
though the pressure exerted inside me to make me write them soon became
dizzying” (CQ, 10–11/264). Despite the repeated attempts at description, it is not
immediately obvious why there should be a privileged relation between writ-
ing and the situation the narrator finds himself in, but there is a sense of some
kind of analogy between the two experiences that enables them to respond to
each other. Blanchot appears to be focussing on this question by making the
narrator into a writer, something that marks this récit apart from his others and
only strengthens its apparently autobiographical dimensions. But it should be
recalled that this alignment between writing and the peculiarly modern isola-
tion of anxiety was noted in the piece that opened his first collection of essays,
Faux pas, where he had stated that the “writer is not free to be alone without
expressing that he is,” indicating that the possibility of being a writer is always
constrained by its actuality such that anxiety is always double as it is always
accompanied by that of writing, which has its effects on his work as much as
on his life.10 At this time Blanchot was working through a network of issues
associated with the contemporary existential mood, as configured variously
by Wahl, Bataille, and Sartre, but a decade later the nature of this problematic
ambivalence is discussed in more singular terms that are made explicit in the
essay that opened L’Espace littéraire, “La solitude essentielle,” which is in many
ways a commentary on Celui qui. The solitude in question is not the merely
empirical isolation of the writer, understood either practically or psychologi-
10 Blanchot, Faux pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 10; translated by Charlotte Mandell as Faux
Pas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 2. I have explored this essay in more detail
in “Dead Transcendence: Blanchot, Heidegger, and the Reverse of Language,” Research in
Phenomenology 39, no. 1 (2009): 79–86. See also, Raymond Bellour, “Blanchot, ‘solitude de
l’œuvre,’ ” Magazine littéraire 290 (1991): 43–47.

cally, but a more fundamental solitude that arises out of the work and to which
the writer is bound. This solitude is to be understood as relating to the fact
that the work cannot be defined other than by saying “that it is—and noth-
ing more.”11 It bears no determinate qualities and expresses no more than its
sheer existence and so does not have any value or significance, is unrelated to
any purpose or meaning, and is not made present other than in this solitude
(EL, 12/22). Writing opens up the space of this solitude and makes the writer
part of it, for writing participates in this solitude to the extent that it is noth-
ing more than it: “writing turned me into a shadow to make me worthy of the
darkness” (CQ, 13/265).
It is important to remember that the word so often associated with Blanchot’s
writings on this point, désœuvrement, should not be immediately assimilated
to its later quasi-technical meaning, for it is used in relation to these narra-
tive scenarios in its everyday sense of enforced idleness, which is what made it
such a key notion in Bataille’s thought. This is the kind of idleness or inactivity
that arises when circumstances lead one to be unoccupied, the dead space or
time that occurs when there is nothing to do, when one is at a loose end, as
we say. This aspect of everyday phenomenology is often passed over in favor
of the more dramatic and supposedly more profound senses of anguish and
ennui, but it is precisely its banality that renders it significant as it indicates
how everyday existence is permeated by a nameless lack that is inherently con-
tingent, that befalls one in certain situations and in doing so renders one aim-
less and dispossessed. At this point it becomes easier to see how this existential
condition is reflected in the work of writing when it is exposed to its own work-
lessness, when it becomes unfocused and unstructured as it is also consumed
by what is at work in the absence of work, “à l’œuvre dans le désœuvrement”
(CQ, 70/292). This phenomenological critique is directed as much towards
Heidegger as it is towards Hegel, since it is a matter of demonstrating that there
is an immeasurable extent of meaninglessness that underlies our meaningful
engagements with the world and cannot be assimilated to them, just as there is
11 The formulation Blanchot uses here, that the work is—and nothing more—recalls self-
consciously the ambivalent formulation discussed by Heidegger in “Was ist Metaphysik?”
that science examines beings—and nothing more; see Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 84. The proximity of Celui qui and
L’Espace littéraire raises the question of the relation between Blanchot’s critical and fic-
tional writings, for in the latter he uses a language resonant with notions of being, which
the former avoids. It is only much later that Blanchot finds a critical language that can
discuss what is at issue in his fiction without drawing upon ontology, but at this point,
as Celui qui makes apparent, his fiction is pursuing its own topography, which his critical
writings can only crudely approximate with a pre-existing terminology.

66 Allen
an ineradicable dimension of negativity that undermines any attempt to relate

thought to work and activity. For Blanchot, the lack that permeates the writer’s
existence cannot be transformed or recouped in another form, as its immen-
sity eludes any attempts to configure it. But it still provides its own attenuated
experience, which is the experience of what takes place par désœuvrement;
when there is nothing else going on. It is this experience that Blanchot seeks
to plumb, an experience that paradoxically occurs to the writer whether or not
he is writing, as it arises both within writing and without, if it is not identified
with mere inactivity.
Just as the figure at the window is not simply the narrator’s reflection, so
his companion is not simply his other. In fact he explicitly rejects the term
“companion,” as the title of the récit emphasizes, and seems to be more like an
echo of the narrator’s presence, which is to say, not just an echo of his thoughts
and words but of his presence and thus as a figure without presence or situa-
tion, unseen and unlocated (CQ, 42/279, 57/286). He could almost be the voice
of the house as the inversion of the narrator’s own space, and in this way he
would fall into the lineage of other figures in Blanchot’s fiction that manifest
themselves in forms of negative space and thereby accommodate themselves
to the figure of the narrator. Here too we find the unstable relation of mutual
accommodation that takes place between writing and désœuvrement and
makes the latter assume some kind of demonic form, corresponding at each
point to the figure of writing but presenting its inversion, its frustration, and
impotence like a secondary body that accompanies the writer and is the nega-
tion of all his efforts, able to counter his moves and reverse his actions at each
step (pas). This is neither malevolence nor nihilism but, rather, the diabolic
turning in which persistent inversions lead to a deviation without end. The dif-
ference between the fantastic images of Blanchot’s early fiction and the mini-
malism of Celui qui is that the narrator of the latter no longer encounters these
inversions innocently. The one who is not his companion is not discovered by
accident in the way that Thomas (like Gracchus) suddenly falls into an errant
course; rather, there is an understanding between them, as we say, some kind
of impossible intimacy, which it is then the task of the work to explicate, inso-
far as it is writing. It is perhaps thus that this récit is both his most concrete
and his most abstract—insofar as it is only writing—in both its proliferation
of sheer circumstances and its immersion in the unreality of fiction, which
combine without dissolution in a désœuvrée melancholy and are thereby expli-
cated through it. For this is no conventional melancholy, as Blanchot has neu-
tralized its bipolar oscillation between the lament for a lost meaning, order,
or purpose to life and the hope for its redemption or reconciliation. Indeed,
Blanchot is indifferent to these extremes as he is intent on investigating its

milieu, the space between, so that while he is exploring the space of melan-
choly, he is not himself melancholic; like Orpheus he passes among the shades
but does not join them. This is still a space of loss and disarticulation but one
without beginning or end; it does not result from a fall or hold the possibility
of resolution. Instead, it holds linguistic meaning to the point of its material
indifference, not as the grey static of emptiness but as the ambivalence of that
which is both material and meaningful, in the experience of their uncoordi-
nated shifting planes rather than their union, and thus remaining immanent to
the ambiguity of language rather than sublating it into a determinate meaning.
Blanchot indicates the depth of this dislocation through the way that it
affects the dimensions of the space in Celui qui, which places distances and
relations into an uncoordinated disarray. The moment when the narrator sees
a figure outside looking in through the window confirms this sense of non-
aligned spaces, but it also does so by emphasizing the mortal resonance of
such dislocation, for there is the sensation of losing oneself in a space in which
“here” has become “nowhere” (nulle part) (EL, 22/31, 272/259). To see a figure
through a window who is apparently gazing back on oneself and to find that
the gaze of this figure fails to register oneself is to suddenly experience the pos-
sibility that one is absent, lost to the other, not there. This broken relation is
the key to the title of the narrative, Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas (“The one
who didn’t come with me”), which recalls, as Christophe Bident has pointed
out, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, but the significance of Blanchot’s
recasting of this severed relation is that it is not possible to say which position
the narrator of Celui qui is in, for at the moment when Orpheus turns back, a
rupture separates him permanently from Eurydice such that both of them are
cast into different spheres, and each is now lost to the other, and thus to them-
selves.12 Ordinarily, this lack of accompaniment would be read as belonging to
Orpheus, as he returns to the world on his own bearing an inconsolable loss
that thereafter inflects his songs, which only separates him further from his
earthly companions, and it is to Rilke’s sonnets on this experience that Bident
refers by indicating the contemporaneous remarks in L’Espace littéraire:
O wie er schwinden muß, daß ihrs (Oh how he must fade, that you
begrifft! understand!
Und wenn ihm selbst auch bangte, And even though he himself is
daß er schwände. scared that he will fade.
12 Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot, partenaire invisible (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1998),
322.

68 Allen
Indem sein Wort das Hiersein As his word surpasses the being
übertrifft, here,
ist er schon dort, wohin ihrs nicht he is already there, where you
begleitet. cannot accompany him.
Der Leier Gitter zwängt ihm nicht The lyre’s bars do not squeeze his
die Hände. hands.
Und er gehorcht, indem er And he obeys as he oversteps.)13
überschreitet.
For, after his ordeal, Orpheus can only speak in such a way that he is led into
a “limitless insecurity” that effaces the “false certitude of being.” But in doing
so he “enters into his own disappearance,” as Blanchot describes it; by “iden-
tifying himself with the force that tears him apart,” he becomes the void from
which the “murmurs of the interminable” propagate, that is, he becomes the
force of the poem itself as it endures its own impossibility in the formlessness
of a yearning that cannot be quenched (EL, 162–63/156–57). But in an earlier
poem Rilke examines this relation from the other side, from the perspective of
Eurydice as she turns back into the shadows of the underworld, away from a
figure she no longer recognizes that stands before the light of the other world:
Und als plötzlich jäh (And when suddenly

der Gott sie anhielt und mit the god stopped her and in a
Schmerz im Ausruf painful cry
die Worte sprach: Er hat sich spoke the words: He has turned
umgewendet—, around—,
begriff sie nichts und sagte leise: she did not understand and said
Wer? softly: Who?
Fern aber, dunkel vor dem klaren But in the distance, dark before
Ausgang, the clear exit,
stand irgend jemand, dessen someone or other stood, whose
Angesicht face
nicht zu erkennen war. was unrecognizable.)14
It is the divergence of these movements of signification and materiality that

must be thought when it comes to understanding the tendencies of language
13 Rainer Maria Rilke, “Sonette an Orpheus,” in The Poetry of Rilke, edited and translated by
Edward Snow (New York: North Point, 2009), 358–59. “Sonette” first published 1923.
14 Rilke, “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes,” in The Poetry of Rilke, 202–3. Poem first published ca.
1907.

par désœuvrement, which Blanchot emphasises by focusing on their centrifu-

gal nature that would render any dialectic of their expression workless as each
movement disappears into the other, things becoming words just as words
become things. But it is important not to get distracted by such mythical-
allegorical readings, just as the apparently autobiographical elements of the
narrative should not be overplayed, for they attempt to interpret the work by
withdrawing from it and reading it in terms of some other work.
Hence, after reflecting on his companion’s question about whether the fig-
ure at the window had seen him, and speculating that he may not have seen
anyone, the narrator suddenly finds himself at an impasse, for he has found
himself in a space that is asymmetric or non-reversible: “I experienced at that
moment a weariness, to use that word, which hollowed out space, that sought
to substitute another, thinner space for it, an empty rootless air. Yet I heard
him go on to say to me: ‘You know, we should remain alone, we are alone’ ”
(CQ, 34/276). This is not the air of actual spaces but the air of a fictional space,
thinner, more attenuated, but no less real, an air hollowed out by language,
which indicates how language and experience (weariness and its word) com-
bine undecidably but indissolubly with each other in the emptying out of
désœuvrement, which is perhaps why this is an imperfect solitude insofar as
it is complex rather than simple, shared rather than unitary, and inescapable
rather than isolated. As is stated in a remarkably apodictic fashion: “one can’t
really disappear when one must die in two separate worlds” (CQ, 41/279). For in
the exploration and description of the space of the récit experience becomes
language and language becomes experience, without integrating them, and
thus solitude is both hollowed out and folded back on itself, providing its own
evacuated topographical expression. Consequently there is an inevitable rep-
etition in this experience, as the narrator seeks over and again to find a mea-
sure for the measureless, to describe it regardless of the cost; and without fixed
coordinates, such repetition only intensifies the ambivalence of its dislocation:
It is possible that time passed, a time that was also airless and rootless.
I was still thirsty, I had sat down next to a table, and when I heard him
murmur: “It’s a moment that will pass,” I confused this speech with that
other: “Another day has passed, hasn’t it?”; and this memory made me
shiver, something in me broke. I had undergone so many struggles, I had
been so far, and so far, where was that? Here, next to a table. Perhaps my
silence, my immobility, and the feeling that a kind of balance had been
established between us, restored some of my strength to me; perhaps,
on the contrary, I had gained in weakness; at a certain moment, I found
myself in the room again, and beyond the table, there where I had said to

70 Allen
myself that the end had to be situated, there was a wall and, I believe, a
mirror, at least a lightly shining surface. I tried to recognize this spot, was
this where I had just been? was this me? In any case, at present the one
to be found there was also leaning on a table. Thirst, the need to exhaust
space, made me stand up. Everything was extraordinarily calm. Looking
through the large bay windows—there were three of them—I saw that
someone was standing on the other side; as soon as I noticed him, he
turned to the window and, without stopping at me, he stared intensely
at the whole expanse and depth of the room. I found myself again next
to the table, I wanted to turn around quickly to face this figure, but I was
surprised to be now very near the windows and yet felt myself still in the
middle of the room. This obliged me to look strangely at a point that was
not given to me, closer than it seemed to me, close in an almost frighten-
ing way, as it did not take account of my own distance. While I looked for
him almost at random, I noticed in a flash—a flash that was the shining,
tranquil light of summer—that I was holding this figure against my eyes,
a few steps away, the few steps that must still have separated me from the
bay windows, and the impression was so vivid that it was like a spasm of
clarity, a shiver of cold light. I was so struck that I couldn’t help murmur-
ing: “Don’t move, I think someone is there.”
“Someone? Here?”
“Someone is looking at us through the window.”
“Through the window?” Words that immediately gave me a feeling of
terror, of horror, as though the void of the window was reflected in them,
as though all this had already taken place, and again, again. I think I cried
out, I slipped or fell against what seemed to me to be the table. Yet I heard
him say to me again: “You know, there is no one there.”
I kept a memory of this that resembled the space in which I stood
up again a little later. Yet I was rational enough to lean on the table,
slowly following the outline and in this way I went a little further.
(CQ, 34–37/276–77)
The nightmarish quality of being lost in an indeterminate space where dis-

tances shift and slide seems to give rise to the sense of thirst that plagues the
narrator, thirst as a physical need to exhaust this immensity of space, which
of course is unattainable, but which qualifies the nature of existing in such
an expanse. Experience finds itself empty of everything other than this topo-
graphical thirst, which is in turn the form in which this worklessness appears,
as if the void of the window were reflected in it, as if its emptiness had taken
form in this condition.

Such a situation is unsustainable, its vertigo of fascination only goes so far

before it comes up against an obstacle, since it is not unaffected by circum-
stances. Although this is the most minimal of Blanchot’s récits, he makes the
most of its bare setting by showing how its seemingly insignificant material
details become the only points of navigation in such a space, and ones that
accordingly take on an enigmatic resonance that is non-negligible. That is,
Blanchot has not chosen to strip this narrative of all contingent details but
rather to take them up in a way that amplifies the force of their contingency,
for these are items that impose themselves on the narrator in an unmistak-
able, if illegible, manner. The table, the mirror, the windows, walls, doorways,
and staircases do not bear any interpretable meaning that would convey any
allegorical sense to the récit, but nor can they be ignored; they are thus its
anomalous and fluid but nevertheless material constituents, against which it
necessarily abuts, whether as words or as things. And by making these mate-
rial constituents so prosaic Blanchot emphasizes the extent of their enigmatic
force, which is to be found everywhere and is thus inescapable. The manner
in which the narrator’s companion persistently repeats and obstructs the
thoughts of the narrator also derives from this sense of material disruption,
disallowing the possibility of free development and forcing the narrator to
keep turning back to the constituents of his situation, in language as in space,
as well as in their cross-wired expression and description.
A signal instance of this disruption comes in the form of that rarest of
moments in Blanchot’s writings: the joke. For how else are we to interpret the
moment early on in the last cited passage: “I had undergone so many struggles,
I had been so far, and so far, where was that? Here, next to a table”? The bathos
is deliberate but also very revealing, enabling us to understand both the persis-
tence of the mundane and the strange air of lightness that pervades this récit,
lightness as a response to gravity, as the joy of companionship even in the atten-
uated and elusive form that it has here. For the sense of cheerfulness that per-
meates the narrative is not deflated by the frequent and often acute moments
of anxiety and confusion but persists in the understanding that, despite his
idleness and his companion’s opacity, there is still some kind of communica-
tion between them, and perhaps precisely because of their mutual elusiveness.
It is possible that this levity, which is so uncommon in Blanchot’s writings, is a
recognition of his intense friendship with Bataille, for whom laughter was just
as powerful as boredom or anxiety as a mode of exposure to the il y a. But it
should also be noted that the extract from Celui qui that Blanchot published in
Botteghe Oscure in 1952 has a structural echo that is lost in the final récit, for it
begins with the same initial proposal (“I sought, this time, to approach him”)
and finishes with a repetition of the aforementioned joke that reappears at the

72 Allen
end of the first section of the récit.15 Or not quite, as the narrator’s discovery
of himself by the table triggers a meditation on the uncertain support that
writing provides, on the endless emptiness that the writer attempts to lean on
in his work, which leads to an exhausted resolution reminiscent of another
novel published at that time: “I will continue to go in this direction, never in
any other” (CQ, 78/296). The proposal has thus simply been reaffirmed, but the
approach has not been bridged; the narrator, despite his movements around
the house, is no closer to his companion or whatever it is that he shares the
space with, but he is also no more remote from him or it (il). However, his apo-
retic movement is not over, since it cannot be completed or exhausted; instead,
after going as far as he has, and the distance he has covered is not negligible,
he has merely come up against his table, as if his approach could have no other
sense of gravity, and its banality could not appear to any other approach. The
relation between these positions becomes more tense in the later sections of
the narrative as the companion persistently asks “Are you writing? Are you
writing at this moment?” (CQ, 71/292)—a question that answers his aporetic
approach with its own uncertainty. The relation of these statements is thus
suspended, as Kafka would say (as if following Hegel’s thoughts on the banality
of revolutionary action), “like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.”16 This is
the lightness of fiction in relation to the mundane, its disastrous worklessness.
Schwermut ist der Affekt, der das Denken begleitet, welches zu

Ende denkt17
To understand this relation more clearly it is helpful to contrast it with the

figure of the melancholic as one who, suffering from a nameless loss, is drawn
into an intense examination of his situation to the extent of losing himself
in its obscure details, and for whom the dimensions of space and time are
set loose from their conventional terms and become immense and fluid. The
15 Blanchot, “Le compagnon de route,” Botteghe Oscure 10 (1952): 39–53. In the English trans-
lation of the récit, this extract corresponds to pages 263–73, 279–81, and 296 of The Station
Hill Blanchot Reader.
16 Kafka, “Ein Glaube wie ein Fallbeil, so schwer, so leicht,” in Nachgelassene Schriften und
Fragmente II, ed. Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992), 133; The Blue Octavo
Notebooks, ed. Max Brod, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (Cambridge, MA: Exact
Change, 1991), 39. On Hegel, see note 28 below.
17 Hermann Schweppenhäuser, “Quipus,” in Zeugnisse. Theodor W. Adorno zum sechzigsten
Geburtstag, ed. Max Horkheimer (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1963),
281 (“Melancholy is the feeling that accompanies the thinking that thinks to the end”).

discussion of these issues in Adorno’s Kierkegaard forms the most useful paral-
lel to Blanchot’s investigations, as it is the question of the dimensions of the
melancholic’s subjectivity that is the center of Adorno’s critique.
The understanding of melancholy that Adorno draws upon is adopted from
Benjamin’s study of the baroque Trauerspiel, which itself followed the work of
the Warburg Institute on Renaissance allegories, but Benjamin makes a stron-
ger case for the philosophical importance of melancholy by claiming that it
bears a significance that is both epistemological and ontological. In his read-
ing, melancholy is not simply a subjective condition nor is it to be explained
through the symbolic correspondences of astrology and pathology; instead,
Benjamin finds it to be the key to the baroque period, as it manifests itself in a
dialectical image that both reflects the world that it arises from and transforms
that world through what it uncovers. That is, melancholy responds to the col-
lapse of meaning in the disenchanted world by finding the seeds of material
transformation buried within this disintegration, even though they are beyond
reach. Melancholy is thus both analytical and synthetic; it not only diagnoses
the problems of the time but also finds therein a possible response to them, and
crucially this means that it is a rational as well as an aesthetic mode of thought,
albeit one in which these modes are dialectically intertwined.18 Benjamin thus
finds the basis for his work on the Trauerspiel in the attempt to unravel the
enciphered knowledge of its allegories, for these are too immersed in their own
contextual relations to be able to reflect on themselves explicitly, and it is thus
also that Adorno will find the necessity of his own work on Kierkegaard. The
key passage for Benjamin’s position is this:
Every feeling is bound to an a priori object and its representation is its

phenomenology. The theory of mourning [Trauer], which predictably
proves itself as a pendant to the theory of tragedy, can thus only be devel-
oped in the description of the world that is opened up under the gaze
of the melancholic. For feelings, however vague they may seem to self-
18 In response to Kierkegaard’s discussion of Abraham in Fear and Trembling, Kafka also
seems to think that the task is one of finding out how thought and aesthetics can be
combined, rather than eliminating one in favor of the other, a task that is excessively dif-
ficult: “An enchantment accompanies his reasoning. One can escape from reasoning into
the world of magic, from enchantment into logic, but both simultaneously are crushing,
all the more since they constitute a third entity, living magic or destruction of the world
that is not destructive but constructive” (Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II, 105;
The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 55). Blanchot pointedly remarks on the differences between
Kierkegaard and Kafka here, insofar as Kafka’s very existence as a writer is as one who
cannot resolve this dilemma and so remains suspended within it (EL, 57–58/61–62).

74 Allen
perception, respond like motorial reactions [motorisches Gebaren] to the

concrete structure of the world. If laws are to be found for the Trauerspiel
in the heart of mourning, partly explicitly, partly implicitly, then their
representation does not devote itself to the emotional state of the poet
or his public, but to a feeling that is released from any empirical subject
and is intimately bound to the fullness of an object. A motorial attitude
that has its well-defined place in the hierarchy of intentions and is thus
only called a feeling because it is not the highest. It is determined by an
astounding tenacity of intention, which among the feelings is matched
perhaps only by love—and that not playfully. For whereas in the realm
of affects it is not unusual for the relation between an intention and
its object to alternate between attraction and alienation, mourning is
capable of a singular intensification, a continual deepening of its inten-
tion. Pensiveness [Tiefsinn] is characteristic of the mournful. On the road
to the object—no: on the path of the object itself—this intention pro-
gresses as slowly and solemnly as the acts of the powerful move.19
This is Benjamin’s doctrine of justification (Rechtfertigungslehre): that which

permits him to develop a reading of the Trauerspiel in relation to the humanist
allegories of the Renaissance and as distinct from the classical worldview of
tragedy—a justification grounded in a conception of melancholy as a singu-
larly intense exploration of the relation between subject and object in which
the laws of this relation reveal themselves, however obscurely, in the forms
of the Trauerspiel. That is, the world that is opened up under the gaze of the
melancholic finds itself expressed in the form of the Trauerspiel, which thereby
offers an aesthetico-rational topography of its relations. A topography whose
rationality derives from the actual relations disinterred from the material ruins
of the disintegrated world, for “all the wisdom of the melancholic belongs to
the depths; it is gained by immersion in the life of creaturely things and the
sound of revelation does not penetrate through to it” (UDT, 330/152).
This emphatically secular understanding of melancholy is central to
Adorno’s intentions in his Habilitationsschrift, for he rejects Kierkegaard’s treat-
ment of the aesthetic as merely being part of the stages of edification in order
to show two things: first, and negatively, to criticize the way that Kierkegaard
subordinates the aesthetic to the ethical by claiming that any transition to the
19 Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in Gesammelte Schriften 1.1, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 318;
translated by John Osborne as The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1977),
139–40; hereafter cited as UDT, followed first by German then English page numbers.

latter can only occur by transcending the aesthetic, which is what occurs in
the intérieur. This notion is not to be understood as a kind of space, for it is
precisely space as the form of externality that is excluded from the intérieur.
Rather, the intérieur is constituted by images, and specifically, reified images
of objects, which are arranged to make up the intérieur of the subject just as
objects are made to do in the domestic bourgeois interior.20 Such images are
reified because they are no longer linked to the forces of production and so
can only appear as tokens of subjectivity divorced from their actual historico-
material background and whose content thus only derives from their arrange-
ment. However, and here the negative critique starts to reveal its inversion,
these images are also symbols of the mythical that find their way into sub-
jectivity; that is, these symbols of the historical (background) that have been
rendered natural (reified) are also found to bear aspects of the natural world
that have become historical—in the conventionalized forms of the aesthetic
contingencies of existence: the sensual, material, and accidental elements that
Kierkegaard discusses as the “demonic.” But such elements cannot be so easily
transcended, as their willful intransigence is part of the very medium of reflec-
tion that Kierkegaard seeks to use to transcend them, since his introspective
literary attempts to remove himself from the distractions of the everyday are
constituted through these images of reification, which necessarily persist in
conveying their own concrete traces. Thus it is possible to read these images
dialectically; both for what they demonstrate about the reification of subjec-
tivity and for how the reification of these images undoes itself by virtue of the
actual materiality that it fails to suppress:
man is not divided into the natural and the supernatural, which struggle
between themselves; rather, his natural essence is dialectical in itself, and
what contributes in man to his rescue is equally attributable to his nature
as to what will ruin him. . . . The clarity of the despondent [Verzweifelten],
who as spirit is demonically entangled in his own nature, is, however,
a clarity that the mythical dialectic itself produces. In the captivity of
complete immanence mythical-ambiguous nature becomes separated
as it does not persist emptily, but moves dialectically and its movement
grasps nature in the depths from which it originates to pull it up to safety.
(K, 86–87/59)
20 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 65; translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor as Kierkegaard:
Construction of the Aesthetic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 43; here-
after cited as K, followed by German then English page numbers.

76 Allen
It is precisely this model of dialectical images that Benjamin takes up in the

Passagen-Werk, but the significance of the dialectical nature of this reading
is that the potential for redemption is undercut to the same degree as is the
process of reification.21 This means that although the lens of this dialectical
mode of reading allows us to read through the loss of materiality to its actual
subsistence, it does so only because it reveals the diremption of the image,
its existence as a mere semblance (Schein), which suggests much only by way
of its distance from reality. This diremption arises in Kierkegaard’s writings
through the way that the actuality of the aesthetic is displaced in the pursuit of
the artistic, which is in turn displaced by the leap of faith. Adorno, by contrast,
wants to find the materialist inversion of this move in which the artistic gives
way to the aesthetic, as the artwork voids itself as a work of art and becomes an
aesthetic experience in both its Kantian and Hegelian senses. For Adorno the
convergence between these aesthetics occurs through the materiality of the
work, which conveys a concrete expression of truth that through its material
inversions and occlusions remains indeterminate. It is this sense of aesthetic
experience voiding the artwork that also takes place in Blanchot’s récits, which
thereby become ontological (but non-philosophical) experiments.
Adorno pursues this double sense of aesthetic experience through his
notion of “exact fantasy” (exakten Phantasie), which in its combination of rigor
and imagination attempts to develop the image of materiality into the form
of its existence in general, its abstract model, which is nevertheless concrete
and particular.22 In much the same way that Benjamin focuses on the name as
the encrypted expression of the disenchanted world, which bears both a form
21 Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1982), 575–76; translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin as The Arcades Project
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 461.
22 As is well known, this is the term used at the end of Adorno’s inaugural lecture to indicate
the mode of thought that he sees as necessary for philosophy to develop, insofar as exact
fantasy is a “fantasy that remains strictly within the material that the sciences present to
it, and reaches beyond them only in the smallest aspects of their arrangement: aspects,
granted, that fantasy itself must originally generate” (see “The Actuality of Philosophy,”
trans. Benjamin Snow, in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor [Oxford: Blackwell,
2000], 37). As such, it is possible to see this notion as a materialist, disenchanted version
of Kant’s aesthetic ideas, “on the one hand because they at least strive towards something
lying beyond the bounds of experience, and thus seek to approximate a presentation of
concepts of reason (of intellectual ideas), which gives them the appearance of an objec-
tive reality; on the other hand, and indeed principally, because no concept can be fully
adequate to them” (I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul
Guyer and Eric Matthews [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 192, §49.

of knowledge of this world and also the potential to change it, Adorno finds
the possibility of the model in the aesthetic fragment; for as the semblance or
image of materiality, the fragment bears an infinitesimal but unfulfillable hope,
which, insofar as it does not fully agree with reality, leads beyond it. It does so
because “fantasy is not intuition (Anschauung) that leaves the existing as it is;
but intuiting that intervenes unnoticed in the existing as the completion of its
arrangement as an image.” Following Kant’s understanding of genius, Adorno
sees fantasy as the mode in which nature expresses and thus surpasses itself
and through this slight displacement perceives itself as rescued (K, 196/138).
The concrete generality of these images, by which this rescue is discovered, is
a notion elaborated from Kierkegaard’s discussion of farce in Repetition, and
more specifically, from a passage that examines the nature of the categories
at work in quasi-aesthetic activities, such as when one who is not ordinarily
affected by art finds that
he can be stirred by a Nürnberg print, a picture of the kind found on the

market not long ago. There one sees a landscape depicting a rural area in
general. This abstraction cannot be artistically executed. Therefore the
whole thing is achieved by contrast, namely, by an accidental concre-
tion. And yet I ask everyone if from such a landscape he does not get the
impression of a rural area in general, and if this category has not stayed
with him from childhood. In the days of childhood, we had such enor-
mous categories that they now almost make us dizzy, we clipped out of a
piece of paper a man and a woman who were man and woman in general
in a more rigorous sense than Adam and Eve were.23
Such categories have a generality that
is not the abstractness and size of the concept, but the smallness and
concreteness of a model—in one variety it is familiar as a “pattern”
[Modellierbogen]—in which individual differences of existence disap-
pear only to be resurrected, ontologically saved, as prototypical features
of the apparent figure. Like names, the pattern attaches contingency, as
“accidental concretion,” to the most universal concept and moreover,
to the natural-historical prototype, Adam and Eve, which anamnesis
emphasises for the instant and for all time by developing their contours
out of the chaos of the sheet of paper as their “second nature.” Through
23 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, edited and translated by Howard
and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 158.

78 Allen
fantasy genius continuously recalls and reproduces original creation; not

as the creator of its reality but by the reintegration of its given elements
in an image. (K 197/138–39)
We see here the dialectical relation between the universal and the particular
in which each actualises the other, but such easy dialectical formulations are
disrupted by two further aspects of the image that exert a centrifugal pressure
on its relations: First, despite the author’s intentions the image takes on its own
form of life, like Frankenstein’s creature it bears witness to the unassimilable
contingencies of its origin and calls the writer to account for it, and as such,
like the creature, the image embodies a specific material aesthetic (K, 189/133).24
Second, as this voiding of the artwork as a work arises out of an intense immer-
sion in the contingencies of the work’s existence, its form is related to melan-
choly, as melancholy is the mode in which material singularity is experienced
as such. But in doing so melancholy conveys an experience that is peculiarly
topographical, as it is of a space whose depth and detail cannot be measured
conventionally, and it is thus that literature is particularly capable of giving
expression to this melancholy topography since it is precisely that which takes
form in and as such a singular material space. For Adorno this point is made
explicit by the Diapsalmata of Either/Or, whose fragmentary organization,
despite Kierkegaard’s professed intentions, “legitimates itself as one of exact
fantasy” (K, 195/137; cf. 176–78/124–25). That is, the Diapsalmata may appear
to exemplify the unstructured form of the aesthetic, but in its precise deploy-
ment of images it actualizes more by way of its fragmentation than is possi-
ble in any systematic or ironic format, as it provides a glimpse of the actual
diremption of material forms as well as the possibilities that lie beyond this.
But the corollary of such a form is that it bears an intrinsic material affect that
cannot be avoided, for the fragmentation of the aesthetic uncovers the singu-
lar logic of affinities of its images (as their exact fantasy), which manifests itself
as an endless longing (Sehnsucht) that “does not finish up in its images, but sur-
vives in them just as it emerges from them” (K, 199/140). Such aesthetic forms
24 Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, edited and translated by Howard and Edna Hong
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 74: “Figuratively speaking, it is as if an error
slipped into an author’s writing and the error became conscious of itself as an error—
perhaps it actually was not a mistake but in a much higher sense an essential part of the
whole production—and now this error wants to mutiny against the author, out of hatred
towards him, forbidding him to correct it and in maniacal defiance saying to him: No,
I refuse to be erased; I will stand as a witness against you, a witness that you are a second-
rate author.”

can be found in the singularity of proper names, which bear experiences that
resist conceptualization while surpassing what is present, as Adorno would
find exemplified in the works of Proust.25 Such linguistic forms thereby take on
the manifold concreteness of things, while still providing descriptions of the
world that are thus no less thing-like than that which they describe, in all their
materiality and finitude.
In the modern age in which Blanchot writes, the nature of such a topogra-
phy has changed, for the introspection characteristic of the melancholic has
become transformed by the loss of any center or ground for the subject, so
that any introspective meditation finds its pathways exploded into a space
that lacks the forms and dimensions previously deemed intrinsic to it. As I
have written elsewhere, the sense of this transformation is captured by the
way that Pascal’s depiction of God as a circle is inverted in the disenchanted
world, for the melancholic finds that the center is nowhere and the periphery
everywhere, which is the nature of the space explored in Blanchot’s récits, par-
ticularly in Celui qui with its profusion of borders and lack of focus.26 But the
pathways of introspection are not entirely set adrift in these modern texts, as
the downward gaze of the melancholic still finds itself seeking out the material
bases of relation from which it hopes to find some form of insistent meaning,
an insistence that abides, as we have seen, in the writing of these relations.
As Blanchot writes in a work that accompanies the investigations of Celui qui,
the center cannot be reached, as it is displaced by the ongoing pressure of
the work as the writer writes so that it becomes more hidden as well as more
imperious and more uncertain (EL, 7/v). For the writer finds that the work is
only able to explore its relation to the world, the relation that inheres between
words and things, if it also describes this exploration as it proceeds. In doing
so the work enacts the relation of expression and description within itself and
thereby finds itself isomorphic to the reality that it seeks to approach even
as it displaces it. So it is through writing that the space of the work opens up
but also remains open to displacement, and it is for this reason that there is
always a distance that separates the writer’s gaze from its focus, which in turn
appears as an array of exteriorities that provides the milieu of his fascination,
25 T. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972),
366; translated by E.B. Ashton as Negative Dialectics (New York: Seabury Press, 1973),
373; cf. Adorno, Metaphysik. Begriff und Probleme, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 218; translated by Edmund Jephcott as Metaphysics: Concept and
Problems (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 140.
26 W.S. Allen, “The Image of the Absolute Novel: Blanchot, Mallarmé, and Aminadab,” MLN
125, no. 5 (2010): 1101–2.

80 Allen
a milieu that the work renders absolute (EL, 23/32). Thus, in writing the work,
the writer finds that it becomes illegible to him, and he can only continue by
starting again, and in attempting to decipher his own enigmas he only creates
more, which then become separated from him as ruins and fragments, since
that which he uses to respond to the darkness in which he finds himself only
leads to its extension, and so the work becomes increasingly alien. The writer
thus becomes as removed from the work as he is from the world, which finally
leads to an estrangement from his language and himself as he becomes lost
in a milieu without end, neither here nor there but in a space with uncertain
dimensions (EL, 41/48). For in the passage between the first and the third per-
son, between the narrator and his companion, the writer finds that he is able to
speak no longer in his own voice but only through the work, from it (il), which
means, as Kafka had remarked, that he has entered into literature, into its
space (EL, 17/26, 70/73).27 This is a space not of appearances but of that which
takes place when nothing appears, which in relation to language becomes an
image of material ambiguity.
As a result, underlying the particular allegorical meanings that the mel-
ancholic might retrieve in the readings of Benjamin and Adorno lies a differ-
ent kind of wisdom altogether, an ontological understanding that cannot be
reduced to any conceptual system but is rather an aesthetico-rational expe-
rience that can only find expression in its own (aesthetico-rational) terms.
Benjamin finds such a form of expression in allegory, in which the material and
semiotic poles of the image are presented in the greatest dialectical tension.
In this way the meaning and materiality of the image are combined so that
they perpetually give way to each other, betraying themselves to and through
the other. It is thus uncertain whether it is the thing or its meaning that we
are presented with, thereby indicating the materiality into which meaning dis-
sipates as well as the meaning that arises from this materiality, which is the
mark of death in every image, the loss of meaning and the eruption of opacity
alongside abstraction and signification that constitutes the double-edged rei-
fication of natural history (UDT, 342–43/165–66; K, 80/54). This internal divi-
sion is what makes the image slip between opacity and transparency, between
being an obstacle and a passageway, into the mysterious space in which words
27 This is a point that recurs consistently through Blanchot’s writings from La Part du
feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 28–29; translated by Charlotte Mandell as The Work of Fire
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 21 (hereafter cited as PF; pages refer first to
French then to English editions) to L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 558–59;
translated by Susan Hanson as The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), 380–81.

and meanings, names and things become dissociated and in doing so make
and unmake themselves as images, which Blanchot was led to discuss in
terms of a symbolic form of language. The idiosyncrasy of these readings of
allegory and symbol indicates the difficulty of addressing the complexity at
issue in this understanding of ambiguity: that it is not simply ambiguous but
that its ambiguity is itself ambiguous, upsetting any possibility of encompass-
ing it in a straightforward dialectic of meaning. While baroque allegories have
a hieroglyphic density that gives them a thingly illegibility, Blanchot’s much
more minimal images aspire to a degree of indifference over the presence and
relation of meaning and materiality, replacing the dialectical tension of the
baroque image with something more subtle and discreet, an almost inconspic-
uous ambivalence that is consequently more difficult to address or dismiss.
These images are not derived from a fantastic imaginary but are implicit in
the most prosaic of forms, such as the glass of water, which could not be any
clearer symbol of uncertain transparency.28 This manifestation of ambiva-
lence thus holds the possibility of a more profound critique of language in the
secular world precisely because it is not removed from the everyday.
Blanchot’s understanding of symbolic meaning follows that developed in
Hegel’s Ästhetik, where the symbolic is that mode of art in which there is an
irresolvable inadequacy between the form and the content of the work insofar
as the content remains too abstract to be fully formed into the work. There
is thus an excess to the symbolic work that leaves it unstable, as its symbolic
content perpetually indicates the possibility of meaning exterior to its form,
to which it refers but cannot comprehend.29 For Hegel such works are not
28 Blanchot may also be recalling the way that the prosaic banality of water is used by Hegel
to mark the point of convergence of freedom and death in revolutionary action (which,
as Blanchot had earlier emphasised, “is in every respect analogous to action as embodied
in literature: the passage from nothing to everything, the affirmation of the absolute as
event and of every event as absolute” [PF, 309/319]), for the “sole work and deed of uni-
versal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling,
for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and
meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or
swallowing a mouthful of water” (Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and
Karl Markus Michel [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969], 436; translated by A.V. Miller
as Phenomenology of Spirit [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 360; hereafter cited as
PG).
29 Moreover, “the look of a symbol as such raises at once the doubt whether a shape is to be
taken as a symbol or not” (Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox [Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1975], 306). It is precisely for this reason that it is the symbolic
nature of “proto-art” (Vorkunst) that raises for the first time the issue of the relation

82 Allen
properly artistic as they fail to achieve the integration of their spiritual and
material aspects, but for Blanchot the symbolic indicates the peculiar qual-
ity of writing that does not signify “a particular idea by a determined fiction,”
as symbolic meaning is “global”: it is not that of a particular object or action
“but that of the world in its entirety [ensemble] and of human existence in its
entirety” (PF, 83/79). For what the symbolic narrative does is “to make present
the global meaning that everyday life, strangled in too particular events, rarely
enables us to reach and that reflection, which retains only its timeless aspect,
does not enable us to experience.” This would seem to imply writing of an
imaginatively transcendent form, or to make it into an expression of being, but
Blanchot stresses the inadequacy and negativity of the symbolic by proposing
that in it the “imagination goes further” (N.B. The paragraph from which these
lines derive is missing from the English translation):
It is not satisfied to be given, in the absence of an object in particular,

this object, i.e. its image; its movement is to continue and to try to give
itself this very absence in general and no longer, in the absence of a thing,
this thing, but, through this absent thing, the absence that constitutes it,
emptiness as the milieu of every imagined form and, exactly, the exis-
tence of inexistence, the world of the imaginary, insofar as it is the nega-
tion, the inversion, of the real world as a whole. (PF, 84)
It is only in this movement that imagination becomes symbolic and the image
that it seeks “implies an absolute absence, a counter-world that would be like
the realization, in its entirety, of the fact of being outside reality” (PF, 84/79).
This persistent negativity of the symbolic removes it from any meaning or
truth, either present or absent, as it does not signify anything, instead “it pres-
ents us with this very surpassing that it grasps and makes sensible in a fiction
whose theme is the impossible effort of fiction to realize itself as wholly fictive”
(PF, 85/79). Fiction in this form is inherently contradictory as it presents its
lack of integrity in the excess of symbolic references that appear to reside in
it, references that do not refer to anything in particular but rather to an abso-
lute otherness that cannot be reached. Thus the fictional work does not cohere
within itself in any specific meaning; neither does it refer to one elsewhere
but, rather, presents its own unreality as one that cannot be realized on its
own terms or as anything else. The symbolic negation is both the condition of
between form and material, and nature and art, which is then resolved in classical art.
The most useful discussion of Hegel’s thoughts on the symbolic can be found in Kathleen
Dow Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001).

possibility of the work as fiction and its condition of impossibility, since it can
never fulfil itself by means of it.
Such a thought of abstraction and generality needs to be examined care-
fully, for the symbolic is not simply a vague absolute. For, as Blanchot makes
clear, the symbolic is made up of details, gestures, and moments, the “dust
of words,” as well as announcing something that surpasses all these details
taken together or separately and, going further, that surpasses this movement
as well by refusing what it attempts to announce. It is thus not nothing but,
rather, “nothing but circumstances,” even as it can never attain them, which
is why the symbol is not simply abstract for Blanchot but rather the space of
the imaginary not just in its particularity but also as its very condition of pos-
sibility (PF, 85–86/80). The inadequacy Hegel had attached to the symbolic
has thus been extended and reformulated to make it into the intrinsic impos-
sibility of the work out of which it nevertheless emerges, and towards which
it persistently directs us. In entering the world of fiction, as K. does in Das
Schloss or as the narrator discovers in Celui qui, we enter a form of language
in which it is impossible to decide which side of its symbolization we are on:
is this a language of surplus and signification, or that of its denial and evacu-
ation, or is it somehow both and neither in its attempt to pursue that which
underlies the possibility of signification but which can never be reached? Such
a form of language is thus wholly distinct from everyday language insofar as it
“seeks to surpass all particular negation and affirm itself as universal negation,
not as an abstract universal, but as a concrete emptiness, a realized universal
emptiness,” and although this seems to be an impossibly self-defeating desire,
for fiction to be itself as nothing but prose, it is nevertheless the desire inher-
ent to it (PF, 86/81).30 While structurally similar to the hope latent in aesthetic
fragments explored by Adorno, Blanchot’s understanding of the negativity
of fiction pushes the aporetic logic of this non-coincidence of language and
the world much further, to the point where its impossibility extinguishes any
scope for redemption and leaves a melancholy without relief, which entirely
reconfigures what we might understand by hope for change.
As a result, it is not possible to see the figure of the glass of water in Celui qui
in simple symbolic terms; it does not represent or signify anything about the
content of the récit. But its presence is not to be overlooked, precisely because
30 Paul Davies elucidates this argument especially well in “Blanchot,” in A Companion to
Continental Philosophy, ed. Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder (Oxford: Blackwell,
1998), 304–16. See also the development of this point in relation to Das Schloss, in Marthe
Robert, The Old and the New: From Don Quixote to Kafka, trans. Carol Cosman (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1977).

84 Allen
it is the focus of so much of the narrator’s movements.31 Consequently, its

symbolic resonance may operate across the language of the récit more imma-
nently, insofar as water is pre-eminently a medium of both transparency and
reflection that is almost entirely without qualities. In fact it is the medium par
excellence, the element or milieu that intangibly sustains communication,
understood in the more basic material, rather than semiotic, sense. Such a
notion of absolute mediation is behind Hegel’s description of language as the
“perfect element within which inwardness is external just as externality is like-
wise inward,” for it mediates its own relations between form and content, and
transparency and reflexivity, between its material circumstances and its own
lack of qualities (PG, 529/439). And it does so by bringing the two into the clos-
est possible relation of intimacy without dissolving their differences, without
absorbing one into the other, which makes for the thinnest, most limpid form
of melancholic immersion. So it makes a difference when Blanchot speaks of
a glass of water, doubling the refractory qualities of its transparency, as writ-
ing does for language, and also places it beyond reach, for when the narrator
of Celui qui examines the table that he has come up against he finds that the
bottle is empty, and his thirst cannot be quenched.
If it can be argued that melancholy is that particular form of disaffection
that arises in modernity for those engaged in artistic or intellectual pursuits,
insofar as it is the mode in which boredom or alienation appear when these
are coupled to an experience that is creative and reflective, then it is possible
to suggest that the nature of the melancholy Blanchot appears to experience is
a particularly profound form of this creative disaffection, since it is not simply
artistic but aesthetic.32 Which is to say that it is a profoundly philosophical form
of melancholy, one that would seem to arise from the lived experience of the
disparity between Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics. In the wake of Heidegger,
and the more broadly existential ideas discussed in the 1930s and ’40s,
31 This glass of water had also appeared in Au moment voulu (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 12;
translated by Lydia Davis as When the Time Comes, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, 205.
As Holland has noted, Celui qui was explicitly marked by Blanchot in his prière d’insérer
as the third panel of a triptych, following L’Arrêt de mort and Au moment voulu, and so,
despite their differences and increasing thematic impoverishment, there are a number of
elements that repeat from one récit to the next, since, in Blanchot’s words, “they all belong
to the same experience.” See Holland, “Space and Beyond: L’Attente L’Oubli,” in Clandestine
Encounters, 279–80.
32 The sociological reading of melancholy has been developed by Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy
and Society, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1992), but see the extensive revisions by Elizabeth S. Goodstein in Experience without
Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), chap. 2.

the spiritual and religious senses of melancholy became translated into a

sense of angst that was lived not just at the personal level but that directly
affected the individual’s sense of existing truthfully. For the writer, who is natu-
rally disposed to melancholy, as this is the form of anxiety intrinsic to writ-
ing, such lived experience of doubt and disaffection would become inflected
not through general questions of authenticity or humanity but by the incom-
mensurability between the finitude of experience and the universality of con-
cepts, alongside the sensible appearing (sinnliche Scheinen) of the idea and
the autonomous purposelessness of the work, that is, between the different
senses given to aesthetics by Kant and Hegel. The significance of this point is
that this is not simply a conceptual or historical problem of relating different
philosophical discourses but is a division that marks the writer’s existence and
has to be endured. In this way the melancholy that Blanchot seems to experi-
ence is of such stringency and rarefaction because it derives from the divided
aesthetics of his existence as a writer. His is not a melancholy that derives
from religious doubt or social alienation and so cannot be read in those terms;
rather, its peculiarly modernist form is aesthetic, which distinguishes it as
much from the existential as from the intellectual and grants it its singular aus-
terity. Such an aesthetics is concerned with developing a mode of writing that
can deliver a kind of phenomenology of writing, a language that is responsive
to the ambiguities and displacements of the experience of language in writing
and is not just reflexively sensitive but also rigorously engaged with the fact
that this is an experience with its own historical and philosophical ramifica-
tions, a language that has been riven by irreversible fissures through the works
of Hölderlin, Mallarmé, and Kafka, as much as by Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger,
for example. This is an experience not of pure writing but of one that is intrin-
sically if abstractly related to the world and thus bears its marks in the actual
words and images that irreducibly constitute it. And in writing from and about
this experience, Blanchot is seeking to bring it to a point of tangibility such
that its imaginative force can be grasped as that which makes sense and non-
sense of the world, extending and suspending its possibilities through its own
formation of space, which manifests itself as a topography whose rigor and
exactness derives from the extremity to which these possibilities are pursued.
The fact that the melancholy of literature bears its own aesthetics raises
the question of how literature relates to aesthetics more broadly, but the sig-
nificance of melancholy is precisely that its experience cannot be generalized,
as it remains contingent on its materiality. So any attempt to approach litera-
ture from a broader aesthetic perspective would have to capitulate to the aes-
thetics that literature bears, which is inevitably linked to melancholy insofar
as its fragmentary materiality prevents it from being fully conceptualized or

86 Allen
rendered meaningful within a wider context. Such a sense of aesthetics is thus

itself melancholic, as it is an experience of inescapable lack, of an implied, but
materially unreachable, possibility of understanding or creativity. The possi-
bility of such a singular aesthetics is made concrete in Blanchot’s writing inso-
far as it demurs from any explicit content but, rather, provokes a sense of what
a literary work of art might be as an autonomous but indeterminate exemplar
of linguistic exploration. That is, the literary work of art embodies a form of
experience that remains irreducibly alien by virtue of the work’s autonomy, its
ontological remove, and it is by way of the reflexivity of Blanchot’s récits that
this view from elsewhere is made concrete. A view that necessarily arises from
the negativity of language and thus from that which is ordinarily seen as the
most transparent and immediate mode of expression but which exposes itself
in the form of a singularly inordinate topography, a material image space of
unrelieved refraction.

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research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86 Research

The Absolute Milieu: Blanchot’s Aesthetics

Blanchot – Adorno – melancholy – aesthetics – topography

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi 10.1163/15691640-12341302

demonstrate, however, is that this reflexivity exposes the aesthetics of the

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

3 Rodolphe Gasché, in “The Imperative of Transparency: Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas,”

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

The narrative orients itself around a receptacle of transparency, a glass of

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

It is particularly interesting in this regard to focus on a key moment that

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

I remember a period when I would constantly ask him a question that

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

“Ah! One can certainly ask oneself that.”

The temporal status of this sequence appears straightforward to begin with, as

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

“You too? You mean we’re connected?” He seemed prepared to study

According to him—but I must add that he never declared this to me

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

an ineradicable dimension of negativity that undermines any attempt to relate

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

Und als plötzlich jäh (And when suddenly

It is the divergence of these movements of signification and materiality that

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par désœuvrement, which Blanchot emphasises by focusing on their centrifu-

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

The nightmarish quality of being lost in an indeterminate space where dis-

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

Such a situation is unsustainable, its vertigo of fascination only goes so far

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

Schwermut ist der Affekt, der das Denken begleitet, welches zu

To understand this relation more clearly it is helpful to contrast it with the

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

Every feeling is bound to an a priori object and its representation is its

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

perception, respond like motorial reactions [motorisches Gebaren] to the

This is Benjamin’s doctrine of justification (Rechtfertigungslehre): that which

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

It is precisely this model of dialectical images that Benjamin takes up in the

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

he can be stirred by a Nürnberg print, a picture of the kind found on the

Such categories have a generality that

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fantasy genius continuously recalls and reproduces original creation; not

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

It is not satisfied to be given, in the absence of an object in particular,

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

it is the focus of so much of the narrator’s movements.31 Consequently, its

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

the spiritual and religious senses of melancholy became translated into a

research in phenomenology 45 (2015) 53–86

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi 10.1163/15691640-12341302

3 Rodolphe Gasché, in “The Imperative of Transparency: Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas,”