MAURICE

BLANCHOT

Enigma

Dear Madam, Please forgive me for answering you with a letter. Reading yours, in which you ask me for a text to be placed in the issue of an American university journal (Yale) on the topic: Literature and the ethical question, I was frightened and nearly in despair. Once again, once again, I said to myself. Not that I pretend to have exhausted an inexhaustible subject, but on the contrary with the certainty that such a subject returns to me* because it cannot be dealt with. Even the word literature is suddenly foreign to me. What of literature? And of this and between literature and ethics? If I am not mistaken, Adorno, in one of his books on Alban Berg, whose student and friend he was, tells us that one day Schumann spoke of his horror of music.1 In the same way Alban Berg (remember Haydns symphony, simple though it may be, entitled The Farewell Symphony) sought to give shape through music to the disappearance of music. And I remember a text on literature where it is said that it has a clear destiny which is to tend towards disappearance. Why then still speak of literature? And if one puts it in relation with the question of ethics, is it to remind us that the necessity to write (its ethic) would be nothing other than the infinite movement by which it vainly calls for disappearance? Holderlin already:
Why be so brief?! Do you no longer love! *Can also be read is my due. [Translators note] 1. I question this citation. Schumann certainly suffered from an excess of music and may thus have said, in moments of depression or exaltation: Too much music. YES 79, Literature University. and the Ethical Question, ed. Claire Nouvet, 0 1991 by Yale

MAURICE

BLANCHOT

Song as once beforer Yoiz who, younger, In the days of hope when you sang, Knewnot how to finish! * * *

And once again Mallarme. In an old text (a letter written in the spontaneity of abandon), he makes Poes opinion his own.02No remnants of a philosophy, the ethical or the metaphysical, will show through; I add that it must be included and latent. (But isnt Mallarme here restoring ethics? Hidden, it reserves its rights.) To avoid some building reality, remaining around this spontaneous and magical architecture does not imply a lack of powerful calculations and subtle ones, but one doesnot know about them, they themselves make themselves mysterious on purpose. It is the essence in literature to be free only in the rules or the structures which intentionally slip away; they no longer act, if they show themselves. But Mallarme then offers us an affirmation whose beauty we perceive, but which seems to challenge what he has just said. Words always out of reach: Songsurgesfiominnatesource, anterior to a concept, sopurelyas to reflect outside a thousand rhythms of images. An obsession with anteriority. We find it under many forms: To the anterior sky where Beauty blooms and elsewhere (Herodiade): By the pure diamond of some star, but/Anterior, which never shone. Isnt it clear, then, that what is first, is not ethics (moral requirement)? We would be tempted to say so, if we did not also have to say that, for Mallarm& first is not sufficient, is not suitable: Anterior to what would be first and here we are caught in an endlessmovement. Thus, after having stated: Song surgesfrom innate source, anterior to a concept, Mallarme comes back to setting himself limits: The intellectual armature of the poem which is less in the organization of the words (the rhymes or the rhythms) than in the spacewhich isolates them. Significant silence no less beautiful to compose, than verses. One will understand, I hope, that if I speak of contradictions, it is to better experience their necessity. The pure surging from the source. And nevertheless the calculations which only act by slipping away. Or the intellectual armature which composes itself (space,blank, silence), thus work and mastery. And nevertheless to contain what lightning of instinct, simply life, virgin, in its synthesis and illuminating everything. Innate and setting rules for itself; anterior to all principles and simply life, virgin. Contradictions without conciliation: it is not a question of dialectics. And I will add, to stammer an answer to your question on writing and ethics: free but a servant, in front of the other.
2. Citations borrowed from Writings on the book (Editions de Mclat).

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Yale French Studies

An enigma, all this? Yes, enigma such as evoked by Hijlderlins Enigma is the pure surging of that which surges. Depth that shakes everything, the coming of the day words:

And again forgive me for this letter so abruptly ended, as if there were nothing left to say but to apologize, without exonerating oneself. Maurice Translated Blanchot

by Paul Weidmann