In his voice: Maurice Blanchot's affair with the neuter

182 Pages·2016·1.002 MB·English

by  Appelbaum, David;Blanchot, Maurice

In His Voice

In His Voice
(cid:2)(cid:3)(cid:4)(cid:5)(cid:2)
Maurice Blanchot’s
Affair with the Neuter
DAVID APPELBAUM
SUNY
P R E S S
Published by
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Albany
© 2016 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic,
magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the
prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact
State University of New York Press
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie D. Searl
Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Appelbaum, David.
In his voice : Maurice Blanchot’s affair with the neuter / David Appelbaum.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5979-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5981-3 (e-book)
1. Whole and parts (Philosophy) 2. Perspective (Philosophy)
3. Nothing (Philosophy) 4. Blanchot, Maurice. I. Title.
BD396.A67 2016.
843'.912—dc23 2015012445
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Kate Stroud Hamilton
Ah this blind voice, and these moments of held breath when all listen
wildly, and the voice that begins to fumble again, without knowing
what it’s looking for and again the tiny silence and the listening again,
for what, no one knows, a sign of life perhaps, that must be it, a sign
of life escaping someone, and bound to be denied if it came, that’s it
surely, if only all that could stop, there’d be peace, no, too good to be
believed, the listening would go on, for the voice to begin again, for
a sign of life, for some one to betray himself, or for something else,
anything, what else can there be but signs of life . . .
—Beckett, The Unnamable
Contents
Preface ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
1 Narcissus 3
2 The Mirror 31
3 Death as Instance 55
4 Echo 83
5 Voice Eo Ipso 109
Conclusion 137
Notes 141
Selected Bibliography 161
Index 163

Preface
In His Voice: Maurice Blanchot’s Affair with the Neuter has a twofold aim.
The first is to deepen a post-phenomenological investigation of authorial
voice, the voice that appears on the scene of writing. The second is to
utilize as frame and resource Maurice Blanchot’s discoveries vis-à-vis voice.
They represent crossings or chiasma between his thinking and my own.
His prolonged fascination reveals, in its principal insight, that the writer’s
voice in a literary work lacks a direct presentation and has one given in
response to a second voice—the other’s voice or the otherwise than voice.
Only with this responsiveness does the singularity of authorial voice make
its appearance.
Blanchot conceives of the alterity as a murmurous null point
of vocalization. It is the sirens’ song, with allusion to Homer, or the
cacophonous resonance of unadorned being, the il y a of Levinas, a motile
chaos that precedes subjectivity, consciousness, and the properly human.
Normally suppressed in the name of linguistical efficacy and worldly reality,
its irrepressibility is the quilting point of literature since Romanticism.
Writers such as Hölderlin, Rilke, Kafka, Mallarmé, René Char, and Beckett
lead Blanchot to speak of the authorial voice that embodies otherness as the
neuter. The neuter voice, avoiding the repressive tendencies both of everyday
language and philosophical discourse, reveals a menace to our appropriation
of being and the order of things. Confronting it as reader, one falls under
an exigency quite different from that of worldly comportment.
In accordance with current views, voice itself also has a twofold nature.
It declares, yielding statements about the world, and it performs, presenting
ix