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MAURICE BLANCHOT

Enigma

Dear Madam,

Please forgive me for answering you with a letter. Reading yours, in whichyou ask me for a text to be placed in the issue of an American universityjournal (Yale) on the topic: Literature and the ethical question, I wasfrightened and nearly in despair. Once again, once again, I said to myself.Not that I pretend to have exhausted an inexhaustible subject, but on thecontrary with the certainty that such a subject returns to me* because itcannot be dealt with. Even the word literature is suddenly foreign to me.

What of literature? And of this and between literature and ethics? If Iam not mistaken, Adorno, in one of his books on Alban Berg, whose studentand friend he was, tells us that one day Schumann spoke of his horror ofmusic.1 In the same way Alban Berg (remember Haydns symphony, simplethough it may be, entitled The Farewell Symphony) sought to give shapethrough 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 towardsdisappearance. Why then still speak of literature? And if one puts it inrelation with the question of ethics, is it to remind us that the necessity towrite (its ethic) would be nothing other than the infinite movement bywhich 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 and the Ethical Question, ed. Claire Nouvet, 0 1991 by YaleUniversity.

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MAURICE BLANCHOT 9

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 makesPoes opinion his own. 02 No remnants of a philosophy, the ethical or themetaphysical, will show through; I add that it must be included and la-tent. (But isnt Mallarme here restoring ethics? Hidden, it reserves itsrights.) To avoid some building reality, remaining around this spon-taneous and magical architecture does not imply a lack of powerful cal-culations and subtle ones, but one does not know about them, they them-selves make themselves mysterious on purpose. It is the essence inliterature to be free only in the rules or the structures which intentionallyslip 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 ofreach: Songsurgesfiominnatesource, anterior to a concept, sopurelyas toreflect 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 thepure 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, forMallarm first is not sufficient, is not suitable: Anterior to what wouldbe first and here we are caught in an endless movement. Thus, after havingstated: Song surges rom innate source, anterior to a concept, Mallarmecomes back to setting himself limits: The intellectual armature of thepoem which is less in the organization of the words (the rhymes or therhythms) than in the space which isolates them. Significant silence no lessbeautiful to compose, than verses.

One will understand, I hope, that if I speak of contradictions, it is tobetter experience their necessity. The pure surging from the source. Andnevertheless the calculations which only act by slipping away. Or the intel-lectual armature which composes itself (space, blank, silence), thus workand mastery. And nevertheless to contain what lightning of instinct, simplylife, virgin, in its synthesis and illuminating everything. Innate and setting

rules for itself; anterior to all principles and simply life, virgin. Contradic-tions without conciliation: it is not a question of dialectics.

And I will add, to stammer an answer to your question on writing andethics: free but a servant, in front of the other.

2. Citations borrowed from Writings on the book (Editions de Mclat).

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10 Yale French Studies

An enigma, all this? Yes, enigma such as evoked by Hijlderlins words:

Enigma is the pure surging of that which surges.

Depth that shakes everything, the coming of the dayAnd again forgive me for this letter so abruptly ended, as if there were

nothing left to say but to apologize, without exonerating oneself.

Maurice Blanchot

Translated by Paul Weidmann