Dreadful Reading: Blanchot on Hegel

Author(s): Andrzej Warminski

Source: Yale French Studies, No. 69, The Lesson of Paul de Man (1985), pp. 267-275
Published by: Yale University Press
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ANDRZEJ WARMINSKI

Dreadful Reading: Blanchot on Hegel

No rereading of Blanchot in the 1980s can take place without coming up

against what a fragment from "Fragmentaire" calls "the dread of reading"

(l'angoisse de lire): "The dread of reading: it is that every text, no matter how
important and how interesting it may be (and the more it gives the impression

of being so), is empty-it does not exist at bottom (il n'existe pas dans le fond);
it is necessary to clear an abyss, and if you don't jump, you don't understand."'

If in order to understand (reading and the dread proper to it) we have to clear the
abyss of the text's essential non-existence, it may be good to know what this
non-existence comes down to. Rather than proceeding directly to the text of
Blanchot and its non-existence-and thereby risking too immediate an answer

to the question of (the existence or non-existence of) his text-we would take a
detour and begin by way of the question of reading: as a pretext, then, Blanchot's reading of Hegel, in particular the Phenomenology of Spirit-an apparently existent text if there ever was one. Another fragment from "Fragmentaire" provides us with something like a kit for rereading Hegel through
Blanchot: "One cannot 'read' Hegel except by not reading him. To read him,
not to read him, to understand him, to misunderstand him, to refuse him, falls
under the decision of Hegel, or it does not take place. Only the intensity of this
non-place, in the impossibility that there be one, disposes us for a deathdeath of reading, death of writing-that leaves Hegel living, in the imposture

of the finished Sense. (Hegel is the impostor, that is what renders him invincible, crazy for his gravity (fou de son serieux), counterfeiter of Truth.)" On the
one hand, this fragment formulates the dread of the reader in the face of Hegel's
System: whether you read Hegel or do not read him, you'll regret it because in
either case you will have been read by Hegel. That is, to read Hegel-the
This paper was delivered at a Special Session ("Re-reading Blanchot in the 1980s") of the 1983
MLA convention in New York. It will appear as an Epilogue to: Andrzej Warminski, Readings in

Interpretation: H6lderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

1. Maurice Blanchot, "Fragmentaire," in A Bram Van Velde (Montpellier: Fata Morgana,

1975).

267

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268 Yale French Studies

Phenomenology of Spirit, for example-means to follow at a distance and

immerse oneself in the dialectical movement of knowing's (das Wissen) e

ining itself as the philosophical observer who is both superfluous and necessary, who puts himself in by leaving himself out, the "we" of the text. In short,
the reader of Hegel-objective genitive-inscribes himself, is already inscribed, in the Phenomenology as the book's own "we" and thereby becomes
the reader of Hegel-subjective genitive-Hegel's own reader. But even not to
read Hegel-to misunderstand him, to refuse him, etc.-falls under the decision of Hegel precisely to the extent that it defines and identifies itself as the
refusal of, or in opposition to, Hegel, the System. That is, the refusal to read

Hegel, like all (mere) negations, has a positive content-it is always the negation of something, in this case the negation of Hegel and therefore still belongs
to him, Hegel's own negation. In short, the familiar work of determinate nega-

tion insures that reading or not reading Hegel will not make a difference. And

yet, on the other hand-and this would have to be a third, other, hand since
both one and two turned out to be the hands of Hegel-the writing of the
fragment begins to make an imperceptible difference once we begin reading it.
For the text gives us not only the difference between reading Hegel and its
negation, but also the difference between reading and "reading"-in quotation

marks. However we read this third, other, neuter (neither one, reading, nor the
other, not reading) reading in quotation marks, it is clear that its difference is
not easily masterable by a thought whose motor is determinate negation: for

"reading"-in quotation marks-cannot be thought as the negation (of reading or not reading), it can only be . . . read. Whatever else it does, such a reading
opens up a space for the reading of this fragment and a rewriting of its terms
differently, otherwise. For one thing, we can now read the "or" in "or it does

not take place" (ou cela n 'a pas lieu) as meaning not "in other words" but "on
the other hand." That is, a reading of Hegel that would not fall under the
decision of Hegel would have to be one that did not take place-but in a sense
of not taking place different from, other than, the opposition to take place/not
to take place. In other words, it would be an other not taking place that is not

the negation of taking place-an other negative. It is such an other negative

that the fragment introduces by taking advantage of the French idiomatic

expression "avoir lieu" (to take place, to happen) to create a non-place (nonlieu) which is not the negation of place-a space in which the reading of Hegel

in quotation marks (neither reading nor not reading) can take place without
taking place. It is necessarily impossible that there be such a non-place, for

its space (and time) would necessarily be other than that of any dialectical (or
onto-) logic. So: a non-happening is turned into an impossible non-place where
we are supposed to read, Hegel, in quotation marks-a reading that makes
necessary a rewriting of both the "we" and "death" in a different sense, in a

sense different from the "finished Sense" (Sens acheve) of Hegel. Small wonder, then, that reading-Hegel, for example-is dreadful, for it comes up
against a Nothing that does not turn over into Being (nor does it reveal and

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ANDRZEJ WARMINSKI 269

conceal Being) but rather rereads and rewrites Nothing. (This is perhaps how
we should read Hegel's "invincibility." As another fragment from "Fragmentaire" puts it: "The correct critique of the System does not consist of catching

it in error (as one often delights in doing) or in the interpreting it as insufficient

(this happens even to Heidegger) but of rendering it invincible, uncritiquable,

or, as one says, "un-get-around-able." Thus, nothing escaping its omnipresent
unity and re-collection of everything, no more place remains for fragmentary

writing (ii ne reste plus de place a' l'ecriture fragmentaire) except to disengage
as the necessary impossible (sauf a se degager comme le necessaire impossible): that which therefore writes itself in the name of the time outside time, in

a suspension that, unreservedly (sans retenue), breaks the seal of the unity,
precisely in not breaking it, but in leaving it to the side (de cote) without one's
being able to know it." In other words, the third, other, neuter reading of Hegel
is not a dialectical trick-like, say, Hegel's critique of what he calls the bad

infinity (an infinity that does not include finitude is finite, limited by the
finitude it does not include) or of "absolute difference" (an absolute difference
is different from everything, including itself, difference, and therefore turns
over into absolute identity)-rendering the System invincible in order to demonstrate that its invincibility is limited by its not containing "vincibility" but
rather a rewriting of its seal of invincibility elsewhere, otherwise, on the side.)
Such a rewriting of Hegel's negative in another place, to the side, is what
takes place in Blanchot's readings of Hegel in the 1940s-in particular "La
litterature et le droit a la mort"2-and what accounts for their peculiar "distance" from the text of the Phenomenology as formulated in the essay's first
footnote: "It should be understood that the remarks which follow are quite
remote (fort loin) from the text of the Phenomenology and make no attempt to
illuminate (eclairer) it." If we remember this footnote, we will not make the
mistake of charging Blanchot with having taken out of context and mixed up
specific moments of different dialectics in the Phenomenology: the attempt is
not to explain Hegel but to rewrite him in an other place. But it is also no
answer to dismiss this rewriting as Blanchot's flippant "tendency to allegorize
philosophical texts as parables of writing," for the question remains: what does
such allegorization mean and do to the reading of the Phenomenology? In order
to determine the other place, to the side, in which moments of the Phenomenology as diverse as Hegel's remarks on death in the Preface, the dialectics of work, of universal freedom and Terror, the unhappy consciousness,
master and slave, etc. can all be read as though on the same level and rewritten
into parables of writing, we will begin with Blanchot's rewriting of Hegel on
(the) work and Hegel on death: what takes place (and where), what difference
does it make, when work and death are read as writing? In regard to work, an
immediate answer would be: nothing takes place, it makes no difference, for
here Blanchot's essay seems to follow Hegel quite closely. Just as in the Phe2. Maurice Blanchot, La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949).

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270 Yale French Studies

nomenology the individual (das Individuum) who is going to take a

himself "in a circle in which each moment already presupposes the other"-

that is, he can know the end or goal (Zweck) of his action only from the act but
he can act only if he already has that end or goal-so in Blanchot's essay the

writer finds himself in a double bind: "He has no talent until he has written,

but he needs talent in order to write (II n 'a du talent qu'apres avoir 'crit, mais
illui en fautpour kcrire)." And yet substituting "writer" for "individual" here
makes all the difference to the resolution of the double bind, to how one breaks
the circle and begins to take action or to write. For the individual, there is an

immediate way out, indeed, immediacy is the way out: "The individual who is
going to act seems, therefore, to find himself in a circle in which each moment
already presupposes the other, and thus he seems unable to find a beginning,
because he only gets to know his original nature, which must be his End

(Zweck), from the deed, while, in order to act, he must have that End b
forehand. But for that very reason he has to start immediately (unmitte
and, whatever the circumstances, without further scruples about beginning,

means (Mittel), or End, proceed to action; for his essence and intrinsic nature
(ansichseiende Natur) is beginning, means, and End, all in one."3 That is, as
Hegel continues, the beginning is provided by the given circumstances (vorgefundene Umstinde) in which the individual finds himself-this is the "in
itself" (an sich) of the individual-the end is the "interest" (Interesse) that the
individual posits (setzt) for himself-this is the "for itself, " das seinige, of the
individual-and the union and sublation of this opposition (die Verknupfung
und Aufhebung dieses Gegensatzes) is the means (Mittel). In short, taking
immediate (unmittelbar) action is the means (Mittel) that mediate between
the individual's circumstances and interest, what it finds and what it posits, in

itself (an sich) and for itself (fur sich), immediacy and mediation. But then what
about the writer? Can he break the circle by beginning to write immediately?
The writer's circumstances, his given in itself, are that he cannot write until he
has written, i.e., that he is not a writer before he has written, but that once he
has written he is no longer writing, i.e., that he is not a writer after he has
written: he is always not yet and always no longer a writer writing. (As Apres
coup puts it: "Du 'ne pas encore' au 'ne plus,' tel serait le parcours de ce qu'on
nomme l'ecrivain . . . ") The writer's interest-the end or goal he posits for
himself-is to be a writer, and this interest cannot be mediated with the
circumstances of his always not yet and always no longer being a writer because the means are lacking. That is, the writer's only means are writing, but
writing is not a means, it does not take place immediately, here and now, but
always in a different place and a deferred time-not yet, no longer, suspended,
interrupted. In short, there is no such thing as beginning to write immediately-writing neither begins nor ends-and hence the writer takes a different
3. G. W. F. Hegel, Phdnomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952), 288. English

translation by A. V. Miller: Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 240.

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ANDRZEJ WARMINSKI 271

way out: he writes (the means) the impossibili

(the interest) a writer: a non-synthesis, a non-ac

if writing "must be recognized as the highest form of work"-as Blanchot's
essay puts it-then its conditions would necessarily be, on the one hand, the
conditions of possibility of all work and, on the other hand, the conditions of
impossibility of all work in that the condition of writing is the unmediatability
of beginnings and ends, circumstances and interest, immediacy and mediation, etc. Hence to substitute the work of the writer for the work of the individual would mean, in the case of the Phenomenology, to replace the order of

presentation (Darstellung) by the order of that which makes the presentation

possible-but which needs to be excluded because it also makes it impossible.
A good example of the way writing functions as an excluded condition of
possibility and impossibility for the work of dialectical mediation is a skit that

dramatizes the critique of the immediacy claimed by the first figure of apparent
knowing in Hegel's Phenomenology: sense-certainty.
The "work" of sense-certainty, what it claims as its truth, is the most
immediate kind of apprehension of Being as "the this" under the double aspect
of the "Now" and the "Here." After asking sense-certainty "what is the now?"
and answering for example "the now is the night," the critique of sense-certainty tests its truth: "To test the truth of this sense-certainty, a simple experiment is sufficient. We write down this truth; a truth can't lose anything by
being written down; much less can it lose anything from our preserving it. If we
look again at this written down truth now, this noon, we shall have to say that
it has become stale."4 Now the critique of sense-certainty's truth hardly requires comment: instead of an immediate, particular now, sense-certainty, as
soon as it says anything, is able to say only a mediated, universal now that is
indifferent to the particularity of night and day. But more interesting for our
purposes here is the work of writing that allows the critique to take place: that
is, in spite of the fact that neither sense-certainty nor we can say an immediate,

particular, self-identical Now (or Here), our critique of that Now depends on
another self-identical Now (and Here), a self-simultaneous moment, in which
we were able to read and compare "Now is the night" and "Now is the day." In
other words, the very critique of sense-certainty's Now and Here requires
another Now-a time of reading-and another Here-a place of writing: it
requires, in short, this piece of paper on which I write this and this.5 But, of
course, this piece of paper on which I write and read this is not the particular
piece of paper sewn into my copy of the Phenomenology and that I can see,
4. Hegel, Phanomenologie, 81, English 60. Some other "exemplary" readings of Hegel: Andrzej
Warminski, "Reading for Example: 'Sense-certainty' in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit," Diacritics (Summer 1981), "Pre-positional By-play," Glyph 3 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1978), and "Reading Parentheses: Hegel by Heidegger," Genre XVI, Number 4 (Winter 1983),
389-403.

5. Our reading of "this piece of paper" crosses that of: Paul de Man, "Hypogram and Insc
tion: Michael Riffaterre's Poetics of Reading," Diacritics (Winter 1981).

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272 Yale French Studies

touch, smell, and taste. It is also not the particular piece of manuscript paper
preserved in the Hegel archives in Bochum on which Hegel wrote "Now is the
day" and "Now is the night" and compared them. To identify it with that piece
of paper would be to fall back into the position of sense-certainty: the Now of
reading and of writing is not one we can see, it can only be written and read.
This does not mean that we are talking about an ideal, universal piece of paper,
as it were. No, this piece of paper on which I write "Now is the day" and "Now
is the night" and read them is the material condition of possibility of the
opposition between particular and universal. It is neither the particular, immediate, phenomenal piece of paper available to the senses nor the universal,
mediated, intelligible piece of paper available to the mind, but other: a piece of
paper that exists in the here and now of writing and reading. It is a piece of paper

conditioned by the materiality (as distinguished from phenomenality) of reading and writing. And the necessary exclusion of this conditioning materiality

from Hegel's construction and critique of sense-certainty's phenomenality is

readable in the text's suppression of the act of reading: when we come back to

sense-certainty now, this noon, with the piece of paper on which we had

written "Now is the night, " we do not read it, says the text, but rather look at

(sehen ... wieder an)-when it is only reading the inscription that will allow
us to compare night and day. This switch from reading to looking-from the
materiality of the text to the phenomenality of the book, from something that
can only be written or read to something that can be the object of a consciousness's knowledge-is a necessary condition of the Phenomenology,

what allows it to begin and end by mediating beginning and end. For in order
begin, Hegel, like the individual, has to begin immediately with the given
circumstances of immediate knowing and the posited end-absolute knowing, the absolute-a standard against which he can measure all too immediate
forms of knowing. But to do so he has to forget the means-writing: the material fact that the Absolute in order to be, i.e., to become, has to have been not

presupposed and posited (nor, as Heidegger would have it, dis-concealed) but
written. In short, in order to begin Hegel has to forget the material fact that he
has already begun in a way he should not have, in a way that makes all beginning (and all ending) impossible: with an inscription of the Absolute, here and
now, i.e., somewhere and sometime else. Without such forgetting the work of
the Phenomenology would become the impossible work of writing-always
not yet and always no longer written. That is, the impossibility of writing the
Phenomenology would become readable: the presentation (Darstellung) of the
Phenomenology is possible, its writing, no; the writing of a text is possible, the
writing of a work (like the Phenomenology), no. The writing of the text takes
place elsewhere in a non-place written by a "Hegel"-in quotation marks-

who could not, did not, write the Phenomenology of Spirit-a Hegel more like
a Nietzsche or a Blanchot. This would be one way to read the non-existence of
the text-the Phenomenology, for example-at bottom. (It would also be one
way of justifying Blanchot's taking different moments of different dialectics

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ANDRZEJ WARMINSKI 273

out of context and rewriting them as though they were on the "same level":
they are on the same level, for his reading takes place on the level of the text,

the space and time not of the dialectical presentation [Darstellung], but the
other space and time of the writing (and reading) of the text.)
If Blanchot's reading of work as writing makes work impossible (and yet is
its condition of possibility), then death read as writing makes death impossible

(and yet is its condition of possibility). It is important to distinguish this death

without death-language, literature, writing, the word, as the "life that en-

dures death and maintains itself in it" (das Leben . .. das ihn ertragt und in
ihm sich erhilt), a phrase that is rewritten several times in "Literature and the
Right to Death"-from the deaths of Hegel. In the "Introduction" to the Phenomenology Hegel himself distinguishes between two deaths: that of natural

life and that of consciousness. What is limited to a natural life (natiirliches

Leben), he says, cannot by itself go beyond its immediate existence, but it is
driven out beyond it by something else, and this something else is its death.

Consciousness, however, is driven out beyond its immediate existence by a

violence it suffers at its own hands: that is, because it is its own concept

(Begriff), because it carries its own standard (of the truth of knowing: the
Absolute) within itself, it is constantly dissatisfied with its immediate existence. In short, consciousness is always also self-consciousness, it carries its
own death within itself. And this necessary condition of consciousness-the

fact that it can and has to make its own death an object of (self-)consciousness-is what distinguishes it from mere "natural life." A cat squashed
by a truck does not die, properly speaking; its "natural life" is, as it were,
extinguished. But unlike the cat, consciousness can die because it can know its
own death, it can represent its own death to itself-indeed, such self -representation is the "truth" of consciousness, i.e., self-consciousness. In other words,
a condition of consciousness is its having to represent its own death to itself,
but such representation is not possible without a subterfuge, as Bataille would
put it: in order to be "we," we have to die while watching ourselves die. We
require a spectacle, theater, sacrifice, a comedy in which we can represent our
own death to ourselves and survive it. But Blanchot recognizes that this comedy of sacrifice-identifying our own death, ourselves, in the extinguishment of

a cat, say-is a linguistic operation, a matter of (impossible) signification

rather than representation, since death is not a something (or a nothing) that
can ever become an object of consciousness's knowing, just as I cannot experience death, I can only name it, impose a sense on it (by catachresis, say), give it

a face, eyes, and a point of view (by prosopopoeia, as Hegel does when he speaks
of looking into the face (Angesicht) of death). In order to bring death into the
world, we (in order to be "we") bring death into the word. And from the point of
view of what Blanchot calls everyday language, the word "death," like all
words, works-by negation: " . . . for a moment everyday language is right, in
that even if the word excludes the existence of what it designates, it still refers
to it through the thing's nonexistence, which has become its essence. To name

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274 Yale French Studies

the cat is, if you like, to make it into a non-cat, a cat that has ceased to exist, has
ceased to be a living cat, but this does not mean one is making it into a dog, or

even a non-dog."6 Death, in the word, works all right, but, what Blanchot calls
literary language, observes that "the word cat is not only the nonexistence of
the cat, but a nonexistence made word, that is, a completely determined and
objective reality." In other words, the word "cat" gives us not only the non-cat,
the cat in his non-existence, but also the word cat, just as the word death gives
us not only a non-death, the negation of death that we can put to work in the
world, but also an other death in its determinate and objective reality-a

linguistic death, the death of the word. And this third, other death-the death
without death-falls completely out of the grasp of a consciousness or a self or
a subject. When I say "I die" I suffer the death of the impossibility of dying: on
the one hand, saying "I die" is the condition of possibility of any "I" whatsoever; on the other hand, "I die" is not anything that can be said by an "I"
since death can have no, is no, subject. At most, I can say "I dies"-in other

words, I can never say my own death, I can only write (or read) it as the deat
an other "I," a linguistic, grammatical subject, someone or something else's. In
short, in order to be an "I," I have to say "I die" while forgetting that I could
never have said it-that in saying it I turn myself into the "I" and say "I dies"while forgetting that I could only have written it and thereby had dispossessed
myself of my "I" and my own death (death as negation) forever. (So: just as
writing was the condition of (im)possibility of the work, so writing is the

condition of (impossibility of death.)

Blanchot's reading of work and death in Hegel as writing is particularly
helpful for a rereading of the famous passage in the Preface of the Phenomeno-

logy quoted repeatedly in "Literature and the Right to Death" and the master/slave dialectic-one place where work and death are explicitly conjoined-to which that passage points. "The life of Spirit," writes Hegel, "is not
the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but
rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it." In the struggle for selfrecognition, it would seem to be the master who looks death in the face, who is

willing to risk death for the sake of recognition, whereas the slave becomes the
slave because he shrinks from death, is not willing to risk his life. But, of
course, the master's "victory" is already his loss, for the death he faces is only
natural death and the life he risks is only "natural life." That is, the master is
willing to give up his life in its immediacy, but because he is willing to give up
this immediacy too immediately, he falls back into an immediate relation to
nature: that is, the slave now satisfies immediately the master's merely appetitive, natural needs, and the master does not have to work to satisfy them, he
does not have to exercise his freedom on nature by appropriating it. It is the
slave who, precisely because he was afraid of natural death, because he was not
6. Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, N.Y.: Stationhill
Press, 1981), 44.

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ANDRZEJ WARMINSKI 275

willing to give up his natural life, it is the slave who looks the death of consciousness in the face: he give his death a name and a face-master death-and
thereby appropriates, masters, death by working nature, putting (natural) death
to work. This is a familiar dialectic. Blanchot's supplementary insight consists
in noting that the slave's very first work-giving voice to his dumb (stumm)

absolute fear of death, naming death as his own negation-brings into the
world still another, third, neuter death, whose excess can never be recovered by

the work of (determinate) negation. It is thanks to this excess of death-death

as written (and read)-that the System works like an invincible impostor.7
YALE UNIVERSITY

7. Blanchot's supplementary insight would require an extensive rereading of the master/slave

dialectic. We have sketched only the barest outline of a beginning here.

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