Revolutionary action. Has the same demand for purity, and the certainty that everything it does has absolute value, that it is not just any action performed to bring about some desirable and respectable goal, but that it is itself the ultimate goal, the Last Act. This last act is freedom, and the only choice left is between freedom and nothing. This is why, at that point, the only tolerable slogan is Freedom or Death. Thus the Reign of Terror comes into being. Blanchot describes a literary terror that arrives like a messianic wind blowing through language, sweeping away the accumulated detritus that masks the things of the world. This was an implicit critique of the similar messianic wind augured by the CNE, which swept writers into exile and banned their works in order to form its utopia.
Blanchot appropriated the demand for purity and the spirit of terror from the CNE, but he did so in order to reconstitute literature as an inherently revolutionary entity, prior to the writer's political commitments. At this point, however, Blanchot went beyond analogy: in the same way that terror forces the people to submit to a law that carries the implication, even the necessity, of death in order that they might experience life in its plenitude, writing nurtures this death in order to give birth to a renewed relationship among things in and through language. Blanchot makes the point through an example: 'For me to be able to say, 'This woman,' I must somehow take her flesh-and-blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being.' Of course, Blanchot quickly admits that the woman does not really die, but insofar as the relations among people are conducted through language, insofar as people communicate with each other, the possibility of a linguistic death that might alter these relations remains.
Maurice blanchot the gaze of orpheus language negation nothingness phenomenology speech act speech act theory lack. Buy The Gaze of Orpheus by Maurice Blanchot, P. Adams Sitney (ISBN: 385) from Amazon's Book Store. The Gaze of Orpheus (Maurice Blanchot) The split in the Orpheic world is predetermined: there is light and there is darkness; life (above) and death (below). 'The power that causes the night to open', the force that enables Orpheus to cross the boundaries of light and life, and to descend to Eurydice, according to Blanchot, is that of art.
Blanchot goes out of his way to specify 'this woman' as opposed to the universal category Woman. In order for this specific woman to be communicable, her flesh-and-blood reality must be, as Blanchot puts it, 'annihilated.' That is, for the locution 'this woman' to be intelligible to anyone not in the woman's immediate presence, one must accept the violent detachment of the woman's body from the words 'this woman.' This is an important idea in the history of French thought, but the figure of the death of the body employed here also makes it an important moment in the history of the writers' war. Again, there was an implicit critique of the CNE and the purge in Blanchot's emphasis on the body that recalls the example of Robert Brasillach.
'This woman' did not refer to a real woman alive in France in 1947. It was, rather, a reference to Sartre's feminized image of Brasillach as an intellectual collaborator. In the same way that the death visited through language upon 'this woman' acts on her flesh-and-blood reality, Brasillach's trial and execution was not least a punitive action upon a reprobate body. By Sartre's logic, which was the logic of the public shaving, it was Brasillach's body that was brought within the law, and it was the law that possessed his body's death by deciding when, how, and why he would die. Blanchot's critique is that 'this woman' refers precisely to the impossibility of executing her.
When one says 'this woman' one causes the death of the woman's flesh and blood, but one has nothing; one relinquishes possession of the woman's death. 'This woman' is given, but Blanchot adds the important caveat that she is given 'deprived of being.' Her death belongs neither to her nor to the speaker; it is cast, rather, into the oblivion of language, where the writer merely functions as its vessel. Blanchot makes the point explicitly when he says. It is accurate to say that when I speak, death speaks in me. My speech is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in the world, that it has suddenly appeared between me, as I speak, and the being I address: it is there between us as the distance that separates us, but this distance is also what prevents us from being separated, because it contains the condition for all understanding.
Language is neutral, and the death that it brings dissolves rather than enables possession. The writer is no more able to wield the violence of words than things are able to defend themselves. Execution and terror differ at precisely this point: in Blanchot's rendition, the people submit to terror because it emanates directly from them, while execution is the law's assertion of dominion over its subjects.
The latter is the very opposite of revolution since there is no change and no possibility, only the reiteration of sovereignty. Just as he argued against a law that retains the power of execution, Blanchot also argued that the death contained in language is the foundation of communication and, by extension,of community. In Blanchot's revolution there is a kind of literary or linguistic terror, in which things are killed through language and subsequently reborn into a renewed existence in language, although never possessed by language. The author has the power to 'create a world without slaves, a world in which the slaves become the masters and formulate a new law.' This is a real revolutionary power of change, as opposed to a law that only seeks to possess its delinquents. In arguing that real revolutionary terror exists in language and not in the law, Blanchot wrested the power of execution away from law, figuratively disarming the law of the purge's righteous violence and rearticulating the power of revolutionary change as literary or linguistic violence.
In Writing Degree Zero Barthes paid homage to Blanchot's analogy between writing and the Reign of Terror. Already in 1953, however, Barthes transmuted Blanchot's idea into the death of the author by analyzing revolutionary writers who were victims of the Terror. Faced with their own deaths, writers produced a new kind of 'revolutionary writing that was the one and only grand gesture commensurate with the daily presence of the guillotine.' Terror culminated in this new literature that consistently and grandiloquently spoke the death of the author. Like Blanchot, Barthes concluded that language has the power to reorganize communities, not through bringing death into the world but by virtue of the author's own death. 'Revolutionary writing,' Barthes suggests, 'was so to speak the entelechy of the revolutionary legend: it struck fear into men's hearts and imposed upon them a citizen's sacrament of Bloodshed.' Jumping ahead fifteen years in the history of this idea, one sees the recurrence of language as a neutral space and of the right to death in Barthes' 'Death of the Author' of 1968.
But in Barthes' figuration there are two important differences. The first is that now death affects only the author. As with Blanchot's death in language, Barthes' death of the author operates on the author's body but only from the perspective of the reader. At the beginning of his essay Barthes writes. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing. As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins. The emphasis on the identity of the body strikingly echoes Blanchot's earlier formulation, but it is also noticeably different.
Here it is the reader who imposes the death of the author by approaching the text without recourse to the author as an explanation, allowing the reader to interpret what the author has written free from speculation about how the author's personal psychology or biography influenced the text's meaning. Communication occurs when the reader is free to receive words without the constraint of the author's posthumous control, as though their creator were trying to possess them long after they were written. This is where the second important difference from Blanchot occurs.
In specifying the death of the author, Barthes raises the register of language's power for change. Where Blanchot isolates a law that possesses the death of its subjects through execution and sabotages it by displacing its sovereignty into language, Barthes substitutes an author who would possess his creations long after he has created them.
Consequently, Barthes' death of the author does not challenge the particular sovereign law so much as it challenges the law of sovereignty generally by refusing to allow it even to exist. Barthes writes that.
Multiple Points of View Examples:. Holbein's 'The Ambassadors'. Stan Douglas - 'The Sandman' (The moving subject). Campus/ Three Transitions. Zbig Rybzinski. Guy Vardi's project Orpheus' Gaze and Lacan's Map.
The Gaze of Orpheus (Maurice Blanchot) The split in the Orpheic world is predetermined: there is light and there is darkness; life (above) and death (below). 'The power that causes the night to open', the force that enables Orpheus to cross the boundaries of light and life, and to descend to Eurydice, according to Blanchot, is that of art. And yet, he continues, Orpheus has gone down to Eurydice: for him Eurydice is the limit of what art can attain; concealed behind a name and covered by a veil, she is the profoundly dark point towards which art, desire, death, and the night all seem to lead. She is the instant in which the essence of the night approaches as the Other night.
(p.99) Rendering this dark point, the lure, the point in which the artist's control is undermined, is also the object of the work of art: Orpheus' work does not consist of securing the approach of this 'point' by descending into the depth. His work is to bring it back into the daylight and in the daylight give it form, figure and reality. Orpheus can do anything except look this 'point' in the face, look at the center of the night in the night. (p.99) The superimposed triangles depicted by Lacan in his article on the gaze figure the path undertaken by Orpheus, as well as the evasion, at each end, of the object of (artistic) desire: (figure 1) Rather than obtained, the object of desire is always displaced.
Drawn from darkness to light, its absence or invisibility is re-articulated as a gap, a notion of loss, a signifier, within the frame of language, within a poem of lament.