Maurice Blanchot on the Origin of Literature and the Problem of Finitude

Despite being rather a less known, even mysterious character in his time, Maurice Blanchot, French philosopher and literary man, became famous due to his writings in the second half of the 20th century, particularly among those who were engaged in Post Structuralism as well as literary critiques and theorists. What is most remarkable and distinctive about Blanchot’s works is his fragmentary approach towards philosophy and literature which results not in the establishment of a literary theory or a philosophical system, but rather in an anti-theory or a non-systematic attitude to these realms. Thus, through injecting a feature of indeterminacy and incompleteness in the bodies of theories and systems, he pushes literary and philosophical works toward their unstable margins which will paradoxically reveal their true potentials in a new manner. Blanchot tries to show that literature is obscure through and through, indicating that it will not be easily submitted to definition or interpretation, and that the more we get close to literature, the more it withdraws to its abysmal origin. Therefore, the questions concerning the nature of literature, are necessarily failed, since the only concern of literature is literature itself. Among the various aspects of Blanchot’s thought, one can recognize the uncanny relation that he suggests between the origin of literature and the problem of finitude. Blanchot’s formulation of the meaning of death and finitude, is a strange one, regarding what he considers as the impossibility of death and also a metaphorical notion about day and night and their relation to literature and the existence. Also, Drawing on Hegel’s ideas about language as the subject’s power and possibility, he considers a radical difference between the normal language and the language of literature and poetry, as the former is linked to the concepts and ideas at the expense of annihilation of the thing itself, and the latter, which is more concerned with the thing which was there before the annihilating work of language. This leads to two surfaces, or as he calls it “slopes” of literature concerning its relation with language, which according to Blanchot, both are in a continuous slide from one to another. In the first slope, literature tries to remain in the realm of communication and clear meaning, and in the second, it seeks to find the absence of the thing which is disappeared by language to be replaced with its concept. However, literature, being necessarily lingual, fails to explore the depths of the absence caused by language, or to put in another way, it fails to find the realm of pre-language, which is ruled by death. Now, by discussing Blanchot’s ideas about the indefinability of literature, the origin of literature and also the question of death, the present article seeks to discuss the relation between the origin of literature and the problem of finitude. As we shall see, Blanchot’s viewpoint regarding finitude and nihilism could be considered as what constitutes the secret of literature’s opacity and its origin. Literature, in the pure quest of its origin, attains a vertiginous knowledge which is the affirmation of finitude, which paradoxically indicates a strange happy moment of infinity.