Date: Sat, 30 Sep 1995 02:37:21 +0100
Subject: MB: Les yeux sans regard des statues...


Unfortunately, I do not have access to this american edition "The Gaze of
Orpheus". It just would not exist in France and "L'espace litteraire" does
have a chapter with this title only its about ten pages long. Hardly enough
to make a book. (Who decided to give that name to the book? What, did they
think "gaze" would make it sound all the more american-academic, hip,
post-structuralist, blah, blah?)

But there is a section that does interest me in L'espace literaire that I
believe is in this "Gaze..." edition and on which I've already posted a
comment. It was on the question of the cadavre. This certainly involves the
"gaze" and is located both at the begining p.28-32 and in the annex on
pages 341-355 (french editions).

It is a difficult text, and certainly one in which the question of the
image vs. text is discussed in a interesting way. For one, we have a
largely textual reading of the image, in which it is the body of a cadavre
lying before us, however neither someone, nor something, and yet neither
not-someone, nor not-something. A quote (I'm sorry - again I have no access
to english texts):

"Quelque chose est la devant nous, qui n'est ni le vivant en personne, ni
une realite quelconque, ni le meme que celui qui etait en vie, ni un autre,
ni autre chose. Ce qui est la, dans le calme absolu de ce qui a trouve son
lieu, ne realise pourtant pas la verite d'etre pleinement ici. La mort
suspend la relation avec le lieu, bien que le mort s'y appuie pesamment
comme a la seule base qui lui reste. Justement, cette base manque, le lieu
est en defaut, le cadavre n'est pas a sa place. Ou est-il? Il n'est pas ici
et pourtant il n'est pas ailleurs; nulle part? mais c'est qu'alors nulle
part est ici. La presence cadaverique etablit un rapport entre ici et nulle
part."

It is this last line that interests me. "The cadaveresque presence
establishes a relation between here and nowhere" - which seems to me to say
much about the novel "L'arret de mort" which is again a relation between
the "arrestation" of death (stopping it up - laying a cadavre there on the
page - keeping death from doing its work) and death sentence. Or
disappearance if you will. This is of course lost in translation but you
all know that. The cadavre however is not. It is itself this (dis)appearing
loss, like the image. Something is there that in its presentation is
disapearing in this Orpheus gaze. All the much more there, then.

The image, then, like the text, would be somehow common in this work of
(dis)appearance. Compare with Thomas' regard in Chapters I and II in Thomas
l'obscur.

But elsewhere, as in L'entretien infini, "Parler ce n'est pas voir". Alors,
what is going on here? Of course Blanchot cannot make the image the same
work of the text, and even in L'espace litteraire he says as much.
=46ascination is not necessarily the absolute solitude of the text. "La
parole et l'erreur sont en familiarité..." and the following page,
"....comme si nous etions detournes du visible, sans etre retournes vers
l'invisible. Je ne sais si ce que je dis la dit quelque chose. Mais c'est
simple cependant. Parler, ce n'est pas voir. Parler libere la pensee de
cette exigence optique qui, dans la tradition occidentale, soumet depuis
des millenaires notre approche des choses et nous invite a penser sous la
garantie de la lumiere ou sous la menace de l'absence de lumiere. Je vous
laisse recenser tous les mots par lesquels il est suggere que, pour vrai
dire, il faut penser selon la mesure de l'oeil." (L'entretien infini,
p.37-8).

But doesn't Blanchot himself liberate this optical tradition that wants to
see everything either in the pure light of reason (idea as pure presence)
or to see error (and la parole) as simply the absence of light (and hence
just another thing to be seen - seen as what is not-there: the invisible
again as presence, just missing).
Such a liberation - a liberation of the error, the neither to-be-seen, nor
invisible - would be his comment on the cadavre. Non? Hence an image,
albeit a particular one.

But again he writes: "Ecrire, ce n'est pas donner la parole a voir....et
voir, c'est se servir de la separation, non pas comme mediatrice, mais
comme un moyen d'immediation, comme im-mediatrice. En ce sens aussi, voir,
c'est faire l'experience du continu, et celebrer le soleil, c'est-a-dire
par-dela le soleil: l'Un." (EI, p.39) Here Blanchot sounds like Lacan,
whereas with the cadavre he's doing something more interesting. Here "voir"
is a maintenance of the "interdit": it gives us something to see precisely
at the moment when there is a distance to be both covered and held from us.
This distancing (the english word is good here) is therefore not the same
thing as the parole-debordante.

Again, in this chapter, we have something like the cadavre. Only here its
the fascination of the dream: "Voir dans le reve, c'est etre fascine, et la
fascination se produit, lorsque, loin de saisir a distance, nous sommes
saisis par la distance, investis par elle. Dans la vue, non seulement nous
touchons la chose grace a un intervalle qui nous en desencombre, mais nous
la touchons sans etre encombres de cet intervalle. Dans la fascination,
nous sommes peut-etre deja hors du visible-invisible." (EI, p.41)

So there seems to be an opposition going on here. Fascination of the
cadavre and the dream (that depasses the invisible-visible opposition)
opposed to "voir" as "vue d'ensemble" or the immediate siezure at a (or of)
distance ("Voir, c'est donc saisir immediatement a distance"). Is this
opposition my own? Or Blanchot's? And couldn't writing itself be placed on
the side of fascination when Blanchot writes: "Je me demande si Heraclite,
lorsqu'il dit de la parole sacree qu'elle 'n'expose ni ne cache, mais
indique', ne dit pas quelque chose la-dessus. Ne pourrait-on lui preter
l'idee que vous voudriez presenter : qu'il y a un langage ou les choses ne
se montrent ni ne se cachent?" (EI, p.44)

I've been racking my brain over this and had given it up for a while, only
I saw that recently some people have been interested in reading "The Gaze
of Orpheus", and I've seen here and there that the comments on the cadavre
printed above are reprinted in this same text.

Well, it was an attempt. You know, I just cannot stand to talk about what
to talk about as everyone seems to be doing. It is to me the worst disease
of all and the day I left America it seemed to disappear like rats from a
sinking ship. Please, whether "voir" be our subject or not, let us drown
ourselves in thought, not stand above the abyss looking at what route we
could take down....


Douglas Edric
Paris. late, 1995.

"C'est qu'il y a peut-etre une invisibilite qui est encore une maniere de
se laisser voir, et une autre qui se detourne de tout visible et de tout
invisible." (EI, p.43)

Sorry for all the french, I am too timid to translate and have no english
editions. Then again, why should English be the forced language of
Internet?