Date: Tue, 14 Mar 1995 01:06:26 -0700
Subject: MB: "Berlin"


Maurice Blanchot "Berlin." MLN. April 1994, v109, n3, p345(11)

Editor's Note: Maurice Blanchot's "Berlin" first appeared in an Italian
translation by Guido Neri under the title "Il nome Berlino," printed in il
menabo 7 (1964), 121-25. Based on the Italian version, Semiotext(e)
published an English translation by James Cascaito in its German Issue, 2
(1982), 60-65, entitled "The Word Berlin." When the Merve Verlag in Berlin
undertook to publish the French original together with a German
translation, the French text--still unpublished--could not be retrieved.
With the permission of the author, Helene Jelen and Jean-Luc Nancy
translated the text into French, using the Italian version. It was
published as "Le Nom de Berlin" in a 1983 bilingual edition of 500 copies
hors commerce. Since then, the French version has been reprinted in Cafe 3
(1983), 43-6; Berlin, collection Liberation, 4 (1989); and Po&sie 52
(1990), 6-8. For this re-publication of the French translation, only the
title has been modified--in accordance with the indication, contained in an
editorial note in il menabo, that the original title of the text was
"Berlin."

While Blanchot's essay was written thirty years ago, addressing political,
socio-economic, and linguistic realities which have since changed, it has
lost none of its relevance. For this issue devoted to topographies, we are
publishing the text in four different languages, offering the suggestion
that the problems addressed neither are a matter of the past, nor pertain
only to what is invoked in the name of "Berlin."

* * * * *

For everyone, Berlin is the problem of division. From one point of view,
this is strictly a political problem, for which--we must not
forget--strictly political solutions exist. From another point of view, it
is a social as well as an economic problem (and therefore political, but in
a larger sense): in Berlin, two systems, two socio-economic structures,
confront each other. From still another point of view, it is a metaphysical
problem: Berlin is not only Berlin, but also the symbol of the division of
the world, and even more: a "point in the universe," the place where
reflection on the both necessary and impossible unity imposes itself on
each and every one who lives there, and who, while living there, has not
only the experience of a domicile, but also that of the absence of a
domicile. This is not all. Berlin is not only a symbol, but a real city in
which human dramas unknown to other big cities are performed: here,
division is a name for tearing apart. This is not all. Berlin presents, in
unusual terms, the problem of opposition between two cultures within the
same cultural context, of two languages without inner relation inside the
same language, and thus challenges the assumption of intellectual security
and the possibility of communication normally granted to those who live
together by virtue of sharing the same language and historical past. This
is not all.

To treat or question the problem of Berlin as a problem of division, it is
not enough to enumerate, however completely, the different forms in which
they are given to us to comprehend. Concerning the problem of division, we
must say that Berlin is an indivisible problem. At the point at which we
isolate provisionally--if only for clarity of exposition--this or that
particular given of the situation "Berlin," we run the risk of falsifying
not only the question in its entirety, but also this particular given which
it is nonetheless impossible to grasp without considering it by itself.

The problem of division--of fracture--which Berlin poses not only to the
Berliners, not even to Germans only, but, I believe, to all thinking human
beings--and in a compelling, I would say painful, way-- is a problem that
we cannot formulate adequately in its complete reality if we do not decide
to formulate it fragmentarily (which, however, does not imply partially).
In other words, each time we happen to be confronted with a problem of this
nature (after all, there are other such problems), we must remember that to
speak of it in a just way entails speaking of it in such a way that the
profound gap existing in our words and in our thought also be permitted to
speak, in order to articulate the impossibility in which we find ourselves
when we speak in terms that strive to be definitive. This implies: 1. that
omniscience, if it were possible, is of no use in this case: the essence of
this situation would elude even a God alleged to know all; 2. that in
general it is not possible to dominate, survey, or encompass in one sweep
the problem of division, and that--in this as in other cases--the panoramic
vision is not the correct one; 3. that the deliberate choice of the
fragment is not a skeptical retreat, the lazy renouncement of a complete
synthesis (though it could be the case), but a patient-impatient,
mobile-immobile method of searching, and the affirmation--furthermore--that
meaning, the entirety of meaning, is not to be found immediately either in
ourselves or in what we write, but that meaning is still to come, and that,
by examining the sense, we consider it a pure becoming and a pure future of
questioning; 4. this implies, to conclude, that we must repeat ourselves.
Each fragmentary speaking, each fragmentary reflection, requires repetition
and infinite plurality.

I would like to add two (fragmentary) observations. The enforced political
abstraction which Berlin represents found its most acute expression the day
the wall was erected, which is nonetheless something dramatically concrete.
Until August 13, 1961, the absence of a visible sign of separation--well
before this day a series of regular and irregular controls had already
prompted premonitions of the enigmatic advance of a line of
demarcation--gave the partitioning an ambiguous character and
signification: what was it? A border? Certainly: but it was also something
else; something less than a border, since large numbers of people cross it
every day, avoiding the controls; but also, something else in addition,
because the fact of crossing did not signify the passage from one country
to another, from one language to another, but the passage within the same
country and the same language, from "truth" to "error," from "evil" to
"good," from "life" to "death," and it implied being subjected, almost
without knowing, to a radical metamorphosis (but in order to determine
where this "evil" and "good" were properly located--as brutally opposed as
they are--one could only rely on a partial reflection). The almost
instantaneous construction of the wall substituted for the still indecisive
ambiguity the violence of a decisive separation. Outside of Germany people
became aware of, in a manner more or less intense, more or less
superficial, the dramatic changes this event announced, not only in
relations between fellow human beings, but also in the economic and
political domains. Yet one problem, I believe, passed unnoticed (perhaps
even in the eyes of many Germans): the fact that the reality of this wall
was destined to throw into abstraction the unity of a big city full of
life, a city that was not and is not, in reality--its profound reality
consists precisely in this--a single city, not two cities, not the capital
of a country, not any important city, not the center, nothing but this
absent center. In this way, the wall succeeded in concretizing abstractly
the division, to render it visible and tangible, and thus to force us to
think henceforth of Berlin, in the very unity of its name, no longer under
the sign of a lost unity, but as this sociological reality constituted by
two absolutely different cities.(*) The wall's "scandal" and importance
consists of being, in the concrete oppression it represents, essentially
abstract, and it thus recalls what we continually forget: that abstraction
is neither simply an inexact manner of thinking nor a manifestly
impoverished form of language, but that abstraction is our world, the world
in which we live and think, day after day.

Meanwhile, we have at our disposal a considerable quantity of writings on
the situation of Berlin. I am struck by the fact that among all these
texts, two novels offer, at least to non-Germans, the best approach to the
situation, two novels which are neither political nor realist. I do not
attribute their merit only to the talent of Uwe Johnson, but also to the
truth of literature. The difficulty itself and, to put it more succinctly,
the impossibility of the author to write such books in which the division
is put into play (and thus the necessity, for him, to reassess this
impossibility of writing as well as in what is written)--this is what
brings the literary operation into accord with the singularity of "Berlin,"
precisely by this hiatus it had to leave open with an obscure and never
relaxed rigor between reality and the literary grasping of its sense.
Perhaps the impatient reader or critic will say that, in works of this
genre, the relationship toward the world and toward the responsibility of a
political decision concerning it remains distant and indirect. Indirect,
yes. But one must ask precisely if, in order to accede to the "world" by
way of speech and, above all else, by writing, an indirect route would not
be the correct one, and moreover the shortest.

Translated from the Italian translation and its French retranslation by
Aris Fioretos

* The wall pretended to substitute the sociological truth of one situation,
its factual state, with a deeper truth, one which could be called--but only
by simplifying considerably--the dialectics of this situation.