January 28, 2005

Blanchot: limit-experience & being Jewish

The 2nd part of Blanchot's book, Infinite Conversations, is called 'The Limit-Experience' I have little idea what this means. Nor is there an introduction to this section. It is just a title for a collection of essays. A naive reader like myself comes into this text cold. Within this part of the book there is subsection entitled 'The Indestructible', which starts with an essay called 'Being Jewish' and ends with one called 'Humankind.'

I connect. It is the anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz. People at the UN are saying never again:

Auschwitiz1.jpg

Given this response at public opinion, and this kind of writing about the long shadow cast by Auschwitz by Julie Szego about the Jewish experience in Australia, I decided to read the essay. This essay might be one way to connect Blanchot to concerns in the Australian grain.

I thought that it might also be pathway into Blanchot's literary space that is the locus of an anonymous, unmasterable, unspeakable experience. I suspect that this space is marked by death. Presumably death is a limit or a boundary, and the beyond of the limit of death is nothingness. This is the outside of language, writing and writing human experience.

If this is so, then writing becomes a problematic activity. If the writer uses words connected to the world, then cannot express an unspeakable experience. That would be outside the limit of human experience and writring it would be an impossible goal.

I'm going to put that poetics stuff to one side, as I am more interested in limit-experience as an attempt to reach the other, the outside. Auschwitz would be a classic example of a limit experience would it not? Do we not confront the capacity of writing to represent the experience of the holocaust here and come up against the limits of literature?

So what does Blanchot say in the 'Indestructible' essay ?

The 'Indestructible' essay is about 'being Jewish.' It starts off thus:

"The Jew is uneasiness and affliction. This must be clearly said even if this assertion, in its indiscreeet sobriety, is itself unfortunate. The Jew has throughout time been the oppressed and the accused. Every society, and in particular Christian society, has its Jew in order to affirm itself against him through relations of general oppression .... Being Jewish would be then ... essentially a negative condition; to be Jewish would be to be from the outset deprived of the principle possibilities of living...."

Blanchot then asks:
"Still, is Jewish existence only this? Is it simply a lack? Is it simply the difficulty of living that is imposed unpon a certain category of men by the hateful passion of other men? Is there not in Judaism a truth that is not only present in a rich cultural heritage, but also in living and important for the thought of today--even if this thought challenges every religious principle?"

Good question.It is mostly seen as a lack in a Zionist discourse with Israel as the solution. Julie Szego says:
"If the Jewish community appears sometimes overly protective of Israel, it is because the collective carries the same baggage that I carry as an individual. It is a bundle of shameful, primal fears - the whispering voice that says: "You cannot protect your own children." In Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, you stand in a dark room of tiny lights, like stars in the night and listen to the endless names of children who perished in the Holocaust. It gives expression to an infinite, devastating grief that I feel in my darkest moments when those names merge with mine, with my sister's children and now with that of my own baby daughter."

Julie's hopes lie with being comfortable in Australia are with her baby Is that being Jewish in a positve sense? If Blanchot appears to be opening the issue of being Jewish up, then what does he say?

Suprisingly, Blanchot says that the positive aspect of the Jewish experience --being Jewish---is that:

"...the idea of exodus and the idea of exile can exist as a legitimate movement; it exists, through exile and through the initiative that is exodus, so that the expereince of strangeness may affirm itself close to hand as an irreducible relation; it exists so that, by the authority of this experience, we might learn to speak."

Being Jewish affirms uprooting, the affirmation of nomadic truth, exodus, the exile. For Blanchot being Jewish is being destined to to dispersion, to a sojourn without place, to a setting out on the road, a state of wandering, and not being bound to the determination of place.

Maybe. Is that not a very European perspective. One rooted in the 20th century.

What about being Jewish today in the Australian diaspora? Are not Australian Jews comfortable living in Australia and have little desire to uproot themselves to go wandering and live in Israel? They are comfortable in Australia, settled in a place, rather than being in exile or in a state of wandering. Australia is home and a comfortable at that.

Why go wandering? Re read Julie Szego's Auschwitz's long shadow.

That is about all I can connect to in Blanchot's essay. There are several pages on Jewish religion and reading the meaning of the history of the Jews through Judaism that pass me by. Things look up in the next section called 'Humankind', where Blanchot considers being Jewish in terms of life in a Nazi concentration camps described by Robert Antelme,

Is this the best example of being Jewish? The only one?

Blanchot says:

"The man of the camps is as close as he can be to powerlessness.All human power is outside him, as are existence in the first person, individual sovereignty, and the speech that says'I'.. And yet this force that is capable of everything has alimit; and he who literally can no longer do anything still affirms himself as the limit where possibility ceases: in the poverty, the simplicity of a presence that is the infinte of human presence."

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at January 28, 2005 05:05 PM | TrackBack
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