The Writing of the Disaster by Maurice Blanchot

The Writing of the Disaster Reviews

• 
  Fergus, Quondam Happy Face

  WHAT BETTER REFUGE AFTER A LONG THOUGHT
  THAN A DEEP MEDITATION ON THE CALM OF THE GODS?
  Paul Valéry, La Cimetière Marin
  
  For Blanchot, the Disaster was the wartime Nazi Occupation of France, and the brute shell shock and trauma of their ugly treatment of this young impressionable kid! And he fell hard and deep into despair.
  
  We ALL live out the Disaster, in greater or lesser intensity. Our diversions divert us, but the Disaster always comes back sooner or later. WWII made it Real Bad for Blanchot, as our current news does for us.
  
  Yes, it was Brutal, as is our own Disaster now. But look what brave new worlds it ushers in, what stark standalone pinnacles of thought... And one thing he teaches us is simple resignation.
  
  What is happiness? A fleeting thing. But, as long as we cling to it, it will invariably morph into its opposite - anxious unhappiness.
  
  Being is fluidly immutable, and those who experience it, as did Blanchot during the years of the War, may “miss its meaning.” Blanchot did, when he saw it as an evil threat, during the War. And now it remains - as the Disaster - in the past, throbbing like a sore tooth.
  
  He advises that an "infinite patience" is the only cure. It brings equanimity.
  
  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel once quipped, "The Owl of Minerva flies in the darkest night." But Hegel's Minerva, goddess of wisdom, was not a prize to be wooed and won by mere quips, and he knew it.
  
  No - for the great philosopher thought that to wed her one must first grapple in hand-to-hand combat with Pluto, god of the Underworld - similarly godlike and no easy match for us mortals.
  
  Maurice Blanchot was one who, like Hegel, entered the lists of mortal battle with this Mother Night - which he termed The Disaster. But sotto voce - abstractly.
  
  However we may see it, and not as an act of violent terrorism on the news, no matter what the editor of this edition says - but more like the Fall of Man, grim empty Nothingness, or the sudden foreshadowing of our Death by a viral infection, any of which is most likely to visit our sleeping minds in the wee small hours of the morning - it can be unnerving!
  
  It often appears in key moments of our lives, immovable and unconquerable.
  
  Blanchot considers it totally intractable - to be wrestled to the death by patience. It is a propitious augury, in fact. It brings peace.
  
  In this book he considers stretching the line of an evidently symbolic circle flat out on a horizontal plane... The ‘FLATTENING-OUT’ of meaning into meaninglessness, amid the often-circular patterns of our thoughts, in this Dark Night of his.
  
  Blanchot cherishes meaninglessness, wakefulness, insomnia, for these symptoms may have ‘secrets’ to tell.
  
  Matthew Arnold once saw the ideal writer as one who "sees life steadily and sees it whole."
  
  Not Blanchot.
  
  He sees life as a million jagged, broken fragments of a mirror. No problem for him.
  
  But doesn’t he heed the ancient warnings against his Promethean challenge?
  
  No - for that is his Disaster. And it is in the Past. He has had his dark night of the soul.
  
  The knights who sought the Holy Grail had finally to spend a night - the ultimate test before victory - in the brooding, haunted Chapel Perilous....
  
  Or, as in his Memories, Dreams and Reflections Carl Jung shows that the final gruelling ordeal we must face in order to become whole is to face our own dark inner Shadow...
  
  A Herculean task!
  
  But Blanchot had long since leapt into the very depths of old King Minos' funereal Labyrinth, sword unsheathed, ready to slay the dastardly Minotaur.
  
  Did he succeed?
  
  Once we enter the subterranean world of Blanchot, NOTHING is certain. You will walk in the fog.
  
  Maybe, just maybe, the Minotaur is only an illusion, a projection of our own deepest fears, or a shadow the world is perversely throwing at us, to use Billy Joel’s old metaphor.
  
  Maybe, with adamantine faith, we can indeed arrive some day at the end of our quest, and find our hidden Grail - and, ultimately peace.
  
  And maybe, just maybe, it won’t be quite what we expected.
  ***
  
  And what if we arrive in the next life wide awake - arriving in an old, sealed room into which the dawn is finally breaking, revealing the monsters we thought we saw in our darkest hours - now a mere dusty collection of useless museum artificacts?
  
  Bugaboos, whose only questionable purpose is to scare a poor, lost child?
  
  For maybe:
  
  At the source of the longest river
  The voice of the hidden waterfall
  And the children in the apple-tree
  Not known, because not looked for
  But heard, half-heard in the stillness
  Between two waves of the sea.
  
  And there, I think all our dreams will find their Source.
  
  So be Tough. Be Patient. Make FRIENDS with your Disaster -
  
  And our Nightmares of this Omnipresent Disaster will Cease.
  
  Perpetually.
• 
  Tahani Shihab

  
  المترجم خصّص ما يقرب من 47 صفحة كمقدمة وشرح للكتاب. لا أعلم هل الترجمة صحيحة أم أن المترجم أخفق في إيصال المعنى الصحيح للكتاب.
  
  كتاب أصابني بالفاجعة لأنني لم أفهم شيئًا من الشذرات!
  
• 
  Jonfaith

  Do not forgive. Forgiveness accuses before it forgives. By accusing, by stating the injury, it makes the wrong irredeemable. It carries the blow all the way to culpability. Thus, all becomes irrepairable; giving and forgiving cease to be possible.
  
  I found this collection an errant scattering of rather profound poetry. It may also be a sustained meditation on disaster, writing and loss, but I was unable to locate any connective tissue.
  
  I read this on a lovely spring day, most of such in an IKEA parking lot. It was wonderful to read a few lines and then ponder the resonance while gazing upon the blue sky. Blanchot appears intrigued by certain stances of Nietzsche and Celan. This interest is manifested in a half dozen lines.
• 
  Abdulaziz

  [—silence—]
• 
  Mike Thorn

  "The isolated, aphoristic sentence is attractive because it affirms definitively, as if nothing besides this sentence spoke anymore in its vicinity. The allusive sentence, also isolated—speaking, not speaking (effacing what it says at the same time that it speaks)—makes ambiguity a positive value."
  
  In a book of fragments, the passage above clarifies how Blanchot's formal approach articulates his philosophy. Blanchot explicitly interrogates the notion of monotheistic ontology—of "One God"—questioning if "[w]hen we feel the need to think coherently, or when we are ill at ease because we cannot unify our knowledge, is it only because of the ordinary standard of unity, or is it not rather on account of a forgotten reverence for the One without any referent, which we sense unmistakably every time we encounter translations of it—ethical or not—such as the Superego, or even the transcendental 'I'?"
  
  Blanchot's project, then, is a process of undoing, much like the elusive, illusive (and occasionally allusive) concept of its titular "disaster." Navigating the cryptic landscape of these pages over a series of days felt much like visiting and revisiting a highly trafficked pawn shop—sometimes I found nothing, sometimes I was bemused but intrigued, and on the rare occasion I came across one or more strikingly resonant aphorisms. Blanchot would probably loathe this utility-based analogy, but so it goes.
  
  I'm much less convinced of postmodernism's value and import than I used to be—as a political project, as a project of thought, it has been more or less as disastrous as pre-modernity and modernity—but for what it's worth, Blanchot's philosophical M.O. is foundational for French post-structuralism. Mixed feelings. Essential (?) reading.
• 
  Sajid

  “From the moment when the imminent silence of the immemorial disaster caused him, anonymous and bereft of self, to become lost in the other night where, precisely, oppressive night (the empty, the ever dispersed and fragmented, the foreign night) separated him and separated him so that the relation with the other night besieged him with its absence, its infinite distantness—from that moment on, the passion of patience, the passivity of a time without present (absent time, time’s absence), had to be his sole identity, circumscribed by a temporary singularity.”
  
  Blanchot's journey into the word-web night begins with Levinas's thoughts on the other. He scratches the surface,then he swoops down to the ontological hollowness where being is bereft of its words. Time,memory,being—nothing can give foundation to the disaster. Because it is always already coming, or it has always already come. It has come by not coming. It never happened. And that's how it is disastrous.
  
  Blanchot delves into the paradoxical nature of attempting to articulate the unimaginable and the unspeakable, grappling with the limitations of language in the face of profound suffering and destruction. Blanchot invites us to confront the aporia of representation, the impossibility of adequately capturing the full weight and meaning of disaster in words. In doing so, he challenges conventional notions of communication and reveals the inherent gaps and silences that define our attempts to understand and convey the world around us.
• 
  Alex Obrigewitsch

  "Language, perpetuating itself, keeps still."
• 
  Veronica

  Hard, but worth the effort
• 
  Azarin

  Breathtaking prose, intelligent writing, one of the best philosophical texts I've ever read. I have also read his work in French and I have to say that the English translation never reaches the beauty and the depth of the oroginal prose. The poetry of Blanchot's prose is lost in translation but the poetry of his thoughts seems to have survived the shock of this transforamation. This book is about writing the disaster but also about the agony of writing.
  
• 
  Aya Mohammed

  "أتكون غاية الكتابة أن يقرأها الجميع في الكتاب، وتظل مستغلقة على نفسها؟ (ألم يقل لنا جابس ذلك تقريبًا؟)"
  
  شذرات كثُر تشبه هذا الاقتباس، حالت دون فهمي للمغزى، في البداية غرقت مع بلانشو في كثافة صياغته، إنه بلا شك يجيد كتابة الشذرة، وربما هذا ما أغراه بتكرار فكرة كتبها سابقًا أكثر من مرة، وبصيغة مختلفة.
• 
  Daniel Rosa Hunter

  “Calma, cada vez más calma, la calma indeseable”.
• 
  michal k-c

  if someone ever asked me, “which theorist wrote the most books that have titles that could also be the title of noise metal albums”, i would say Blanchot without hesitating. “Writing of the Disaster”, “Death Now”, “Awaiting Oblivion”, etc. marvellous stuff. anyway great book for the covid era especially if you’re irritated with people who say things like “ugh can’t believe the downfall of civ. is happening during my 20s!”. if you encounter someone like this just smile sagely and remind them that the disaster forcloses the arrival of a future in which to speak of catastrophe
• 
  Katrinka

  I couldn't even begin to rate this, unsure as I am that I even understood it. But thrilling all the same.
• 
  Ellie

  3.5 insightful book of bullet points
• 
  G

  Un libro extraordinario y enigmático. La Escritura del Desastre es una obra deslumbrante que pareciera desarrollar un género propio: la escritura fragmentada. Entre el aforismo y el ensayo, Blanchot reflexiona sobre el lenguaje. El resultado de esta reflexión es la destrucción del lenguaje. Sin embargo, el lenguaje también resulta restituido. Una y otra vez, en cada frase el lenguaje es desarmado y rearmado. Entretanto Blanchot dialoga -en conversaciones sin palabras, diría Blanchot- con Hegel, Nietzsche, Sade, Hoelderlin, Schelling, Heidegger, Levinas y Kafka, entre otros. Opino que este libro es tan lúcido como extremo: Blanchot promueve una forma personal de entender las fisuras, las contradicciones, las insuficiencias insalvables del lenguaje. Se podría sugerir que el corolario es una especie de silencio místico al modo de Wittgenstein en la última frase del Tractatus. También se podría sugerir que el método de Blanchot es la dialéctica aplicada a la reflexión sobre el lenguaje y a la crítica literaria. Ambas sugerencias son falsas en mi opinión. Blanchot admira el silencio, pero un silencio que puede mutar en palabra sin que ello implique degradación. En este aspecto hay proximidad entre Blanchot y Pascal Quignard. En cuanto a la dialéctica, creo que el método de Blanchot se parece bastante al monstruo dialéctico que todo lo devora, pero no lo aplica de manera sistemática -quizás por eso su lectura es tan desconcertante-. Blanchot emplea al extremo la figura retórica del oxímoron. Si el lector no es paciente, amable, abierto, receptivo, fuerte, el oxímoron recurrente puede hacer que el lector abandone el libro. Esto sería penoso en mi opinión porque Blanchot se las arregla tanto para desconcertarnos, como para compartir con claridad sus descubrimientos, sus iluminaciones -sus momentos de oscura luminosidad diría Blanchot en oxímoron-. Más allá de la noción de Desastre, de la que no creo que se pueda ni deba ensayar una definición, opino que la discusión sobre el escepticismo es brillante. Incursiona en los problemas filosóficos del escepticismo porque tienen mucho que ver con el Desastre, sin tratarse de equivalencias. En síntesis, opino que se trata de un libro muy recomendable. Su lectura es un ejercicio estético de gran provecho. La generosidad del premio, así lo creo en este caso, es mucho mayor que el esfuerzo de la lectura: una experiencia estética gozosa.
• 
  Ian

  I can't say that I'm usually a huge fan of philosophical texts; I figured I was taking a gamble by picking this one up. A philosophical theory book written in fragments that deals with the holocaust? Not usually my thing.
  
  The first few pages I was just mystified; they seemed full of wilfully contradictory phrases about the other, about truth, about literature and death, concepts I understood in my own language but which this book was not making clear how I should interpret.
  
  After I got into the swing of its vocabulary, however, I was swept away in its philosophical power. Some say theorizing is just a way to avoid confronting how little we control in the universe. Maybe that's true, even though this theory seemed concerned mainly with showing us how little control we have, and how fragmented our existence is.
  
  The organization—fair for a book about traumatized writing in fragments—is hard to follow at times, but most of the fragments, if arbitrary, are dazzling, even dazzlingly beautiful in their demistifying quality. Some on writing, some on existence, some on death, some on the need for a God; the ones I understood I almost universally loved. I found myself in the midst of endless pleasure as I read this book, as difficult as it was.
  
  A few choice quotes:
  
  On Etymology: It is not the arbitrariness that is surprising here, but on the contrary, the mimetic effort, the semblance of analogy, the appeal to a doubtful body of knowledge that makes us the dupes of a kind of transhistorical necessity.
  
  On Writing: But this "task" cannot be limited, as he would have it, to the job of exhausting life—causing life, through the constant renewal of desire, to be lived completely.
  
  From Schelling: "To the extent that the human mind is related to the soul as to something nonexistent—something, that is, without understanding—its profoundest essence . . . is madness. The understanding is regulated madness. Men who have no madness in them are men whose understanding is void and sterile.
• 
  Michael A.

  "There is no explosion but a book", Mallarme said. The explosion of a book may be the disaster. (Primal scene?) How do you write about the disaster, the "void of the sky," "a deferred death" when it "ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. It does not touch anyone..." I read that Blanchot's writing is completely devoid of an interior. On some of my book reviews of his before, I remember saying something like "everyone knows some horrible secret, but won't tell anyone" but I don't think it's really like that: it's the secret in which there appears to be a secret but there isn't any; it is only a secret to the Other, the Outside. I believe Blanchot posits literature is without a center in his masterpiece "The Space of Literature". In this book he perhaps demonstrates that literature is an agonizing passivity without anything to it at all (paradoxical when it's being communicated through language, of course, but that's Blanchot). The Writing of the Disaster is the explosion that ruins everything, while leaving everything intact, touching no one in particular...
• 
  Sara Sheikhi

  This is a must-read! The language is used, abused and twisted around in this lovely book. All while dealing with important questions (actualized by the Holocaust, but always already there) about violence and where the words end. It has got a therapeutic effect on you, pouring out uncomfort from the text to you as a reader. But at the same time, it is far from soothing, it is angry and aggressively searching for the words that can't really get a grip of the human complex - that of why and that we will die, go back into endless passivity. This is also what is good - although the piece of writing is of this disaster, it is also about its limit. From this comes the power of writing and reading.
• 
  Jim

  brilliant and obtuse... i have read other works by Blanchot that are less fragmentary and more explanatory, detailed... lots of intriguing anecdotal intellectualisms and mindbending phrases, but not as much theory as i had hoped... seems like a tract of mental observations grabbed from a notebook and put into a book... sometimes reading smarty-books just makes the brain work in ways you didn't know it could... probably not a book for a discussion, even for those who have read it :)
• 
  Doug H

  DNF
• 
  Cecilia

  "En el trabajo del duelo el dolor no trabaja: vela".
• 
  Jon

  A book of aphorisms or, better said, fragments:
  
  

  Fragments are written as unfinished separations. Their incompletion, their insufficiency, the disappointment at work in them, is their aimless drift, the indication that, neither unifiable nor consistent, they accommodate a certain array of marks—the marks with which thought (in decline and declining itself) represents the furtive groupings that fictively open and close the absence of totality. Not that thought ever stops, definitively fascinated, at the absence; always it is carried on, by the watch, the ever-uninterrupted wake. Whence the impossibility of saying there is an interval. For fragments, destined partly to the blank that separates them, find in this gap not what ends them, but what prolongs them, or what makes them await their prolongation—what has already prolonged them, causing them to persist on account of their incompletion. And thus are they always ready to let themselves be worked upon by indefatigable reason, instead of remaining as fallen utterances, left aside, the secret void of mystery which no elaboration could ever fill.

  
  
  But what of the Disaster he writes about?
  
  

  Naturally, "disaster" can be understood according to its etymology—of which many fragments here bear the trace. But the etymology of "disaster" does not operate in these fragments as a preferred, or more original insight, ensuring mastery of what is no longer, then, anything but a word. On the contrary, the indeterminateness of what is written when this word is written, exceeds etymology and draws it into the disaster.

  
  
  Or still:
  
  

  But the disaster is unknown; it is the unknown name for that in thought itself which dissuades us from thinking of it, leaving us, but its proximity, alone. Alone, and thus exposed to the thought of the disaster which disrupts solitude and overflows every variety of thought, as the intense, silent and disastrous affirmation of the outside.

  
  
  Overall, this is a curiously complex work—though not as complicated as it probably seems because it has only a handful of themes, each alternating between being stitched together and ripped apart in a dialectical fashion—which requires very careful reading, but I think it's worth it for his foundational thinking on postmodern fiction.
• 
  Maria Ferreiro

  Cualquier intento de organización o comentario sería más bien inútil. Es un libro-desastre, claro, fragmentario y lleno de aforismos y poesía que no permite orden, clasificación, catalogación, estructura. Quizá para ser justos tendría que escribir un poema, o construir un puzzle en que las piezas no encajen del todo, para dar mínimamente cuenta de lo que pasa en este texto. Escritura, muerte, dolor, Uno, política, y un millar de temas más que van construyendo una escritura hermosa y dolorosa, a veces incomprensible, cuyas 126 páginas se extienden desde la nada y hacia la nada.
• 
  Samodh

  I have no idea what this book is or what it's trying to say. My best guesses: this is to show writing disaster is a wreck in itself, a disaster can't be written, or writing disaster will produce a work like this book, in which case--without any discernible meta aspects--this is a "guide." Found several gems, though.
• 
  Kyle Crawley

  3.5 rounded down...
  
  The disaster: "that to which we are destined without being party to it."
  
  Secret is scatter, said Alina Popa.
  
  Not a bad book; a bit abstruse, but better than Lacan and almost as good as Bataille.
• 
  Alice Rovanux

  Érudition tournoyante, elle construit et déconstruit à la fois l’intégralité de l’œuvre. Blanchot vogue dans l’espace littéraire qu’il a créé : tout se dit mais se répète par d’autres mots et le tout est exposé dans sa nature vertigin—euse—ante.