Une voix de fin silence by Roger Laporte

Une voix de fin silence Reviews

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  Alex Obrigewitsch

  Laporte, like Blanchot, is the writer's writer, who writes the writing of writing (as Heidegger has said that Hölderlin writes the poetry of poetry). The object of this work, what it says or seeks to say, is no object, but rather the writing which it traces in its very passage. And yet this writing, at the end, has not attained "itself," fulfilled itself as work - it fails, necessarily, to say that which it remains nothing but the attempt to say, to write - silence thus haunts the entirety of this work, exceeding its limits, demanding that its end cannot but be a failure, a faltering behind what remains ever in default of all language, and yet demands that there be language, that language speak.
  
  There is progress in the passage here, having departed from La Veille more wakeful, watchful, over that which it traces. No more is the proximal distance of the work, of this silent demand underwriting all language, received in terror or fear - there has been a katharsis of sorts, and Une voix de fin silence thus marks a shift in the questioning and questing reception in and of this writing. Here the writer seeks and welcomes this strange silence from the outside, purifying and voiding his language so as to receive it in writing. Writing becomes a waiting for the unknown, what cannot be foreseen and awaited - an attempt at echoing or resonating the silence in the purified or hollowed word. And yet, as Laporte attests near the end of the work, in an echo of Blanchot, he is left with nothing, with but an echo of an echo perhaps, forsaken by the very writing that bears its promise as an ineluctable, faithful infidelity. "It is a moment," he says, "where I can say neither that I wait, nor that I do not wait, for I am thus with the future in a neutral relation, one of a pure vigilance which preserves the unawaited." Of course, this neutrality (of le neutre) also marks a suspension, a caesura - a radical incompletion and suspension. For even such a vigilance, marked by writing, remains never vigilant enough (as Blanchot attests). Writing bears its exigency along with its own fault - an impossible demand which turns, returning, to a repeated attempt at temping the unsayable silence nearer to the word and its saying. A play of distances, so fine as to be imperceptible - except, perhaps, to those who have borne the agony of this tragic fate which bears the name of writing...