“The Authenticity of Exile” between

Blanchot and Levinas

Michael Krimper

If there is, among all words, one that is inau-

thentic, then surely it is the word “authentic.”
(Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster 60)

In 1956, Emmanuel Levinas devoted a provocative essay to the writ-

ing of his friend and companion in thought, Maurice Blanchot, entitled
“The Poet’s Vision.” Therein, Levinas closely examines Blanchot’s medita-
tions on the origin and essence of the literary work, focusing in particular
on the collection of essays assembled together in the book The Space of
Literature, which appeared one year beforehand in 1955. His contention,
broadly speaking, is that Blanchot’s literary criticism and fiction does not
reduce “the limit of the human” to the domain of possibility (“Vision” 127).
Instead, it places into question the definition of human being in terms of
the “I can,” whereby the subject exercises power over the object, gaining
mastery over things, words, and others in the world. One could say that
Blanchot thus contests the dialectical view, as received at least in part
from Alexandre Kojève’s famous lectures on Hegel in the 1930s, accord-
ing to which humanity gradually produces and realizes itself by means of
undertaking an enormous effort to negate nature, comprehend the other,
and transform the entirety of the given in the course of Western history.1
At odds with this dialectical account of the human as possibility,
Blanchot interrogates the impossibility underlying a certain strand of
modern art and literature. His writing, Levinas tells us, tends to delve into
an experience of a singular artwork or literary work in which the search
for the absolute (the total work) inevitably encounters the impossible
and ungraspable source of its existence. That source defies all powers of
negativity, every disclosure of meaning, frustrating the limits of the work
as a whole. This is because the work’s “way of being,” Levinas specifies,
“consists in being present without being given, in not delivering itself up
to the powers, since negation has been the ultimate human power, in being
the domain of the impossible, on which power can get no purchase, in

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106 Michael Krimper

being a perpetual dismissal of the one who discloses it” (131). Blanchot,
for his part, occasionally puts the non-dialectical movement whereby the
work disrupts the labor of the negative and comes undone under the sign
of désoeuvrement—an untranslatable concept rendered approximately into
English as “unworking” or “worklessness,” along with other terms that
loosely designate “inoperativity.” By enacting the inoperative operation
of désoeuvrement, the work brings about its own absolute dissolution and
fragmentation. That is, the work lays bare nothing but the non-foundation
or “error” out of which it unfurls and into which it collapses. And though
Levinas does not deploy the term désoeuvrement in this regard, he similarly
demonstrates how the work under question for Blanchot draws from a
measureless reserve of inaction and passivity whose impossibility refuses
the mastery of the human subject. According to Levinas, this procedure
would introduce another “category” for philosophy, along with a new
“way of knowing” (133).2
Apart from dialectics, Levinas considers, moreover, whether Blan-
chot’s literary research of the error might consist in undermining the
enclosure of Heidegger’s ontology in its widest sense. Levinas raises this
question at multiple junctures in his essay, “Does Blanchot not attribute
to art the function of uprooting the Heideggerian universe?” “Does not
the poet,” he asks again, “hear the voices that call away from the Heideg-
gerian world?” (127). As far as Levinas is concerned, Heidegger’s view of
authenticity in particular implies how his thought remains caught within
the same totalizing logic that reduces the limit of the human to possibil-
ity (capacity, power, and mastery). Blanchot, by contrast, signals another
source for authenticity, no longer within the possibility of appropriating
one’s own death, but its impossibility; no longer within the founding act
of disclosing the truth of being in the world, but within the foundering
act of error; no longer within the enrootedness of poetic dwelling either,
but within the uprootedness of poetic exile. “And yet it is in this nontrue
to which literature leads,” Levinas asserts, “and not in the ‘truth of being,’
that authenticity resides. Authenticity that is not truth: this is perhaps the
proposition to which Blanchot’s critical reflection leads us. And I think it
is an invitation to leave the Heideggerian world” (134-5). Levinas hereby
reiterates a longstanding aim in his early writing to break away from the
confines of fundamental ontology without returning to a pre-Heideggarian
metaphysics of subjectivity.3 But how would Blanchot’s literary research
of error, désoeuvrement, and authenticity come to negotiate this impasse?
In this paper, I would propose to chart the trajectory of Levinas’s
argument by revisiting key junctures in Blanchot’s writing where he chal-
lenges Heidegger’s view of authenticity and subsequently reframes its
questioning within the configuration of literary space. Although Blanchot

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and Levinas converge to the extent that they contest authenticity in the
sense of human mastery over the whole, they diverge to the extent that
they rethink authenticity otherwise. Whereas Levinas, in short, reincorpo-
rates Blanchot’s literary interrogation of authenticity back into his elabo-
ration of ethics as first philosophy, Blanchot’s approach to authenticity,
I will argue, indicates an inoperative poetics of responsiveness that still
warrants further attention.

The Power of Death

Blanchot’s concern with the question of authenticity undoubtedly
stems from Heidegger’s ontological-existential analysis of death in Being
and Time (1927).4 Indeed, Blanchot grapples at length with the problem
of authenticity in the writings of Rilke, whose struggle to die a so-called
“proper death” prefigures Heidegger’s own reflections on this issue.5 Yet
Blanchot diverges from Heidegger in putting emphasis on the way that
Rilke links dying to the predicament of writing, and thereby draws an
analogy between the spaces of death and the literary work or poem. He
weaves such an analogy throughout The Space of Literature, in essays not
only on Rilke, but also on Mallarmé and Kafka, along with the myth of
Orpheus. And Blanchot goes on to contend with Heidegger on his own
terms in the concluding three-part essay of his book, “Literature and the
Original Experience,” around which Levinas focuses his reading and to
which I would now like to turn.6
In “Literature and the Original Experience,” Blanchot subjects Hei-
degger’s view of the search for authenticity through death to critical reas-
sessment. We might recall that, for Heidegger, death constitutes the most
extreme possibility for existence. Death, in other words, is the possibility
of not being—the possibility of impossibility—which individualizes each
human entity in its finitude. Since no other entity can die for me, my death
belongs to me alone, singling me out.7 Heidegger thus departs from the
tradition of metaphysics. Rather than founding the subject on the basis of
an ideal or logical principle of transcendence, he resituates the temporal
structure of human existence within the world (as “being-in-the-world”),
alongside others (as “being-with”), but fundamentally determined by the
individual’s anticipatory relation to the end (as “being-towards-death”).
What Blanchot draws to our attention, though, is that even if Heidegger
rejects the metaphysics of the subject, his treatment of authenticity man-
ages to recover the classical account of selfhood. This is because death is
still possible for Heidegger. I have the capacity to not be. I can die. Blanchot
makes these points while curiously erasing Heidegger’s name from his
commentary: “When a contemporary philosopher names death as man’s
extreme possibility, the possibility absolutely proper to him, he shows that

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108 Michael Krimper

the origin of possibility is linked in man to the fact that he can die,” and
that for him death “is nevertheless within his mastery, that it is the extreme
moment of his possibility” (Space 320). Thus, if the origin of possibility
is linked to the fact that each human being can die, then to gain mastery
over my own death would simultaneously involve asserting ownership
over all of my possibilities-to-be—the entirety of my own existence.
To expand upon the scope and implications of Blanchot’s brief gloss
here, we should add that each entity, according to Heidegger, nonetheless
tends to flee from the possibility of its own death. Rather than facing the
advent of my own death, I am ordinarily immersed within the familiarity
of everyday life where impersonal norms regulate the averageness, idle
talk, and the leveled down practices of inauthentic existence. Inauthen-
ticity, in this sense, designates the impersonal modality of the everyday,
where singular beings are absorbed and covered up in “the they” [das
Man]. I do what they would do, say what they would say, and die an
anonymous death just like anyone else. In order to pull myself out of this
fallen state, Heidegger proclaims, I must listen to the call of conscience
alerting me to the anxiety of my ownmost relation to death. At that point
I could resolutely decide to confront my own death, appropriate the
whole of my finite existence, and come into my own.8 Heidegger, in the
final analysis, puts this form of self-appropriation and ownership under
the sign of Eigentlichkeit (a German neologism which plays on eigentlich
as “really” or “truly,” and eigen as “proper” or “own,” and which is
usually rendered into English and French as “authenticity”).9 As many
commentators have argued, Heidegger thereby could be said to retrieve
the classical definition of human being in terms of autonomous selfhood
and autarchy.10
We should further expand on Blanchot’s gloss in noting that Hei-
degger’s non-relational depiction of authenticity bears on his treatment
of “historicity” [Geschichtlichkeit] and “being-with” in the second division
of Being and Time. I am thinking in particular of the juncture where Hei-
degger ties the fate (Schicksal) of the individual to the destiny (Geschick) of
the group or people (Volk) to which it supposedly belongs.11 Destiny, in
this sense, designates the co-historicizing mode of authenticity that binds
the identity of the human individual to the shared past and future of a
particular community. Perhaps Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has argued the
most convincingly that the “ontological concept of the people” in particu-
lar and “historicity” more generally indicates the political dimension of
Heidegger’s thought, which he never fully abandons in his later writing.12
After setting aside fundamental ontology, for instance, Heidegger would
similarly attribute the operation of authentic co-historicity to science, as

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well as to the disclosive powers of poetry, myth, and the artwork. All
of these human activities appeal to founding or re-founding a people’s
national identity or State by means of receiving the spiritual destiny of
humanity and the West. This is what Lacoue-Labarthe calls “national
aestheticism.”13 He contends that Heidegger’s national aestheticism
foregrounds his political commitment to the Nazi party in 1933, informs
his rectoral address at Freiburg that same year, and finally helps to ex-
plain his baffling yet enduring belief in the “inner greatness and truth”
of National Socialism.14
Blanchot, for his part, was likely aware of Karl Löwith’s controversial
article on Heidegger (perhaps the first to draw a systematic connection
between his fundamental ontology and politics), which initially appeared
in Les Temps modernes in 1946 (“Implications”). And, many years later, he
would go on to voice agreement with Lacoue-Labarthe’s rigorous and
deeply nuanced study of Heidegger’s “national aestheticism.”15 Some
commentators, furthermore, have pointed out that Blanchot’s criticism
of Heidegger seems to tacitly double as an auto-criticism of his own
dubious political commitment to far-right nationalism in his journalism
from the 1930s.16 However, in The Space of Literature, Blanchot is all the
more discreet. At this stage of his post-war writing, Blanchot neither
mentions Heidegger’s political involvement, nor scrutinizes the concept
of authentic co-historicity, let alone his own faults in the past. Rather than
directly confronting Heidegger’s view of authenticity, Blanchot, I think,
aims to destabilize the foundation on the basis of which its justification
is derived. It is as though he sought to distance himself not only from
Heidegger (up to the point of putting his name under erasure), but also
from his authority on the question of authenticity, so as to displace and
re-inscribe its interrogation within the itinerary of his own thought.
For Blanchot, Heidegger’s ontological analysis of the possibility
of death closely resembles Hegel’s dialectical formulation according to
which death constitutes the essence of “man” as “active nothingness.” In
either case, Blanchot seems to suggest, human existence would become
authentic by virtue of converting the power of death into the historical
being of “action, value, labor, and truth” which gradually appropriates the
world in its entirety, so as to put everything at the disposal of humanity.
Let’s read this passage in full:
Existence is authentic when it is capable of enduring possibility right
up to its extreme point, able to stride toward death as toward pos-
sibility par excellence. It is to this movement that the essence of man
in Western history owes its having become action, value, labor, and
truth. The affirmation that in man all is possibility requires that death
itself be possible: death itself, without which man would not be able

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110 Michael Krimper

to form the notion of an all or exist in view of a totality, must be what

makes all—what makes totality—possible. (320)

So, if authentic existence could manage to maintain itself in death as the

source of all possibility and essence, then it would establish the foundation
on the basis of which the very notion of totality becomes available, and
everything in fact becomes possible, for humanity. It is in this sense that
Blanchot links the concept of authenticity to mastery over the whole—to
the total and totalizing work carried out by human being for the sake of
achieving its own self-realization and fulfillment in the course of Western
history.

The Powerlessness of Dying

Against the search of authenticity through death, Blanchot contends,
with Levinas, that death is not merely the possibility of impossibility,
but in a reversal of terms, the impossibility of possibility. In Blanchot’s
view, death cannot be confronted directly, for it always eludes my grasp.
It always withdraws from the experience of self-presence and the pres-
ent, subverting every effort of self-appropriation and mastery by the
subject. To illustrate this, Blanchot distinguishes between the possibility
of “death” (la mort) and the impossibility of “dying” (le mourir). Whereas
“death” designates the possibility of an end to life, “dying” signals the
impossibility of an end in the guise of an endless ending. Dying, in this
sense, opens onto the temporality of “the incessant” and “the intermi-
nable” which always leaves finite existence unfinished, without rest or
consolation. Dying, in other words, opens onto the temporality of the
infinite whose lack of beginning and end overflows the very enclosure
of totality. Thus, Blanchot strips death of any transcendental ground, or
absence thereof, that would secure the fulfillment of meaning for human
existence as a whole.
While reading Blanchot and Levinas on this issue, Simon Critch-
ley links the impossibility of dying to the experience of “being riveted
to existence without escape.”17 For these thinkers, Critchley observes,
there is something more horrible than the end of existence, namely its
endlessness—the perpetuity of existence without me. “To Blanchot,”
Levinas sums up, “death is not the pathos of the ultimate human possi-
bility, the possibility of impossibility, but the ceaseless repetition of what
cannot be grasped, before which the I loses its ipseity. The impossibility
of possibility” (“Vision” 132). In the face of the impossibility of dying,
the subject becomes incapacitated and dissociated from itself, exposed
to the unstoppable recurrence of what there is. Whereas Levinas registers

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such an impersonal flow of being and nonbeing as the il y a (“there is”),

Blanchot registers it under the sign of “the Outside” (le Dehors), an un-
graspable and unlocatable dimension of existence extending prior to and
further than the temporal boundaries of my ownmost relation to death.18
In later writing, Blanchot conjoins the unbounded region of the outside
with “the neutrality of being,” or more explicitly at a distance from on-
tology, with “the neuter” (le neutre).19 Articulating the conjunction of the
outside and the neuter, Blanchot gestures towards an originary event of
language evacuated from the classical humanism and anthropocentrism
that otherwise puts the objectifying command of the human at the center
of self-consciousness and existence.
Furthermore, Blanchot’s decentering of the human subject indicates
a crucial but frequently neglected point, once again contrary to Heidegger,
pertaining to the fundamentally relational dimension of death. He thus
reconsiders, in proximity to Levinas, how the experience of bearing wit-
ness to another’s death conveys an altogether different way of being in
relation with the other.20 However, unlike Levinas, Blanchot puts emphasis
on the utterly anonymous and impersonal event of the death of the other.
On the occasion in which somebody in particular dies, Blanchot tells us,
“they die” (on meurt). When somebody dies or is dying, the occurrence
of the disappearance or absence of the other cannot stop (not) occurring
without admitting of any personal relation that would put it to term. Such
an experience (or rather non-experience) introduces a relation to what
excludes all relation—a relation to the unknown that would suspend
the fixed distinction between self and other, the proper and improper,
authentic and inauthentic. For to undergo such an experience would
carry the self outside itself, consigning you to the self-dispossession and
dis-appropriation of désoeuvrement.
Blanchot occasionally illustrates this movement in terms of “the
radical reversal” where the power that I can exercise over death inevita-
bly turns, at its extreme limit, into the powerlessness of dying. Whereas
the power of death fuels the totalizing labor of the negative (l’oeuvre), the
powerlessness of dying arrests all negativity (désoeuvrement), eliciting the
absolute dissolution and fragmentation of the work. Désoeuvrement, in
this sense, runs counter to the work of authenticity. It shows how human
being is always vulnerable to dissipation and failure, its projects always
disposed to incompletion and ruin, embedded within the materiality of
finite existence. Critchley, for his part, coins the term “originary inau-
thenticity” in order to express the burden of finite existence which can
neither be assumed nor relinquished and which exhibits the irremediable
non-coincidence between self and other.21

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Error: The Source of Authenticity

Now that we have elaborated on Blanchot’s contestation of the
search for authenticity through death, let’s examine how he subsequently
reframes its interrogation within the configuration of literary space. It
would seem that by drawing an analogy between the spaces of literature
and death, Blanchot traces the movement of the radical reversal from pos-
sibility to impossibility, and from work to désoeuvrement, in both registers
at once. Levinas tells us as much: “The literary work brings us closer to
death, because death is that endless rustle of being that the work causes
to murmur. In death as in the work of art, the regular order is reversed,
since, in it, power leads to what is unassumable” (“Vision”132). Death
appears as “the endless rustle of being,” the inappropriable region of the
outside, or the error at the origin of the work, condemned to désoeuvrement.
Consider for example the way that Blanchot depicts this reversal
of the regular order in his famous essay “Orpheus’ Gaze,” where the
encounter with the death of the other coincides with the impossibility
of authentically founding the work. According to Blanchot’s retelling of
the myth, Orpheus does not descend into the underworld strictly for the
purpose of retrieving his deceased lover, Eurydice, but also to represent
her absence within the beautiful form and perfection of the artwork.
Beyond the demand to accomplish the work, he wants to lay bare the
empty profundity of her dying. He wants, as Blanchot puts it, “not to
make her live, but to have her living the plenitude of death” (Space 172).
This is why Orpheus puts everything at risk. He breaks the interdiction
requiring him to look away from Eurydice, surrendering instead to the
irresistible desire to gaze at her dying in the heart of the night. And yet,
when Orpheus suddenly looks back, he sees nothing. He sees nothing but
the infinite exteriority and foreignness of dying upon which power has
no purchase. Its withdrawal from all revelation denies the intimacy of the
penetrating gaze that would otherwise enable the subject to assimilate
the death of the other into the interiority of self-consciousness, as well as
the self-unifying identity of the work.
Blanchot depicts this particular movement of the radical reversal
in terms of “the other death.” When Orpheus looks back, he fails to seize
the absence of Eurydice, but is unceasingly seized by the tremendous
presence of her absence. And, at that furtive instant, Blanchot continues,
Orpheus is “no less dead than [Eurydice]—dead, not of that tranquil
worldly death which is rest, silence, and end, but of that other death
which is death without end, the ordeal of end’s absence” (172). If Orpheus
is at that instant “no less dead” than Eurydice, then it is because the ex-
perience of bearing witness to the impersonal and anonymous event of
the death of the other carries him outside himself, exposing him to the

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impossibility of dying which inhabits the living without end. We glimpse

these fragmentary effects when Orpheus’ gaze induces, as Blanchot puts
it, “the ordeal of eternal inertia [désoeuvrement]” (173). To undergo the
ordeal of désoeuvrement would consist in laying bare the inessential and
insignificant non-foundation—the nothingness of “error”—at the heart of
the work. It would consign both the subject of the work and the work of
the subject to unending dis-appropriation and dispersal. And yet Blanchot
goes on to ask whether désoeuvrement puts the work at stake “as if what
we call the insignificant, the inessential, error, could, to one who accepts
the risk and surrenders to it without restraint, reveal itself as the source
of all authenticity” (174).
Blanchot similarly deploys the formula of the “as if” in the important
footnote concluding “Literature and the Original Experience.” There he
considers “the mission” of literature more specifically under the circum-
stances of the modern era in which humanity’s productive and acquisitive
drives tend to dominate everything. Due to this turning point in history,
Blanchot maintains, it has become all the more urgent for the literary work
to refuse the seriousness of action and meaning, and call us back to the
error “as if” the source of all authenticity arose out of the unserious and
untrue default of being:
To present this question in a context closer to historical actuality, one
might say: the more the world is affirmed as the future and the broad
daylight of truth, where everything will have value, bear meaning,
where the whole will be achieved under the mastery of man and for
his use, the more it seems that art must descend toward that point
where nothing has meaning yet, the more it matters that art maintain
the movement, the insecurity, and the grief of that which escapes ev-
ery grasp and all ends. The artist and the poet seem to have received
this mission: to call us obstinately back to error, to turn us toward the
space where everything we propose, everything we have acquired,
everywhere we are, all that opens upon the earth and in the sky, return
to insignificance, and where what approaches is the nonserious and the
nontrue, as if perhaps thence sprang the source of all authenticity. (247)
This passage indicates the extent to which Blanchot displaces the terms
of Heidegger’s account of authenticity and proceeds to re-inscribe them
within the itinerary of his own thought. The work under question for
Blanchot aims to contest everything we are, everything we have, and ev-
erything we understand, without reducing the limit of the human to the
domain of possibility. Yet doesn’t Heidegger, too, reject this hegemonic
form of mastery in the modern era? After all, Heidegger will consistently
scrutinize the technical-scientific objectification of nature, as well as the
deliberate reasoning and action of the subject, all the while advocating
for another relationship of attentiveness to be sustained between human
existence and the question of Being. Nevertheless, Blanchot’s contestation

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114 Michael Krimper

of the search of authenticity through death, as we have argued, consists in

undermining the enclosure of fundamental ontology at the very least. But
would his approach to the insecurity and grief of error as another source
for authenticity likewise consist in dismantling Heidegger’s ontological
elucidation of the artwork? Does authenticity as mastery over the whole
somehow still insinuate itself into its powers of disclosure? And if so,
what would Blanchot’s poetics of error offer instead?

Poetic Exile
To begin to address these questions, let’s consider more closely Levi-
nas’s argument in the “The Poet’s Vision” that Blanchot offers an exit not
merely from fundamental ontology but from the expansive boundaries
of the “Heideggerian universe.” According to Levinas, Blanchot’s liter-
ary interrogation of authenticity contests above all the “last Heidegger,”
presumably encompassing his reflections on the artwork, poetry, and
language all the way through the 1940s. How would Blanchot’s call back to
error, then, break away from Heidegger’s ontological poetics in particular
without returning to the metaphysics of subjectivity?
Levinas claims that Heidegger’s elucidation of the artwork remains
caught in the same logic of authenticity, since he reduces its essence to
the power of disclosing the truth of being in the world.22 By contrast,
Blanchot links “the essential form of authenticity,” Levinas specifies, to
an “uncovering that is not truth.” He links authenticity to the obscure
uncovering of error which, like Orpheus’ gaze, reveals nothing but the
infinite “exteriority” and “alterity” in which you are cast outside your-
self and from which you are nonetheless excluded. This is what Levinas
calls “the exteriority of absolute exile” (“Vision” 133). If Heidegger thus
examines the disclosive powers whereby the artwork sets up the open-
ness of the world in which the truth of being happens and is set to work,
then Blanchot’s call back to the error interrupts those powers, exiles the
subject from the work, and unceasingly elicits its désoeuvrement as a whole.
In order to develop such a non-revelatory mode of disclosure,
Levinas highlights its exposure at once of the error and errancy of being
(“l’erreur de l’être”). The uncovering of error at the source of being coin-
cides with the errant condition of not being in the truth, as Levinas puts
it in the following key passage:
Blanchot sees art’s vocation as incomparable. But above all, writing does
not lead to the truth of being. One might say that it leads to the error of
being [l’erreur de l’être]—to being as a place of errancy [lieu d’errance],
the uninhabitable. Thus, one would be equally justified in saying that
literature does not lead there, since it is impossible to reach a destina-
tion. The error of being—more external than truth. In Heidegger, the

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alternation of nothingness and being also occurs in the truth of being;

but Blanchot, contrary to Heidegger, does not call it truth, but non-
truth. He insists on this veil of the “no,” the inessential character of the
ultimate essence of the work. (134, translation modified)
So, in Levinas’s view, the uncovering of both error as the source of being
and being as the placeless place of errancy consists in laying bare the
irreducible obscurity of the “no” (nothingness) at the heart of the work.
It lays bare, in other words, the groundless ground of the work, whose
withdrawal from all appropriation neither sets the disclosure of the truth
of being to work within the work, nor inaugurates the horizon of a world
to which a historical people or community could be destined to belong.
It is in this sense that Blanchot challenges the operation of authentic co-
historicity underlying Heidegger’s ontological-poetics, because the un-
covering of error renders inoperative the disclosive powers of the work.
And by doing so, it conveys an entirely different relation of separation
between human existence and being, along with another errant manner
of residing on the planet.23
Along this line of thought, Levinas draws a distinction between the
“enrootedness” at stake for Heidegger (linked to Greco-Germanic pagan-
ism) and the “uprootedness” at stake for Blanchot (linked to Judaism).
Whereas Heidegger associates the work with the “founding place” (137)
where human existence can poetically dwell in the midst of beings as a
whole, Blanchot associates the work with the foundering movement of
poetic exile which is “devoid of place,” errant, and separated from being
(136). Whereas Heidegger shows how the disclosure of the truth of be-
ing shelters and secures the sedentary existence of a people in the world,
Blanchot shows how the uncovering of error precipitates an insecure and
nomadic manner of residing with others on the planet. Rather than invok-
ing mythical attachments to the native land, this sort of “nomadism” seems
to detach human existence from its fixed ties to any permanent home or
homeland, carrying you towards the uninhabitable region of the outside
to which nobody belongs.
Blanchot will occasionally associate the exilic condition of the liter-
ary work with the Jewish biblical story of Exodus, albeit an exodus in
which the wandering in the desert has neither origin nor end, and cannot
even name itself exodus with any certainty. As Eric Hoppenot points out,
Blanchot hereby submits the singular story of the Exodus in the desert
to a slight modification, so as to articulate the impersonal movement of
poetic exile at the threshold of the outside.24 Consider, for instance, the
exilic steps of Orpheus, whose uncovering of error leaves him abandoned
to restless dispersal and errancy outside all being. Or take similar orphic
migrations in Blanchot’s fiction, notably including his first two published

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116 Michael Krimper

novels Thomas l’obscur (1941) and Aminadab (1942). In each of these stories,
the literary quest of losing yourself does not culminate with the heroic
action of finding yourself, but spirals into an endless sojourn of exile to the
point of no return. At odds with the classical narrative of homecoming in
which the departure from the self always assimilates the other and returns
to the order of same, Blanchot traces the exilic narrative of homelessness
in which the departure from the self orients unknowingly towards the
other without the return of self-appropriation.25
Levinas, for his part, examines the implications of such literary ban-
ishment in the final section of his essay under the header “the authenticity
of exile” (136). He maintains, on the one hand, that Blanchot’s poetics of
exile undermines the ground on the basis of which Heidegger seeks to
authentically found the disclosive powers of the work. But, on the other
hand, Levinas contends that Blanchot’s attempt to contest Heidegger’s
view of authenticity does not go far enough, because the uncovering of
error at the source of being must also assume the ethical responsibility
of going out towards the other. Authentic literature, Levinas continues,
must acknowledge the “human wretchedness” and “needs” ignored by
Heidegger’s “mastery morality” and “pagan enrootedness” according to
which solely the disclosure of the truth of being matters (138). Perhaps
one could say that the authenticity of exile must not only dispossess and
exile the subject, but by doing so also awaken you to the suffering of other
dispossessed human beings—the uprooted, dislocated, and disinherited in
search of refuge across the planet. What remains missing from Blanchot’s
literary interrogation of authenticity, according to Levinas, is therefore
the ethical demand of justice: “if the authenticity Blanchot speaks of is to
mean anything other than a consciousness of the lack of seriousness of
edification,” then it “must herald an order of justice, the slave morality
that is absent from the Heideggerian city” (137). It is worth citing Levinas
here at length:
Does man as a being, as this man standing before me, exposed to hunger,
thirst, and cold, truly accomplish, in his needs, the disclosure of being?
Has he already, as such, been the vigilant guardian of the light? Hei-
degger’s world is a world of lords who have transcended the condition
of the needy, wretched human beings, or a world of servants whose
only concern is for these lords. […] But in monosyllabic hunger, in the
wretched poverty in which houses and objects revert to their material
function and enjoyment is closed on all the sides, the face of man shines
forth. Doesn’t Blanchot attribute to art the function of uprooting the
Heideggarian universe? Doesn’t the poet, before the “eternal rustling of
the outside,” hear voices that call away from the Heideggarian world?
A world that is not frightening because of its nihilism. It is not nihilistic.
But, in it, justice does not condition truth. (138-139)

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The Authenticity of Exile 117

If Levinas hereby breaks away from the boundaries of the Heideggerian

universe, then it is because he sets out to rethink Blanchot’s uncovering
of error in terms of the ethical relation to the other, that is, the relation
to beings prior to the thematization of being. He lets us hear in turn the
primordial appeal to justice that must condition the disclosure of the truth
of being. To sum up, whereas Heidegger characterizes authenticity as the
responsibility for my own death, Levinas subtly shifts the trajectory of
Blanchot’s literary interrogation of the authenticity of exile, contending
that it must entail ethical responsibility and justice for the dying other.

(In)authenticity and Inoperative Poetics

Levinas, I believe, is right to point out that Blanchot does not explic-
itly attribute an ethical responsibility to literature. Nor does he spell out
its political dimension at this stage of his writing in the postwar period.
Nevertheless, I would argue that Blanchot’s silence on this issue, as well
as the silence of the work, bears implicitly on the ethico-political stakes
of modern literature for him. This is because, for Blanchot, the mere
existence of the work is already entangled with the ethical and political,
albeit in a fundamentally ambiguous and impoverished way, in which it
remains unjustifiable. Whereas Levinas contends in turn that the work’s
“irresponsibility” requires justification by other means (whether through
philosophy or literary criticism), Blanchot affirms the sovereign value
of its illegitimate existence in itself.26 For it is precisely the illegitimacy
of the work—its error—which responds to the question of authenticity,
safeguards it, and keeps it open without resolution (Space 210). What the
open question of authenticity thereby offers to thought is not so much
the transcendence of alterity sought by Levinas, but a non-transcendent
relation to the other whose political and ethical implications I would like
to briefly sketch here.
In the concluding pages of “Literature and the Original Experi-
ence,” Blanchot broaches the value of the work’s mere existence in the
modern era. He asks with Hölderlin, and subsequently Heidegger after
him, “What use are poets in time of distress?” (244). What is the point of
poetry during wretched or miserable times (in dürftiger Zeit) when the
gods have withdrawn and have not yet returned? When the sheer void of
the sacred has been forgotten and even its trace has nearly disappeared?
What is the purpose of art or literature in destitute times unless it can
provide consolation for the emptiness of modern existence? Blanchot ad-
dresses these questions cautiously. They lead him to consider, alongside
Hölderlin, André Gide, and René Char, whether writers would be better
off renouncing the literary work or poem in order to participate more

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118 Michael Krimper

effectively in the real liberation and consummation of the world. No

writer, Blanchot observes, “can easily consider himself exempt from this
‘renunciation,’” whereby they feel compelled to give up literary pursuits
in favor of emancipatory action and engagement in the world (213).
Expanding further on the questionable value of the work, Blanchot
cites another historical marker of modernity in the West, namely Hegel’s
famous announcement in his course on aesthetics that “art is for us a thing
of the past.” This statement, Blanchot says, “constitutes a judgment upon
which art must reflect and which it will by no means consider refuted
simply because since that date literature, the plastic arts, and music have
produced substantial works.” After all, Hegel made this assertion in
the face of Goethe and the birth of Romanticism. So what did he mean?
“This, precisely: that since the day when the absolute became the active
process which is history [travail de l’histoire], art has no longer been able
to satisfy the need for an absolute.” And art can no longer fulfill the de-
mand for an absolute, Blanchot continues, because “everything that was
authentically truth and alive in it now belongs to the world and to real,
purposeful activity [travail réel] in the world” (214).27 Once the absolute
becomes the authentic “work of history” in the modern era, what could
possibly remain for the literary work or artwork to do, apart from serving
the total self-realization and fulfillment of the essence of humanity in the
course of world history?
And yet Blanchot considers by the same stroke whether the work
would occupy its proper place solely during the historical epoch when
art is a thing of the past, when distress becomes its fundamental concern,
and when it thus improperly comes into its own. This is because the time
of distress alone allows the work to undertake the self-reflexive task of
inquiring into the vacancy of its own essence—its dynamically unstable
and inessential essence—foreign to the absolute as the authentic work
of history. The literary work, in this sense, unceasingly interrogates its
own lack of origin, identity, and social role. Rather than achieving self-
appropriation and mastery over the whole, it elicits the dis-appropriation
and dispersal of désoeuvrement. One could say, then, that the authenticity
of the work consists in paradoxically embracing the abyssal void of error,
of originary inauthenticity, at the heart of its existence. Yet the thread of
Blanchot’s argument here is neither to re-authenticate the enterprise of
literature nor prioritize its inauthenticity otherwise, although he at times
gestures in these directions. Instead, if the work’s uncovering of error
suspends the fixed distinction between the proper and improper, the self
and other, the authentic and inauthentic, then it would seem to obstinately
call us back to its ambiguous source of (in)authenticity.

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The Authenticity of Exile 119

The ambivalent term (in)authenticity, furthermore, helps to indicate

the double movement of contestation and affirmation invoked by the
work. Blanchot insists on this double movement when he proposes that
the mere existence of the work not only contests the “apparent authentic
definition” of “man” as possibility, but also affirms an altogether differ-
ent relation to the outside, that is, to (in)authenticity. And he proceeds
to articulate the “particular violence” posed by the question of the work
in this way:
But what is art, and what can we say of literature? The question returns
now with a particular violence. If we have art—which is exile from
truth, which is the risk of the inoffensive game, which affirms man’s
belonging to the limitless outside where intimacy is unknown, where
he is banished from his capability and all forms of possibility—how
does this come about? How, if he is altogether possibility, can man
allow himself anything resembling art? If he has art, does this not
mean, contrary to his apparent authentic definition [l’exigence dite
authentique]—the requirement which is in harmony with the law of
the day—he entertains with death a relation which is not that of pos-
sibility, which does not lead to mastery or to understanding or to the
progressive achievement of time [le travail du temps], but exposes him
to the radical reversal? (322-3)

Though we have already discussed how the work conveys a relation to

dying other than that of possibility, Blanchot goes one step further here.
His contention, moreover, is that through the radical reversal, the work
no longer belongs to the human subject. Instead, the subject belongs to
the work, in particular to its “limitless outside,” which is to say that you
do not belong to it at all. For the work banishes human being from all
possibility, consigning you to the nearly inhuman region of the outside
from which you are nonetheless excluded. It would seem that the outside
hereby carries another demand to which the exilic condition of the work
responds and becomes responsive without resolution. It is this impossible
demand that obliges the self to become other than itself, to unknowingly
err outside being, and by doing so to voice responsiveness to the other
as other. But what sort of bind to the other would this sort of responsive-
ness thereby affirm? And what about to the other human being (autrui)?
In response to Levinas in later writings, Blanchot will depict this
bind variously as “the neutral relation,” “the relation of the third kind,”
and “the relation without relation.”28 With these terms, he forgoes the
social bond, in its classical sense, so as to think a relation of non-belonging
to the other (designating the mutually entangled regions of the outside,
dying, and error, as well as the other human being). And even if Blanchot
does not yet fully spell out this relation in The Space of Literature, his re-
reading of the myth of Orpheus gives us at least the bare impression of

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120 Michael Krimper

its outline. After all, in “Orpheus’ gaze,” the uncovering of error neither
establishes a unitary relation of recognition or reciprocity with the other,
nor an ecstatic relation of rapture that would fuse the subject and object
through limitless dissolution. On the contrary, the uncovering of error
outside being expresses a relation to that which excludes all relation. To
be more precise, the ordeal of désoeuvrement exhibits how Orpheus listens
to an appeal whose infinitely demanding exigency obliges him to respond
at once to the dying other and error at the source of the work. He feels
obliged to respond beyond anything that is in his power to do, even if it
puts everything at risk, rendering the work inoperative. What Blanchot
traces here, in short, is an inoperative poetics of responsiveness, which
conveys a relation without common measure to the other. This is not so
different from Levinas’s contention that justice constitutes a relation to
beings prior to the thematization of being. However, the relation under
question for Blanchot can neither achieve the transcendence of alterity, nor
overcome the neutrality of being, since it remains inextricably embedded
within the materiality of finite existence. At a slight distance from Levinas,
Blanchot’s inoperative poetics of responsiveness involves an anonymous
and impersonal mode of being in relation with the other, foregrounding
his much more explicit writing on community in the years to follow.29
Furthermore, Blanchot’s affirmation of the finitude of connectedness,
being-with, and community converges with George Bataille’s writing
on the notion of communication. To communicate, in Bataille’s view, is
to be exposed to the incommunicable breach between the self and other
constituting the finite co-existence of singular beings on a planet whose
future, too, is tenuous. Blanchot, for his part, calls this “torn intimacy.”
The communication of torn intimacy takes place insofar as the error
unfurls between the self and other, the writer and reader, within the ab-
solute dissolution and fragmentation of the work.30 Torn intimacy, in this
sense, ties the self to the other by means of exposing the infinite distance
that separates them and that they share in common. It is liable, in turn,
to connect a plurality of singular beings beyond all relations of common
belonging, beyond all shared properties, affiliations, identities, languages,
heritages, and futural projects, beyond all enclosed formations of com-
munity. Prompted by Levinas, however, we should note that what still
remains to be thought here is the extent to which the question of justice
bears, and I think it does, on the relationality to which inoperative poetics
draws our attention.31
One way of parsing the question of justice within this configura-
tion would be to go further than Blanchot in elaborating the temporality
of inoperative poetics, error, and exile, so as to distinguish the demand
of (in)authenticity from Heidegger’s concept of authentic co-historicity.

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The Authenticity of Exile 121

By untying the fate of the individual from the destiny of the community,
inoperative poetics would, moreover, expose the groundless past and
incalculable future of another community to which nobody belongs.
This is why Blanchot stresses the notably discontinuous and disjointed
temporality characterizing the exilic condition of the work, as indicated in
his commentary on Hölderlin, once again at odds with Heidegger. While
reading Hölderlin’s celebrated poem “Bread and Wine,” for instance, Blan-
chot suggests that “error helps,” because it “is the intimation in waiting”
(246). Error helps, in other words, because it urges you to attentively wait
upon the endless ending of the work that ever announces a beginning
anew, even if that beginning will have been aborted in advance, already
past and still yet to come. The work, for Blanchot, cannot help but waver
in such an interval between the “no longer” and “not yet.” And it is this
oscillation, one might venture, which withholds the exigency calling forth,
and affirming, the chance of another community.
New York University

Notes
1. On the dialectical conception of the human as possibility, see Blanchot’s pathbreaking
essay “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press,
1995, pp. 300-344. For a notably informative analysis of this essay, see Hill (103-114).
2. Blanchot responds to Levinas’s attempt to reintegrate his meditations on the literary
work back into philosophy many years later in “Our Clandestine Companion,” in Face
to Face with Levinas, edited by Richard A. Cohen, State University of New York Press,
1986, pp. 41-50.
3. See Levinas (Existence 19). On the double bind in Levinas’s early writing, see Critchley
(Problem 16-19).
4. See section 50 on “authenticity” in Heidegger’s Being and Time.
5. Blanchot examines Rilke’s effort to avoid a “mass-produced death” and die properly
in “Rilke and Death’s Demand” (Space 120-159). For a comprehensive overview of the
question of authenticity in Blanchot, Rilke, and Heidegger, see Gosetti-Ferencei (53-62).
6. This three-part essay initially appeared in two larger installments in Les Temps modernes
in 1952.
7. In The Space of Literature, ����������������������������������������������������������
Blanchot does not deploy Heidegger’s term Dasein—designat-
ing the thrown and factical existence of the entity whose being is at issue for it—but
“man” or “human being.” Though this translation risks distorting the meaning of Dasein,
Blanchot is well aware of Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysical subject of reason, as
well as his reorientation of human existence in relationship to the question of Being. I
would suggest that his rephrasing rather helps us hear how Dasein still retains unthought
aspects of the human as possibility.
8. For recent interpretations of Heidegger’s view authenticity, many of which argue for
the constancy of self-possession, wholeness, and self-unity in the face of death, see the
volume edited by McManus (Heidegger).
9. Blanchot eventually comes to remark that the French translation of Eigentlichkeit as
“authenticity” weakens Heidegger’s thought, and brings it closer to a “persevering hu-
manism,” especially once he shifts away from the search of authenticity through death
to the notion of Ereignis, or “event,” in later works (Writing 117).

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122 Michael Krimper

10. For critical readings of Heidegger’s view of authenticity in terms of the self-sufficient and
autonomous subject, see Simon Critchley’s “Prolegomena to Any Post-Deconstructive
Subjectivity” (13-46) and Dominique Janicaud’s “The Question of Subjectivity in Hei-
degger’s Being and Time” (47-58) in the volume edited by Critchley and Dews (Subjectivi-
ties).
11. In section 74 of Being and Time, Heidegger ties the individual’s “fate” to a collective form
of “destiny,” depicted as the “authentic historicizing of Dasein” shared with others (436).
12. See Lacoue-Labarthe (“Transcendence” 287; and “Spirit”).
13. Lacoue-Labarthe spells out “national aestheticism” in conversation with Nancy’s critique
of “immanentism” in his elaboration of the inoperative community (Heidegger 70).
14. On the important distinction between Nazism and “the essence” of the movement
endorsed by Heidegger, see Lacoue-Labarthe (Heidegger 53-76).
15. In a letter to Catherine David dated from 1987, Blanchot follows Lacoue-Labarthe and
Löwith in proposing that Heidegger’s “philosophy” was the basis for his political
involvement in 1933. He contends further that Heidegger’s “profound attachment to
the land,” more so than any racist ideology predicated on biologism, implies “a kind of
anti-Semitism” which might partially explain his “determined silence” on the Extermi-
nation of the Jews (Political Writings 122). In the postscript of the letter, Blanchot goes
on to say that Heidegger’s rectoral address is “frightening,” because it subordinates the
language of fundamental ontology to the causes of National Socialism, and thereby cor-
rupts his writing (up to the commentaries on Hölderlin in particular). The first instance
where Blanchot criticizes Heidegger’s political involvement in this specific sense, to be
reiterated at multiple junctures later on, lies within an extended footnote in the revised
version of “Nietzsche, Today” from 1969 (Infinite 210).
16. Whereas some commentators have argued that Blanchot falls silent about, if not actively
hides and distorts, his own adhesion to far-right nationalism and tendency for a certain
anti-Semitism in his political journalism from the 1930s (which has just been published
in its entirety), others have insisted he takes sufficient responsibility for those faults in
later writing. This ongoing debate, coupled with the question of whether Blanchot’s
critical remarks on Heidegger amount to any sort of auto-criticism, is much too complex
to be fully addressed here. For an introduction to the stakes of this polemic, see the
special issue “Les politiques de Maurice Blanchot (1930-1993),” edited by Michel Surya,
in Lignes, no. 43, 2014. Furthermore, extending its implications in another direction,
Nancy has identified what he perceives to be a troubling continuity between Blanchot’s
political engagements on the far right in the 1930s and on the far left in the 1960s. See his
introductory statements to the volume edited by him Maurice Blanchot, Passion politique,
Editions Galilée, 2011, as well as his book The Disavowed Community, translated by Philip
Armstrong, Fordham University Press, 2016.
17. See Critchley, Little 34-89.
18. Blanchot hereby borrows in part from the way that Levinas underscores the futurity
opened by the relation to the death of the other (Time 116).
19. Blanchot distinguishes his approach to “the neutrality of being” explicitly from
Heidegger’s, but also implicitly from Levinas’s transcendent relation to the other, which
requires overcoming the neuter (“l’Etrange” 681).
20. Bruno Chaouat, I think, correctly points out that Blanchot’s critique of authenticity
reverses the Christian work of the negative into désoeuvrement. I disagree, however,
that its passivity, linked to a particular reception of Jewish thought and experience in
postwar France, “seems wedged in an interminable, nightmarish present, undoubtedly
more reminiscent of Beckett than Levinas” (47). What Chaouat overlooks here is both
the relational and affirmative dimension of Blanchot’s approach to the impossibility of
dying that I am trying to spell out.
21. See Critchley, “Originary Inauthenticity” 142.

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The Authenticity of Exile 123

22. For Heidegger, the disclosure of the truth of being is “at work” (am Werk) or “set to work”
(Ins-Werk-Setzen) within the work (“Origin” 162-65). It is in this sense that he conceives of
truth as aletheia, that is, the movement between truth (the unconcealment of the world)
and untruth (the concealment of the earth). The work, in short, is the instigation of the
strife in which the unconcealment of beings as a whole is gradually accomplished.
23. In “Being Jewish,” Blanchot asks whether the exilic condition of being outside the truth
(error), might indicate “another authentic manner of residing” characterized by errancy,
nomadism, and uprootedness (Infinite 127).
24. For a deeply informative study of the influence of the Jewish tradition on Blanchot’s
writing in general, and the convergences and divergences between Exodus and exile in
particular, see Hoppenot (242-261).
25. I am thinking here of the distinction later made by Levinas between the narrative of
homecoming, exemplified by Odysseus in the Greek tradition, and the narrative of exile,
exemplified by Abraham in the Jewish tradition (“Trace” 348). For a notably poignant
study of how Levinas, along with Blanchot, draws from the Jewish tradition in order to
rethinking an ethics of justice, see Bambach (19-21).
26. ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
In an earlier essay treating Blanchot’s literary strategy of engaged disengagement con-
trary to Sartre, Levinas insists that the “irresponsibility” of the work must be restored
to a language of meaning and reintegrated back into the world (“Reality” 131).
27. Blanchot makes similar remarks on the absolute in the contemporaneous essay “The
Disappearance of Literature,” in The Book to Come, Stanford University Press, 2003, p.
196.
28. In “Knowledge of the Unknown,” “Keeping to Words,” and “The Relation of the Third
Kind” (The Infinite Conversation), Blanchot enters into closer proximity with Levinas’s
demand of going out towards the other, in particular the other human being. Yet Blan-
chot does not have recourse either to the notion of God or the transcendence of ethical
responsibility.
29. In response to Nancy’s essay on Bataille and the inoperative community, Blanchot pro-
poses that the bind to the dying other exposes the self to the openness of community
(Unavowable 9).
30. In the first version of “Literature and the Original Experience,” Blanchot affirms the
“community” forged between the writer and reader insofar as they partake in the torn
intimacy of the work (“l’Art” 1948). Though he does not include these statements on
the literary experience of community in the reprinted version of his essay, the chapter
on “Communication” similarly touches on the interplay between the writer and reader.
31. For a notably insightful study of the question of justice in Blanchot’s later writing, with
a particular focus on the ethico-political stakes of the motif of exile, see Fynsk (1-16).

Works Cited
Blanchot, Maurice. “l’Art, la littérature et l’expérience originelle.” Les Temps modernes, nos. 79-
80, 1952, pp. 1921-51, 2195-2220.
---. “L’Etrange et l’étranger.” La Nouvelle Revue française, no. 70, 1958, pp. 673-83.
---. The Infinite Conversation. Translated by Susan Hanson, Minnesota University Press, 1969.
---. “Literature and the Right to Death.” The Work of Fire. Translated by Charlotte Mandell,
Stanford University Press, 1995, pp. 300-344.
---. The Space of Literature. Translated by Ann Smock, Nebraska University Press, 1982.
---. “Thinking the Apocalypse.” Political Writings, 1953-1993. Translated by Zakir Paul,
Fordham University Press, 2010, pp. 119-123.
---. The Unavowable Community. Translated by Pierre Joris, Station Hill Press. 1988.
---. The Writing of Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock, University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

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Chaouat, Bruno. “Forty Years of Suffering,” l’Esprit Créateur, vol. 45, no. 3, 2005, pp. 49-62.
Critchley, Simon. On Heidegger’s Being and Time. Routledge, 2008.
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