MAURICE BLANCHOT

Enigma

Dear Madam,

Please forgive me for answering you with a letter. Reading yours, in which
you ask me for a text to be placed in the issue of an American university
journal (Yalel on the topic: "Literature and the ethical question," I was
frightened and nearly in despair. "Once again, once again," I said to myself.
Not that I pretend to have exhausted an inexhaustible subject, but on the
contrary with the certainty that such a subject returns to me* because it
cannot be dealt with. Even the word "literature" is suddenly foreign to me.
What of literature? And of this "and" between literature "and" ethics? If I
am not mistaken, Adorno, in one of his books on Alban Berg, whose student
and friend he was, tells us that one day Schumann spoke of his horror of
music. I In the same way Alban Berg [remember Haydn's symphony, simple
though it may be, entitled "The Farewell Symphony") sought to give shape
through music to the disappearance of music. And I remember a text on
literature where it is said that it has a clear destiny which is to tend towards
disappearance. Why then still speak of literature? And if one puts it in
relation with the question of ethics, is it to remind us that the necessity to
write fits ethic) would be nothing other than the infinite movement by
which it vainly calls for disappearance?
Holderlin already:

Why be so brief?
Do you no longer love?

*Can also be read "is my due." [Translator's note]

1. I question this citation. Schumann certainly suffered from an excess of music and
may thus have said, in moments of depression or exaltation: "Too much music."

YFS 79, Literature and the Ethical Question, ed. Claire Nouvet, © 1991 by Yale
University.

8
 MAURICE BLANCHOT 9

Song as once before! You who, younger,

In the days of hope when you sang,
Knew not how to finish�
* * *

And once again Mallarme.

In an old text fa letter written in the spontaneity of abandon), he makes
Poe's opinion his own:2 "No remnants of a philosophy, the ethical or the
metaphysical, will show through; I add that it must be included and la­
tent." (But isn't Mallarme here restoring ethics? Hidden, it reserves its
rights.) "Th avoid some building reality, remaining around this spon­
taneous and magical architecture does not imply a lack of powerful cal­
culations and subtle ones, but one does not know about them, they them­
selves make themselves mysterious on purpose." It is the essence in
literature to be free only in the rules or the structures which intentionally
slip away; they no longer act, if they show themselves.
But Mallarme then offers us an affirmation whose beauty we perceive,
but which seems to challenge what he has just said. Words always out of
reach: "Song surges from innate source, anterior to a concept, so purely as to
reflect outside a thousand rhythms of images."
An obsession with anteriority. We find it under many forms: "To the
anterior sky where Beauty blooms" and elsewhere fHerodiade): "By the
pure diamond of some star, but/Anterior, which never shone."
Isn't it "clear", then, that what is first, is not ethics (moral requirement I?
We would be tempted to say so, if we did not also have to say that, for
Mallarme, "first" is not sufficient, is not suitable: ''Anterior to what would
be first and here we are caught in an endless movement. Thus, after having
stated: "Song surges from innate source, anterior to a concept," Mallarme
comes back to setting himself limits: "The intellectual armature of the
poem" which is less in the organization of the words fthe rhymes or the
rhythms) than in the space which isolates them. "Significant silence no less
beautiful to compose, than verses."
One will understand, I hope, that if I speak of contradictions, it is to
better experience their necessity. The pure surging from the source. And
nevertheless the calculations which only act by slipping away. Or the intel­
lectual armature which composes itself fspace, blank, silence), thus work
and mastery. And nevertheless to contain what lightning ofinstinct, simply
life, virgin, in its synthesis and illuminating everything. Innate and setting
rules for itself; anterior to all principles and simply life, virgin. Contradic­
tions without conciliation: it is not a question of dialectics.
And I will add, to stammer an answer to your question on writing and
ethics: free but a servant, in front of the other.

2. Citations borrowed from "Writings on the book" (Editions de l'eclat).

10 Yale French Studies

An enigma, all this? Yes, enigma such as evoked by Holderlin's words:

Enigma is the pure surging of that which surges.

Depth that shakes everything, the coming af the day.

And again forgive me for this letter so abruptly ended, as if there were
nothing left to say but to apologize, without exonerating oneself.

Maurice Blanchot

Translated by Paul Weidmann