yin "depict actuality itself in a non-actual manner" (PG, 14/PS Hegel's formalist predecessors,

Kant and Fichte, in effect sough formalize the conditions for the possibility of experience. But
Fichte, who attempted to do so by showing that the origi knowledge was the self-identical
self-positing ego, is subject t Hegelian observation that the self-positing of the ego is refle
(and thus not self-identical): the self-positing self splits into a self posits and a self that is
posited.4 Hence, from Hegel's perspect knowledge of the empirical content of consciousness,
i.e., the s it traverses, is exhaustive of what can be known about it. Self- consciousness is a
"unifying unity ... the synthesizing of the manifold into the unity which sustains itself through
this manifold."' In other words, contrary to Fichte, self-consciousness does not have a
structure that belongs to it independent of that which it unifies. To be sure, Hegel designates
the negative as the "soul" and the "self' of con- sciousness (PG, 28/PS, 21), but this "soul" is
to be known exclusively through the shapes of consciousness which it animates. The
"Introduction" to the Phenomenology presents us with an account of the movement of
consciousness as it traverses its succession of shapes. Hegel calls this movement experience.
Experience is the process wherein consciousness establishes and exceeds the limits of its
own comprehension. Hegel writes that Consciousness simultaneously distinguishes itself
from something [the object] and at the same time relates itself to it . . . and the determinate
aspect of this relating, or the being of something for a consciousness is knowing. (PG, 64/PS,
52) Here, knowing is the relation between consciousness and its object. Consciousness
develops because it posits the truth of the object to which it is thus related as an in-itself
beyond its knowledge what the object is for-consciousness. Unlike the Kantian thing-in
however, this in-itself is consciousness itself. Hegel calls it the c In his words,
"Consciousness is, on the one hand, consciousness of the object, and on the other,
consciousness of itself, consciousness of what for it is the True [the concept]" (PG, 65/PS,
54). The succession of shapes of consciousness in the Phenomenology is thus articulated
by way of the gap between object (for-consciousness) and concept, in the difference, that
is, between that of which consciousness is certain (the object) and that which it projects as the
truth (beyond the object).6 This is at once a temporal and an epistemic gap: the in-itself is
projected as something that is now unknown, but that might be known in the future. The
difference that consciousness posits in every act of knowing thus continually renews the
possibility of extending the sphere of its knowledge. In the process of projecting the truth
beyond its object, "conscious- ness suffers violence at its own hands and spoils its own
limited satisfaction" (PG, 63/PS, 51); for although it comprehends its object, it experiences
itself as a beyond that perpetually eludes this limited comprehension. Consciousness suffers
repeated epistemic crises as the object for-consciousness keeps falling short of the
"beyond" which consciousness seeks to present to itself. In this sense, consciousness aims at
making "that which is in-itself express itself outwardly and become for-itself' (PG, 21/PS, 15).
It seeks to become certain of itself as the truth. But this endeavor is foiled because
consciousness, in the very attempt to comprehend itself, repeatedly engenders a breach in the
coherence of its own understanding. In chapter IV of the Phenomenology, Hegel names the
movement which animates self-consciousness desire. The aim of desire is to make explicit
the identity of concept and object (PG, 121/PS, 105). The concept and object are always
already identical because consciousnes is in-itself the identity of concept and object, but this
identity is not for-consciousness; that is to say, consciousness does not have itself in-itself as
its object. Desire is thus the drive for the concept (or the in-itself) to become for-
consciousness so that consciousness no longer posits itsel as a truth beyond the object which
it comprehends. AsJean Hyppolit claims, the aim of desire is desire itself.7 That is,
consciousness seek to have immediate knowledge of itself.8 However, such a state wo involve
a complete actualization of consciousness, fully exhausting potentiality. Consciousness in-
itself would have become wholly fo itself. Nevertheless, the action of generating the
difference betw concept and object is essential to the character of consciousness, a it is
precisely the action of creating this difference that both preven the self-identity of
consciousness and makes possible the progres knowledge. Desire is thus regenerated by the
same movement consciousness that seeks to satiate it; the difference between conc and
object is both the result and condition of the activity of co sciousness. The attempt to
capture the concept as an object o serves to entrench the difference between concept and
object. Hegel claims that the identity of concept and object is ultimate made explicit in
absolute knowing. In absolute knowing, consciou ness intuits itself as time: "Time is the
Dasein of the concept." [Die Ze ist der Begriff selbst, der da ist] (PG, 524/PS, 487).9
However, fr Hegel's point of view, time qua time cannot be intuited, and mu rather, be
experienced as cloaked in the empirical content of histo As a result, the experience of the
absolute identity of concept a object, "the idea of the thought of thought,"'? must be the
intuition o the totality of Spirit's experience. Heidegger makes essentially t same observation:
in attempting to ground Dasein in negativity, a to establish Dasein's (non-)relation to
negativity as the moment vision [Augenblick] which inspires "authenticity," he arrives at
conclusion that the negative cannot be intuited in itself. For Heidegge Dasein's disclosure of
itself in its authentic being would be t disclosure of its own having-been in particular ways.
"As authentically futural, Dasein is as 'having-been.'"' Hegel and Heidegger are agreement,
then, that the "infinity of the difference [die Unendlichk des Untershiedes]" (PG, 123/PS,
107) between concept and object, self-differentiating negativity itself, cannot be intuited
on its own, b must be instead intuited in the shape of the concrete history of experience.
Thus construed, absolute knowing is possible. However, Battaile what appears to be a
deliberate, but suggestive, misreading o claims that absolute knowing would be "definitive
non-knowl and is, as such, "impossible." It would be the experience o cannot be experienced:
"unincorporated negativity."13 This "e ence" could not be an experience, since it excludes all
possib would instead be the absolute renunciation of all experience Bataille called
"sovereignty." Now, in truth, as far as Hegel cerned, Spirit is in fact fleetingly acquainted with
Bataille's eignty as a moment, but Hegel takes this state to be supers absolute knowing,
properly construed. Nevertheless, one He figure does aspire to the "inner experience"
represented by eignty, namely, the beautiful soul. The beautiful soul seeks knowledge of an
object without limit or determinate conten characterizes the beautiful soul as "disordered to
the point ness, and it wastes away in yearning and pines away in consu (PG, 441/PS, 407). In
Hegel's view, the beautiful soul is doom it is fruitless to dwell on the abyssal night of
negativity qua neg uncloaked from the empirical content of the shapes of consc that negativity
engenders. Still, with the figure of the beautiful Hegel at once acknowledges that meditation
on the nature o might lie beyond rational comprehension is an experie rational consciousness
while at the same time ruling it o experience of the absolute. To take seriously the experience
of the beautiful soul (the timate moment of the Phenomenology), as well as Bataille's re
Hegel, is to acknowledge that consciousness is compelled possibility of an object other than
comprehensive recollecti that desire, if it truly seeks its own comprehension, des intuition of
an object which would be impossible to compreh Gerald Bruns has put it, "imagine
Descartes . . . with nothing as a prospect, project, or even condition, with nothing to ex except
his own subjectivity, which is, however, a subjectivity identity . . . a boundaryless interiority
exposed on all sides outside without horizons."'4 Such an object would be, as Bla writes in
Thomas the Obscure, "the beyond which admits o 12 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience,
trans. Leslie Ann Boldt (Albany: State U of New York Press, 1988), 108. 13Jacques Derrida,
"From Restricted to General Economy," in Writing and Di trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978). 852 This content downloaded from 37.76.9.223 on Wed,
19 Oct 2022 13:01:39 UTC All use subject to h M L N yond."15 In Hegelian terms, it would
be the absolute identi concept and object stripped of the recollection of the history o own
experience and turned instead toward the difference of i from itself. The object in
question is not one of the terms of relation, but rather the difference itself. This
difference, I claim, is what Blanchot refers to as the "object of fascination." He speaks of
it as the Outside because it lies beyond rational comprehension. But, to use Bataille's
phrase, the experience of it is "inner experience." This conception of the Outside is a
recasting of the Hegelian conception of the in-itself, which is perpetually beyond what
consciousness can know and yet is its very "soul." As I have mentioned, the relation of
consciousness to the in-itself has a temporal dimension. Accordingly, Blanchot's Outside, like
the Hegelian in-itself, resides on the futural horizon, even though it is not a totality of
possibilities to be actualized. This feature of Blanchot's thought is nicely captured byJohn
Caputo, who describes the Outside as n ."'6 The step beyond or toward it is "the step not
beyond" [le pas au dela].17 It inheres in the present as an interruption of it, but also remains
always yet "to come." It is outside rational comprehension, but recoils upon thought and
becomes its abyssal and ungraspable origin, a point which as definitively inter- rupts the
present as it affirms the inescapability of death. The Outside is at once a threat to the
coherence of thought and its most intimate and constant companion. In his 1953 recit,
The One Who Was StandingApart From Me [Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas], Blanchot
characterizes this companionship as a strange partnership in which the companion offers an
ineluctable resistance, an inscrutable au- thority, and a persistent demand. To converse with
this companion is to undertake, like one of Kafka's protagonists, "the move outside of
truth."18 It is to become exiled from the world, for in seeking the 14 Gerald L. Bruns,
Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1997), 136 15 Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure, trans. Robert Lamberton (Barrytown,
NY: Station Hill Press, 1973), 105. 16John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques
Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 77.
17Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1992). 18 Idem, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln:
Nebraska University Press, 1982), 77. 853 This content downloaded from 37.76.9.223 on
Wed, 19 Oct 2022 13:01:39 UTC All use subject to h VICTORIA I. BURKE nature of the
law which dictates the relation between oneself and the world, to wit, the object of fascination
(which the companion allegori- cally represents), one ceases to inhabit the world. Like the
Heidegge rian "friend whom every Dasein carries with it" (SZ, 163/BT, 206) and who calls to
Dasein as the call of conscience,19 the companion pre- sents an ineffable challenge. Foucault
comments that we ought not to understand this "companion" as "a privileged interlocutor, som
other speaking subject; [rather] he is the nameless limit language reaches. That limit,
however, is in no way positive; it is instead the deep into which language is forever
disappearing only to return identical to itself."20 The Outside reconfigures the possibility of
Hegelian absolute knowing into a "relation to impossibility."21 Here, knowledge of the
explicit identity of concept and object would be impossible, not possible, and therefore
not related to thought by any teleology or possibility of actualization. However,
"impossibility," Blanchot writes, "escapes us by the very fact that there is no escaping
it" (EI, 65/IC, 45). The object of fascination is found to be both "ungraspable" and
"unreleasable."22 Hegel maintained that consciousness supersedes its object only because of
the difference between concept and object. For him, it would have been antithetical to the
nature of conscious- ness, as precisely that which generates the difference between itself and
its object, for this difference itself to become an object, because the difference is indissociably
bound to that which it distinguishes. Blanchot's radicality and his displacement of Hegelian
thought thus lies in the notion that what haunts thought is the impossible possibility of the
becoming-for-consciousness of its own difference from the object. Heidegger, like Blanchot,
differentiates himself from Hegel on this basis: rather than seeking "the restlessness and the
excitement of continual novelty and changing encounters" (SZ, 172/ BT, 216), as Hegelian
consciousness does in traversing shape after shape of consciousness, Heidegger dwells upon
the difference be- 19Jacques Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear: Philopolemology," in Reading
Heidegger: Com- memorations, ed. John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1993). 20 Michel Foucault, "Maurice Blanchot: The Thought From Outside," in Foucault/
Blanchot, trans. Brian Massumi (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 51. 21 Maurice
Blanchot, L'Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 66, and The Infinite Conversation, trans.
and foreword by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota University Press,
1993), 47. Further references to these editions will be identified by the abbreviations EI/IC. 22
Blanchot, Space of Literature, 25. 854 This content downloaded from 37.76.9.223 on Wed, 19
Oct 2022 13:01:39 UTC All use subject to h M L N tween thought and being, a difference
through which though being are understood to be the same [Gleich] but not iden
[Identitdit].23 For Heidegger, the difference enshrouds itself a oblivion of the difference [die
Vergessenheit der Differenz],24 accounts for the being of truth as aletheia, a perpetual str
between concealment and unconcealment. For Blanchot, by con the difference as difference is
a law, which, from the perspect consciousness, can only be disclosed as the abyss, the night
interminable outside. It is the "limitlessness beyond the limit [ limits the limit by turning its
law into a secondary, derived, entity affirms its own necessity as an always prior demand, a
demand tha infinitely at odds with the law of the limit."25 It is precisely dissymmetry in the
relation of thought to the outside that issu challenge that confronts thought.26 Blanchot
mythologizes the impossible object of fascinati Eurydice, the wife of Orpheus. Greek
mythology tells us that Eury was killed before the consummation of her marriage to Or when
she was stung by a viper as she walked in a meadow wit bridesmaids. Overwhelmed with
grief, Orpheus undertook the ney to the Underworld where he won the favor of the gods by
play his lyre. The gods permitted him to return Eurydice to the surf the earth on the condition
that he not gaze upon her during journey. But Orpheus could not resist looking at her, and the
g Orpheus condemns Eurydice to the Underworld for eterni Orpheus is guilty of what
Blanchot calls impatience, the attem bring to light that which cannot reveal itself: "The deep
does reveal itself directly, it is only disclosed hidden in the work," w Blanchot.28 It is in this
sense that we are to understand the obj 23 In the German, Gleich means formally, but not
numerically identical, w Identitdt means both formally and numerically identical. 24 Martin
Heidegger, Identitat und Differenz (Pfullingen: Verlag Giinter Neske Trans. Joan Stambaugh,
Identity and Difference (New York: Harper and Row, 196 25 Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme
Contemporary (New York: Routledge, 1997), 93. 26 As Leslie Hill points out, the Outside is
not to be understood as analogous to Levinas call "the Other," although at first glance the
inscrutable resistance offer the Outside may appear to simulate "the Other." Most of the texts
cited in thi were published prior to Levinas's 1961 Totalite et Infini, and Blanchot's later read
Levinas insists on a secularization and multiplication of what Levinas call the r to the Other.
Hill, ibid., p. 178. 27 This version of the myth, which was derived from Ovid and Virgil, can
be fo Edith Hamilton, Mythology (New York: New American Library, 1940), 103-5. 28
Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 171. 855 This content downloaded from 37.76.9.223 on
Wed, 19 Oct 2022 13:01:39 UTC All use subject to h VICTORIA I. BURKE fascination to be
impossible: Orpheus is compelled by a des pursuit of which destroys the conditions of its own
fulfilme desire, which Blanchot calls fascination, imperceptibly a consciousness. Both
intimate companion and threat, it is tha compels thought beyond itself. In it we find the unma
unthought of what Hegel calls absolute