Parts and Holes: Heraclitus/Nietzsche/Blanchot

Author(s): Steven Ungar

Source: SubStance, Vol. 5, No. 14, Flying White: The Writings of Maurice Blanchot (1976),
pp. 126-141
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3684302
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 PARTS AND HOLES:
Heraclitus/Nietzsche/Blanchot

Steven Ungar

Philosophy does not raise questions and

does not provide answers that would little
by little fill in blanks.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The
Visible and the Invisible

Although philosophers have always concerned themselves with questions of

language, it is only within the last 100 years that significant attention has been given
over to the status of language in philosophical practice. Beyond the polemics which
tend to blot out the tangents between Continental, British, and American inquiries,
this is a historical sense in which investigations of the widest divergence have created a
critical front in a generalized critique of the sovereignty of philosophical language over
the objects of its analyses. At the polar extremes of such a front, Nietzsche,
Wittgenstein, and Heidegger commonly reject the assumed distinction between subject
and object which has characterized philosophical discourse since Descartes. Erich
Heller was among the first to see the scope of this convergence in which Heidegger's
"tortuous metaphysical probings into language and Wittgenstein's absorption in
language games [. . .] can be seen as two aspects of the same intention: to track down
to their source in language, and there to correct, the absurdities resulting from the
human endeavor to speak the truth."' As Heller goes on to observe, it is an intention
already discernible in Nietzsche's universal suspicion and one which has served
increasingly as an underlying priciple of philosophical rigor.
In a short text of 1971 written in homage to the late Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Blanchot characterizes the language of the philosopher as a double parole, an interplay
between manifest and hidden writings which produces an indirect mode of thought
and a specific kind of interrogation: "Le philosophe cherche en maintenant son
discours manifeste [.. .] en position interrogative; interroger, rechercher, c'est
s'exclure des privileges du langage affirmatif, c'est-g-dire 6tabli, parler au-deli de la
parole, l'ouvrir et la tenir en suspens."2 For Blanchot, indirect interrogation is not
merely another term for the reserve of paradoxes and ironies institutionalized by
professional philosophy. What he refers to is more of a pure activity than a
predetermined set of questions. And while he does not emphasize the point, it should
already be evident that Blanchot's own position on this question(ing) begins with the
premise that philosophical discourse enjoys no authority or privilege whatsoever ("est
d'abord sans droit"). Consequently, his indirect mode is multiple, discontinuous, and
fragmented in marked contrast to the norms of primary or manifest language. It is, in
sum, a critical non-discourse ("ce dis-cours pr6cis6ment sans droit") and the
antithetical correlate of every manifest inquiry: "Le non-discours qui certes nous pose

Sub-Stance No 14, 1976

126

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 Parts and Holes 127

constamment, incessamment une question, n'est peut-6tre pas lui-mame ouvert sur une
question, plut6t hors affirmation, comme hors n6gation et qu'on dirait neutre, si l'on
pouvait par li le disqualifier."3
What Blanchot writes of Merleau-Ponty and the language of the philospher can
serve as well to describe his own writings which often seem to hover within a no-man's
land somewhere between philosophy, fiction, and criticism. For use in the following
discussion, I want to approach a dimension of his writings by studying the notion of
fragmentary writing to be found in texts on Heraclitus and Nietzsche republished in
L'Entretien infini. Beyond the initial convergence of Heraclitus and Nietzsche, the
interrogative mode relates to Blanchot's response to problems of interpretation via a
practice of writing increasingly attuned to the fragmentary.

As discrete entities, fragments are commonly thought of as parts in relation to

wholes. "The words 'whole' and 'part' are normally used for correlative distinctions, so
that x is said to be a whole in relation to somethingy which is a component or a part
of x in some sense or other."4 An immediate ambilance arises since parts can function
either as remainders of former wholes or as present forms of not yet completed
wholes. The tendency is then to see temporal distinction (the part before or after the
fact) as the dominant factor which organizes the various shades of semantic difference
in words such as partie, passage, bout, trongon, extrait, esquisse, and fragment.
But beyond this notion is another in which parts do not relate to wholes and where
temporal distinction yields to non-completion as the essential factor discernible in
antonyms such as ensemble, tout, and unitd. If we compare the two notions, the
qualities of completion and cohesion in the first derive from the premise that
contiguity acts like a kind of gravitational pull which fits together the individual parts
to form a whole which, as in the colloquial expression, "hangs together." To follow
through this first view is ultimately to propose that someone or something speaks
through the material and that parts can acquire fixed meaning or function when
assembled correctly. (We momentarily defer the question of what exactly it might
mean to assemble or reassemble parts "correctly"). In contrast to the first notion,
Blanchot's writings illustrate the separation and brokenness (fragment from the Latin,
frangere, "to break apart") alluded to in the text on Merleau-Ponty: fragmentation as
a verbal mode of disjunction and incompletion.
In place of the term "fragment," Blanchot repeatedly makes use of the adjectival,
"the fragmentary," which we cite as described in the recent Le pas au-deld: "Le
fragmentaire, qu'est-ce qui nous vient de li, exigence, dicision po6tique? Ne pouvoir
plus 6crire qu'en rapport avec le fragmentaire, ce n'est pas 6crire par fragments, sauf si
le fragment est lui-mame signe pour le fragmentaire."5 To sum up at this point: the
question of the fragmentary in Blanchot's writings is to be seen in relation to the
phenomenon of endless fragmentation. In the more recent texts (beginning in 1962
with L 'Attente l'oubli), this fragmentation takes the form of an interrogative mode in
which unanswered (and unanswerable) questions subvert the certainty of inquiry and
turn it into a peregrination without privilege, a disjointed discourse predicated on the
double parole as the ghost or trace of philosophical language.

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128 Steven Ungar

It is never the thing but the version of the

thing.
Wallace Stevens, "The Pure Good
of Theory"

The Heraclitean fragments hold a unique place in the history of Western

philosophy. Despite an abundant tradition of philological and exegetical commentary,
few readers would deny that very little is actually known about the fragments or their
composition. Heraclitus of Ephesus, known in Antiquity as Herakleitos skoteinos (the
"dark" or "obscure" one) was the alleged author of apothegms of which some 130
have survived in the form of subsequent references, paraphrases, and translations. The
Book of Heraclitus is, in fact, a body of terse prose writing having very much the
apperance of transcribed oral pronouncements "unconnected by any obviously logical
transition and expressed in an elaborate oracular style."'6 To see the fragments as
components of a continuous and complete text is misleading in the sense that the
doctrines of plurality and dispersion which they develop are inseparable from their
mode of articulation. In addition, to assume completion precludes the supplemental
reflection which Karl Japsers has seen as integral to the existential value of
philosophical thinking: "For what began in this philosophizing can never be coupled as
an objective possession and remains always to be completed in existential reality."7
Although the fragments are among the earliest documents of Western philosophy,
their indefinite status as text or work has not always been confronted. The question of
the fragment has usually been displaced by other concerns; as a result, a number of
problems have remained unexplored. Firstly, the absence of an original point of
reference has displaced the object of study from the non-existent text to the history of
the various readings to which the fragments have been subjected. An initial working
distinction should be made between what Heraclitus might have wanted to say and the
various interests which have determined subsequent readings. Kostas Axelos observes
that it might be necessary to liberate Heraclitus "autant de la prison de la pure et
simple erudition archdologique et philologique que de la confusion du bavardage
littiraire et des ratiotinations ou des illuminations 'philosophiques.' "8 Without a
definite origin, we contend with the unsettling alternative that the entire modern
approach to Heraclitus might be a false narrative, a fiction derived from the
intellectual history of the text rather than from the text itself: "L'Oeuvre nous a 6t6

transmise dans la foul6e des ideologies et par le moyen de la citation intiress6e."9 To

see this is to respond to the traditional allegation of Heraclitean obscurity by tracing it
to readers who have sought to impose definitive meaning where none might have
existed. It is not surprising that such readers find little substantiation in the fragments
and prefer to project their own misconception onto a flaw, inconsistency, or
ambiguity in the text. As W.K.C. Guthrie rightly notes, such readings remain blind to
the notion that incompletion is an integral factor of the fragments: "To draw from
them a consistent world view or system is inevitably to supply connecting links which
are not in the fragments, and to that extent must be speculative."'0
Blanchot's comments on Heraclitus were prompted by the publication of Heraclite
ou lT'homme entre les mots et les choses (Pans: Belles Lettres, rev. ed., 1968), a
classicist's tour de force by Climence Ramnoux whose title immediately reveals its

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 Parts and Holes 129

orientation towards questions of language and writing. In the Ramnoux study

Blanchot finds a reading of the fragments which insists on the ways in which models of
writings and poiesis become the paradigm on the basis of which cosmology and
metaphysics are predicated: "Chaque phrase est un cosmos, un arrangement
minutieusement calculC oi~ les termes sont dans les rapports extremes de tension.""11
The fragments are more than scriptural play; as cosmology, they recount the cyclical
exchanges between fire and the things of the world:

The ordered universe (cosmos), which is the same for all, was not
created by any one of the gods or of mankind, but it was ever and is
and shall be ever living fire, kindled in measure and quenched in
mesure. (FR. 30)12

Fire lives the death of earth, and air lives the death of fire; water lives
the death of air, earth that of water. (FR. 74)

Motion, separation, and exchange characterize the Heraclitean logos as image of the
tension between sets of opposing forces:

And what is in us is the same thing: living and dead, awake and
sleeping, as well as young and old: for the latter (of each pair of
opposites) having changed 1.ecomes the former, and this again having
changed becomes the latter. (Fr. 88)

There is an exchange: all things for fire and fire for all things, like goods
for gold and gold for goods. (Fr. 90)

We arrive at a paradox whose understanding is crucial to Blanchot's comments on

the Ramnoux study. By upholding a logos as central unifying principle of his
cosmology, Heraclitus adheres to a vision of a monadic cosmos. But while the logos is
preserved in the fragments, its doctrines of movement, difference, and dispersion posit
a mobile quality: a kind of nomadic monad whose components of the universe are in
continuous motion. As cosmology the fragments evoke an image or vision of the
universe as a cycle of continuous change. As text, that cosmology remains incomplete
and broken-fragmentary. Initially this condition derives from an inaccessible original.
Subsequently it functions as a factor within an explanatory model whose incompletion
is analogous to a universe itself incomplete, ever-changing and ultimately unknowable.
In this second dimension questions of language pervade and in particular those relating
to the rhetorical function of the metaphor of fire's cyclical changes. It might therefore
be worthwhile to reconsider the fragments as forming in part an auto-critical statement
on the language of cosmology and metaphysics.
A first reading of the fragments promotes separation and incoherence at several
levels. Without access to pertinent biographic or textual origins, the reader constructs
his own principle of interpretation. This asymmetrical relation to the non-existent
originary text underlines the tentative nature of any interpretation and the

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 130 Steven Ungar

impertinence of reading meaning into what is essentially meaningless text. Two

examples will serve here to illustrate the integration of meaninglessness to the language
of the fragments and how their disjunctive quality calls for a reading capable of
confronting verbal openness.

The bow is called Life, but its work is death. (FR. 48)

Meaning is bifurcated in this fragment by means of a wordplay on the Greek word bios
which can be translated in either of two ways, as "life" or "bow." The two meanings
are indistinguishable as the word is spelled and become apparent by means of a
diacritical stress mark-bios as "life" and bids as "bow." In order to understand the
fragment, the reader must "miss the point;" he must suspend a consistent single
reading of the fragment in order to account for a proposition which refers
simultaneously to both senses of the term. Meaning as such is not located in either of
the two possible senses as much as in their disjunction. The image evoked appears
initially deceptive; yet once the reader makes the shift from singular to multiple
discourses, deceptiveness and obscurity can again be traced to assumptions or
expectations of the reader which are not borne out by the text.

They do not understand how that which differs with itself is

agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow
and the lyre. (Fr. 51)

Again in this fragment, the dispersion of static meaning is derived from an initial
scriptural play on the noun harmonia, an antonym of whose verbal form (diachorizein)
appears in most versions of the first part of the fragment. When the noun harmonia is
seen in relation to its infinitive harmozein ("to fit together"), the basic image of the
fragment can be understood to emphasize the interplay between disjunction and
conjunction: fitting together consists of opposing tension such as that of the bow and
lyre.
The Heraclitean fragments offer Blanchot an enigmatic text whose resistance to
conventional critical approaches situates the reader as an unprivileged presence caught
within the' interplay between words and things: "Au fond, ce qui est langage, ce qui
parle essentiellement pour Hdraclite, dans les choses et dans les mots et dans le passage,
contrari6 ou harmonieux, des uns aux autres, enfin dans tout ce qui se montre et se
cache, c'est la difference elle-m~me, mystirieuse, parce que toujours diffdrente de ce
qui l'entoure."'3 The fragments interest Blanchot because their indefinite status as
written discourse points to the problems relating knowledge and experience to the
materials and techniques of writing. The absence of fixed meaning is initially a
historical circumstance. (All the same, is it mere coincidence that the first version of
the fragments was said to have been destroyed in a fire? ) Verbal play in the fragments
promotes an understanding of the logos as a floating verbal phenomenon: the written
word or gramme. While it articulates a cosmology of cyclical change, the text of the
fragment itself imposes a substantive tension between movement and limitation. That
such movement is described as cyclical already suggests the ultimate perimeters of the

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 Parts and Holes 131

cosmological model as a kind of vicious circle, what Heidegger has called the enclosure
of Western metaphysics. It is this very enclosure and its incipient notions of language
and meaning which, in the wake of the Nietzschean inquiry, have become the objects
of meditation in the past 100 years.

What is given, then, is not the naked thing,

the past itself such as it was in its own
time, but rather the thing ready to be seen,
pregnant-in principle as well as in
fact-with all the visions one can have of it,
the past such as it was one day plus an
inexplicable alteration, a strange
distance-bound in principle as well in fact
to a recalling that spans distance but does
not nullify it.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the
Invisible

A prime concern in the essays on Nietzsche published in L 'Entretien infini is to

show the damage of viewing his writings as a coherent whole, system, or complete
work. Referring mainly to The Will to Power, Blanchot holds that the intentions of
selfishly motivated editors have turned hundreds of notes into a posthumous
Hauptwerk whose status as crowning achievement has tended to dismiss consideration
of its fragmentary nature. Both by orientation and date of composition, Blanchot's
comments participate in the controversy surrounding the Schlechta edition of
Nietzsche's writings.14 In order to dissociate his own reading from the commercial or
intellectual opportunism of previous critics, Blanchot formulates a methodological
safeguard at an early point in his essay and provides a fuller description of the
fragmentary: "Ne jamais concevoir ce tout-le tout non-unitaire-comme un systime,
mais comme une question et comme la passion de la recherche dans l'6lan du vrai, unie
t la critique de tout ce qui a pu atre acquis au cours de la recherche. Ressaisir la
'dialectique rdelle,' la pens6e comme jeu du monde, le texte comme fragment."'5
As in the essay on the Heraclitean fragments, word play appears in the commentary
on Nietzsche as a bifurcation of meaning beyond traditional logic. For Blanchot, it is
an action involving a continuous process, what he terms a passage de la ligne.
Borrowing the expression from the title of a text by Heidegger, Blanchot puns on the
original German, Uber die Linie and plays on a dual reference to a passage above and
consideration of the line. (An additional association might involve an oblique reference
to Uber den Humanismus, a letter written by Heidegger to Jean Beaufret in 1947 in
response to Sartre's contention that Existentialism was a humanism.) As a kind of
passage, Nietzsche's later writings are seen by Blanchot to postulate an experience of
language in which contradition yields to a plurality of affirmations similar to that
referred to in the 51st Heraclitean fragment. With repeated references to the notions
of force, separation, and spacing, Blanchot displays a sensitivity to other recent
Nietzsche criticism in France. Especially in his discussion of the non-dialectic

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 132 Steven Ungar

dimension of fragmentary writing, he openly acknowledges the impact of writings by

Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida: "Comment penser la 'force' comment dire la
'force?' [. . .] La Force fait la diff6rence. Penser la force, c'est la penser par la
difference. Cela s'entend d'abord d'une manibre quasi analytique: qui dit la force, la
dit toujours multiple: s'il y avait unit6 de force, il n'y en aurait point. Deleuze a
exprim6 cela avec une simpliciti decisive: 'Toute force est dans un rapport essentiel
avec une autre force. L'Etre de la force est pluriel, il serait absurde de le penser au
singulier.' "16
The convergence of Blanchot's argument with notions developed by Deleuze and
Derrida should not be misconstrued as a recasting or appropriation of vocabulary. As
early as 1945 Blanchot had discussed disjunctive or non-dialectic thought and the
necessity of confronting the role of contradiction in Nietzsche's later writings: "I1 n'y
a pas de reconciliation des contraires: oppositions, contradictions ne se reposent pas
dans une syth~se supdrieure, mais elles se tiennent ensemble par une tension
grandissante, par un choix qui est ? la fois exclusif et choix de la contraritY."'l7 Both
of the above readings of Nietzsche point to problems of logic and language which
break out from the metaphysical enclosure of the Heraclitean cosmology. In view of
the conceptions of text and writings forwarded by Deleuze and Derrida, the question
of the fragmentary reformulated in Blanchot's more recent reading of Nietzsche is that
of how to express force and difference differentially: that is, without opposing the
movement of writing as a passage de la ligne.
Nietzsche's familiarity with the fragments is apparent to the extent that his critique
of Plato is inseparable from his desire to make Heraclitus less of a presocratic and Plato
more of a post-Heraclitean. In "Philosophy During the Tragic Age of the Greeks," his
defense of Heraclitus against the paltry minds who have diluted his fundamental
perception parallels a similar portrait of Nietzsche in L 'Entretien infini. Responding to
the numerous allegations of the obscure Heraclitean style, Nietzsche writes that while
probably no one has ever written more clearly, the fragments have nonetheless
remained obscure to the precipitous readers. Behind such polemics, a more substantive
bond with Heraclitus is to be found in Nietzsche's characterization of creation and
in the fragments: "A Becoming and Passing, a building and destroying, without any
moral bias, in perpetual innocence, is in the world only the play of the artist and the
child. And similarly, just as the child and the artist play, the eternally living fire plays,
builds up and destroys, in innocence-and this game the Aeon plays with himself."'8
This striking personification of the Heraclitean metaphor may well provide insight into
the central question underlying Blanchot's meditation on the fragmentary. By
suggesting a co-relation between the activities of play and artistic creation and the
phenomena of becoming and passing, Nietzsche emphasizes the mobile factor (the
process itself) over the more common focus on the product of its completion. Since
the fragments present us with an authorless text, the role of process can justifiably
become an object of study and offer enlightenment on how to read the text beyond
the limitation of an intentional approach.
It is also possible to question the factor of completion from another perspective
and reject it in favor of a view in which aphoristic expression becomes a suitable mode
of logical discontinuity in the fragments. In this latter view each fragment would stand

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 Parts and Holes 133

individually as a synecdochal part of a textual process whose essence would be the

continuous deferral of completion: "It would be tempting to regard them, following
modern analogies, as aphorisms, and to see in this form of aphorism the appropriate
expression for soliloquy as a method of philosophizing."19 Soliloquy is commonly
understood as the act of talking to oneself. In reference to the fragments it takes on a
voiceless quality as figuration predominates a silent textual process increasingly
internalized and thus removed from representative functions.
In La Voix et le phinomrne (Paris: P.U.F., 1967), Derrida studied the notion of
sign in Husserl's phenomenology and arrived at a more extreme view of discursive
soliloquy as indication (Anzeigen) rather than expression (Ausdrucken). More recently
in "La Forme et le vouloir-dire", Marges de la philosophie [Paris: Minuit, 1972]), he
has questioned the privilege granted to animating intention (vouloir-dire or Bedeutung)
as they contribute to the philosophical bias of presence and centrality which he finds
incapable of dealing with the specificities of written discourse.20 By seeking the
impact of writing on notions of meaning at work in various philosophical inquiries,
Derrida's strategy of deconstruction is particularly well-suited to confront the
problems posed by the fragments via the slow textual reading prescribed by Nietzsche
as remedy against the precipitousness of the racing readers. A prime insight in such
readings concerns the displacement of intentional meaning by writing. To put it
differently, deconstruction traces the textual process over and above manifest
intention and end product; it seeks the disjunction or cleavage, the double parole
referred to by Blanchot as the latent double of philosophical discourse.
The consequences of such a shift in a reading of the fragments are immediate.
Instead of seeing paradox and obscurity as marginal or stylistic factors, it integrates
them to a cosmos which similartly reveals itself in paradoxical signs. To see this is to
understand that the logos of endless change is not merely a doctrine expressed by the
fragments, but one which informs their very status as text. Beyond that which they
say concerning the cosmos, the fragments also show. And what they show in the
silence of voiceless soliloquy is that the logos of endless impermanence extends (shown
as opposed to stated) to a textual process likewise endless and ever-changing.
If we adopt a similar approach to Blanchot's reading of The Will to Power, the
textual factor in the individual fragments posits an equivalence between apophtegm
and aphorism. When he describes the aphorism in Nietzsche as a mode of logical
disjunction and separation ("relation avec le dehors"), the incipient parallels with
Deleuze and Derrida are again set into relief. In a 1972 colloquium on Nietzsche held
at Cerisy-la-Salle, Deleuze returned to the subject of aphoristic expression and
reaffirmed the parallel by invoking Blanchot's portrayal of The Will to Power as a new
kind of text: "Quels sont done les caracires d'un aphorisme de Nietzsche, pour donner
cette impression? Il y en a un que Maurice Blanchot a mis particulibrement en lumibre
dans L'Entretien infini. C'est la relation avec le dehors."2' For Deleuze, Nietzsche's
use of the aphorism relates to questions of force, intensity, and a wider view of the
text as a field of dynamic forces. Despite the fact that problems of textual mechanics
displace those of traditional analysis, the Deleuzian metaphor of textual machine
points to the very same mode of logical disjuntion which Blanchot had earlier seen as a
passage de la ligne: "Machiner le texte de Nietzsche, chercher avec quelle force

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 134 Steven Ungar

ext6rieure actuelle il fait passer quelque chose, un courant d'6nergie."22

But is the logical disjunction just another metaphor? Does it actually function as
the double of philosophical discourse? Is it merely an invention of demented literary
readers? despite their incision, such questions become of increasing impertinence in
their failure to distinguish between the direct correspondence between logic, word,
and writing as factors affect the very conditions of philosophical thought as a verbal
process. In the Heraclitean text, those factors render disjuntion visible at the most
rudimentary level of the text: "La lettre dans le mot, le mot dans la phrase, la phrase
dans le discours, I'antiphrase contre la phrase, le discourse 'anti' contre le discours
l'un contre l'autre et moi face aux autres, tout se s~pare."23 The writing factor
promotes mobility of thought via a verbal strategy argument which preclude stability
and fixed meaning. The very dislocation of fixed meaning is a necessary condition of
the passage towards a textual practice in which the logos enjoys no autonomy or
priority over its manifest or implied relation of writing to meaning. For Kostas Axelos
and others, the prime task facing the reader has been that of restoring to the fragments
the meanings which Heraclitus had originally intended ("lui donner la parole, le rendre
parlant"). But since this kind of resuscitation is unlikely, intentional readings offer
only limited access to the fragments. More importantly, intentional approaches fail to
heed the exhortation in Fr. 50 to listen to the Logos rather than to the voice of
Heraclitus. In the wake of critical practices which insist on the autonomy of written
text, the exhortation is perhaps a little too self-evident: the fragments offer a historical
precedent, an exemplary case in which the uncertain genealogy of a surviving text
disqualifies the traditional privilege of an originary voice. Nonetheless, the overriding
desire to find unity and system at the expense of the text has prevailed in evident
ignorance that the logos-no permanence except for that of change-is first of all a
metacritical illustration, a voiceless indication on how to read the fragments.
To understand better the import of logical and textual disjuntion, I want to return
to Fr. 51 in which harmony is characterized as a unity of opposites. In this fragment,
where the logos is compared to the bow and the lyre, a significant question of
terminology arises as part of a wider debate. If we trace the movement of thought
within the fragment, the abstract notions of variances and similarity in the first part
are illustrated in the second by a double comparison. While Kathleen Freeman
translates harmonia as "harmony," alternative interpretations are possible. Another
reader, who prefers the term "structure" because it connotes the image of fitting
together in carpentry and masonry, maintains that interpretation of the fragment
divides over the term harmonia and the choice between images of alternating
movement and mutual adjustment: "To choose between these possibilities, and to
grasp the full point of the double simile, it is necessary to understand the adjective
which Heraclitus chooses to qualify harmonia. The witnesses to this fragment are
divided between palintropos and palintonos. In either of these the prefix palin- must
be taken to mean 'back,' 'in a contrary direction;' but -tropos represents the notion of
turning, of some movement which alters, while -tonos represents the notion of
stretching or tension and seems to refer to a static situation."24
Disjuntion can now be seen to appear both as metaphor of the logos of cyclical
change and as sign of how to read the fragments. For what matters in such a reading

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 Parts and Holes 135

hinges less on solving the paradox or enigma than on seeing that paradox and enigma
refer to a universe similarly enigmatic and incapable of complete or definitive
understanding. The status of disjunction in relation to this peculiar kind of
meaninglessness also points to the wider paradox that the meaning of this
meaninglessness is inseparable from the fragmentation (both incidental and logical) of
the text in question.

If only you do not try to utter what is

unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the
unutterable will be - unutterably -
contained in what has been uttered.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Letter to Paul Engelmann, 9/4/17

Blanchot's comments on fragmentation in Heraclitus and Nietzsche extend a

meditation on discontinuity and incompletion discernible throughout his own
narratives and essays. In the texts which form up L 'Espace littiraire and Le Livre d
venir, particular attention is paid to unfinished manuscripts, correspondence, notes,
and diaries-to writings which fit only marginally into academic or critical categories
of book, work, and literature. At the root of such a focus is the discomfiting premise
that literature is impossible as long as it continues to be seen as an eternal institution
impervious to beliefs which fall outside its orthodoxy. And while a number of critics
have studied at length this dimension of Blanchot's critical writings, the volume and
orientation of his subsequent production disproves those who would reduce him to a
nihilist of literature. And while it has been the rule to approach the fictions via the
critical writings, an alternate reading suggests an equivalent development in the
narratives written from the mid-1930's to the present.
In L'Arrit de mort, a first-person narrator punctuates his account of a series of
events with a disjointed commentary on the genesis of the text within which the
commentary appears. As in his other early fictions, the narrative mode of the rccit is
intermediate between originary event and novel proper. Throughout L 'Arrit de mort,
the narrator expresses uncertainty as to the veracity of the events as they appear in the
text:

Ces 6vinements me sont arrives en 1938. J'6prouve t en parler la plus

grande gene. Plusieurs fois d6ji, j'ai tenti de leur donner une forme
dcrite. Sij'ai 6crit des livres, c'est que j'ai espird par des livres mettre fin
g tout cela. Si j'ai 6crit des romans, les romans sont nds au moment oli
les mots ont commence de reculer devant la virit6. Je n'ai pas peur de la
virit6. Je ne crains pas de livrer un secret. Mais les mots, jusqu'd
maintenant, ont it6 plus faibles et plus rus6s que je n'aurais voulu.
Cette ruse, je le sais, est un avertissement. Il serait plus noble de laisser
la v6rit6 en paix. Il serait extr~ment utile $ la vdrit6 de ne pas se
d~couvrir. Mais, A present, j'espire en finir bientat. En finir, cela aussi
est noble et important.25

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 136 Steven Ungar

At first glance, L 'Arrit de mort appears to follow the fictional convention in which
the original event is the touchstone against which the narrative is tested, the text itself
secondary to the pre-textual events which it represents either figuratively or
analogically. At the same time, however, the intermittent passages of self-doubt
outstrip the traditional distinction between pretext and narrative account. The fiction
comes to be its own story in the sense that it examines increasingly the ways in which
it has come to acquire meaning. Once the self-conscious interventions of the narrator
have aroused the reader's suspicions, the account is irrevocably split between narrative
and critical discourses. As such it can no longer be mistaken for an official, complete,
or true representation of anything other than itself.
In Structures of Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), Richard Kuhns
suggests that every text offers to its readers evidence for its own meaningfulness and
an implied method for reading. In L 'Arrit de mort, such evidence falters definitively
on the basis of an elliptical postscript which simultaneously cautions and challenges
the reader who claims to understand (too quickly) what he has read: what has taken
place in the earlier pages: "Ces pages peuvent ici trouver leur terme, et ce que je viens
d'ecrire, nulle suite ne m'y fera ajouter ni rien 6ter. Cela demeure, cela demeurera
jusqu'au bout. Qui voudrait l'effacer de moi-m~me, en 6change de cette fin que je
cherche vainement, deviendrait g son tour le ddbut de ma propre histoire, et il serait
ma proie."26 In such terms, the initial split within the narrative is complemented by a
terminal statement which all but precludes a conclusive reading by pointing to the
fallacies of definitive interpretation.
In L'Attente l'oubli, the text is composed of short passages of dialogue and
descriptive prose whose formal properites suggest paragraphs deformed into modules.
Each unit bears an emblematic indentation mark (a diamond made of four diamonds)
similar to the notation used in electron-dot diagrams to designate co-valant bonding.
The reader proceeding through the text cannot help but be drawn to the play of
repetition and difference between the passages which recount a series of verbal
exchanges between pronomial voices (one presumably female, the other male) in
search of common understanding and dialogue. The disjunction of narrative and
critical discourses in L'Arrit de mort takes on extreme proportions in L 'Attent l'oubli
by means of continuous polyvalence and bifurcation which produce statements
capable of being read in a number of ways. Despite the appearance that the two voices
participate in a dialogue, everything in the text comes to imply misunderstanding. An
initial barrier to understanding is the uncertainty surrounding pronomial shifters.
Stripped of this grammatical frame of reference, dialogue precludes reciprocity and
comes increasingly to thwart satisfactory intercourse. Where L'Arrit de mort altered
the convention logic of narrative fiction, L 'Attente l'oubli furthers the split between
narrative and critical discourses by equating fictional action with language.
Paranomasia (punning and variation around a central radical) is the rhetorical figure
which generates the individual passages and the larger body of the text. This can be
illustrated even in the title whose terms undergo an extended series of transformations.
At various points in the text, the noun attente refers to acts of waiting, expectation,
and anticipation as well as to the homonym of the feminine adjective latente. Similarly
the noun oubli denotes forgetfulness, oversight, neglect, and oblivion.

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 Parts and Holes 137

A brief review of the term attente reveals the model of textual generation as that of
diploiement, a semantic unfolding of various meanings which is also a kind of
deferment-precisely the deferment denoted by attente. Beyond the possible meanings
of an individual term, variants are produced by adding and altering prefixes. The
infinitive attendre reappears as entendre (simultaneously "to hear" and "to
understand") and as the negative noun misentente. Attente, entente, tension,
attention, and intention are all modern French forms derived from the Latin root
tendere ("to stretch"). Used by Blanchot as paronyms, the variants generate
supplementary tautologies and paradoxes which consistently oppose reciprocal
understanding (attente d'entente) and reduce it to ambiguity and terminal misentente:
"L'Attention accueil de ce qui 6chappe A l'attention, ouverture sur l'inattendu, attente
qui est I'inattendu de toute attente. [...] Depuis quand attenddait-il? L'attente est
toujours l'attente de l'attente, reprenant en elle le commencement, suspendant la fin
et, dans cet intervalle, ouvrant l'intervalle d'une autre attente. [. . .]Peut-6tre ne
sommes-nous s6par6s que par notre pr6sence.Dans l'oubli, qu'est-ce qui nous
s6parera? -Oui, qu'est-ce qui pourrait bien nous s6parer? -Rien, sauf l'oubli qui
nous r6unira. -Mais si c'est vraiment l'oubli? '"27
In the above passages, textuality follows paronymic transformation and a logic of
semantic disjunction which makes special demands on the reader. Where L 'Arret de
mort maintained a tenuous play between representation and figuration, L'attente
l'oubli pursues disjunction and dislocation at a semantic level throughout the text. In
both cases, dislocation is irremediable. Backtracking in search of antecedents is futile
once the reader sees that grammar has been discarded in favor of a textuality which
resists logical and grammatical norms.
A final elaboration of the fragmentary is found in Le pas au-dela where Blanchot
uses a decidedly fragmentary mode composed of narrative, dialogue, and critical
discourses. As in the fictions and the essays on Heraclitus and Nietzsche, that which
acts in Le pas au-dela recalls the simulacrum Blanchot had found in the fragments and
The Will to Power. It is a text made up of disparate prose fragments which refer
obliquely to the experience of language in images of tension, movement, and
and mortality. An early portion appeared first in L 'Arc no. 43 (1970) under the
title, "L'Exigence du retour" and it is this expression, inspired by Nietzsche's
thought-experiment, "die ewige widerkehr," which will qualify our original point of
departure in the Heraclitean fragments. As in Fr. 51, a seemingly minor question of
translation is the sign of a more substantive debate. Wiederkehr translates into the
English "recurrence" as opposed to "return" (Wiederkunft) or "repetition"
(Wiederholung). A similar distinction exists in French where retour denotes inverse
motion, recoil, or reaction as opposed to the reversion denoted by rentrde. As invoked
by Blanchot in Le pas au-dela, the expression refers to writing as an endless turning,
the palintropos harmonie of Fr. 51. By characterizing the writing as a tour et retour,
Blanchot offers an illustration of the figurative and non-representational writing which
had taken shape in the earlier narratives and in his discussions of Heraclitus and
Nietzsche.
Fragmentary writing delineates an interrogative mode beyond dialectics because the
logical categories of affirmation and negation oppose the openness of endless

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 138 Steven Ungar

questioning. Only in such a neutral mode can difference be affirmed without

predetermining the movement toward further difference. As the ultimate
characterization of writing, the fragmentary hovers along the extreme limit between
the intelligible and the unintelligible-the pas in Le pas au-deld simultaneously a
prohibition against and a step beyond. For Blanchot the limit also refers to a personal
experience, the term or expirience-limite of death whose impact has come to
preoccupy him since the lengthy meditation on "La Littirature et le droit g la mort,"
at the end of La Part du feu. In almost every instance, that experience has taken on a
negative value as clear and distinct meaning has yielded to unanswerable paradoxes and
mortal silence. It is this imminent return to silence which has haunted Blanchot's
writings and which appears in the blanks, gaps, and spaces which condemn his
reflections on writing to incompletion and the fragmentary.
At the end of the text on Merleau-Ponty, Blanchot returns to the double parole of
philosophical language and reaffirms its subversive function as sign of fallibility and
mortality: "Du moins, lorsqu'un philosophe, un dcrivain se tait, apprenons de son
silence, non pas A nous approprier ce qu'il fut pour le faire servir A nos fins, mais A
nous disapproprier de nous-m~mes et A partager avec lui le mutisme inhumain. Le
discours philosophique toujours se perd & un certain moment; il n'est peut-etre meme
qu'une manidre inexorable de perdre et de se perdre. C'est cela aussi que nous rappelle
le murmure digradant: pa suit son cours. "28
A question of fidelity-rather than resolve the question of the fragmentary, I prefer
instead to restate it and extend the interrogation. My last words will be those of
Blanchot. In L 'Amitie, two final texts are entitled "Le Dernier Mot" and"Le Tout
Dernier Mot." In the latter, Blanchot writes, "Encore une fois ce dernier mot qui ne se
propose que pour simu ler et dissimuler l'attente du tout dernier."29 Finally, in a short
story entitled "Le Dernier Mot" written around 1935 and reprinted in Le
Ressassement &ternel (1951), Blanchot recounts the attempts of an anonymous
first-person narrator to leave a besieged city in which he finds himself a fugitive.
Unable to learn the password of the day (none exists), he rebels against his failure to
understand a language which does not serve him by fleeing to a tower which overlooks
the city. Blinded by his frustration, the narrator is unaware of the fatal consequences
of his quest for enlightenment. At the end, he falls to his death "sans dire un mot." In
L'Attente l'oubli and Le pas au-deld, that fall is deferred, latent in the anguish of
l'attente, simultaneously ignorance and understanding, accident and necessity. Even
after abandoning the quest for satisfactory answers, Blanchot's narrators survive as
long as they continue to ask the questions which project the last word. Terminal
silence circulates within Blanchot's writings as their inevitable truth, deferred and
projected by a subject which charts its passage from latent toward manifest oblivion,
tracing the space or moment separating l'attente from l 'oubli, le pas from Le pas
au-deld whose last words point to the implied silence of terminal fragmentation:
"Libbre-moi de la trop longue parole."30

The University of Iowa

Working versions of this text were read in December 1974 at the MLA seminar, "Sign

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 Parts and Holes 139

Percept Trace" chaired by Andrew J. McKenna and in February 1976 at The

University of Iowa. I am grateful to those whose questions and comments prompted
me to continue work on this project.

NOTES

1. Erich Heller, The Artist's Journey into the Interior (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 217.

2. Maurice Blanchot, "Le Discours philosophique," L'Arc, no. 46 (1971), p. 3. The title, listed
incorrectly in the journal, should read "Le Discours logique."

3. Ibid.

4. Ernest Nagel, "Wholes, Sums, and Organic Unities," in Daniel Lerner, ed., Parts and Wholes
(New York: Free Press, 1963), p. 136.

5. Blanchot, Le pas au-deld (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 60.

6. H. F. Cherniss, "The Characteristics and Effects of Presocratic Philosophy," in David J. Furley

and R. E. Allen, eds., Studies in Presocratic Philosophy (New York: Humanities Press, 1970),
p. 13.

7. Karl Jaspers, The Great Philosophers, trans. Ralph Mannheim. (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
and World, 1966), vol. 2, p. 36.

8. Kostas Axelos, Hdraclite et la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1962), p. 9.

9. Jean Bollack and Heinz Wismann, Hdraclite ou la sdparation (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 46.

10. W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1962), vol. 1, p. 426.

11. Blanchot, L'Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 123.

12. Kathleen Freeman, The Pre-socratic Philosophers: A Companion to Diels, "Fragmente der
Vorsokratiker" (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949), pp. 104-31. Future references to individual
fragments will be taken from this translation and edition.

13. L'Entretien infini, p. 129.

14. For an updated and impartial account of this ongoing polemic, see the lucid remarks by
Werner J. Dannhauser in his Nietzsche's View of Socrates (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1974), pp. 18-19.

15. L'Entretien infini, p. 211.

16. Ibid., p. 241.

17. "Du C6te de Nietzsche." La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 281.

18. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works, trans. M. Mugge (New York: Russell & Russell,
1964), vol. 2, p. 108.

19. Georg Misch, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, trans. E. W. Dickes (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1973), vol. 1, p. 90.

20. Both texts referred to have been translated by David B. Allison in Speech and Phenomenon

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 140 Steven Ungar

(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973) along with the important 1968 piece, "La
Diffirance." Additional writings by Derrida presently available in English include "The Ends
of Man," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 30 (1969), pp. 31-57; "White
Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy," New Literary History, 6 (1974), pp. 5-74
and Linguistics and Grammatology," Sub-stance, no. 10 (1974), pp. 127-81 from Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak's forthcoming translation of De La Grammatologie (Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press, 1976).

21. Gilles Deleuze, "La Pensee nomade," in Nietzsche aujourd'hui? (Paris: Union g~ndrale des
6ditions, 1974), vol. 1, p. 165.

22. Ibid., p. 167.

The same collection contains a number of contributions, including transcriptions of talks
given at Cerisy-la-Salle in 1972 by Derrida ("La Question du style"), Pierre Klossowski
("Circulus Vitiosis"), and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe ("La Dissimulation"). Despite a prolific
output of Nietzsche criticism in France over the past decade, little rapport seems to exist with
Nietzsche scholars on this side of the Atlantic. Despite the evident erudition and awareness of
current Continental philosophy displayed throughout her Nietzsche's Thought of Eternal
Return, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), Joan Stambaugh expresses the
reservations of most non-French critics when she recounts in "Nietzsche Today" (Symposium,
28, no. 1 [spring 1974], pp. 86-93) that the Cerisy colloquium left her bewildered by the
sheer disparity of viewpoints from which Nietzsche was approached.
The figure of Nietzsche continues to play a key role in current French critical process,
having acceded since 1960 to the position occupied by Hegel following World War II. Among
the studies which have promoted this shift, mention should include Deleuze's Nietzsche et la
philosophie (Paris: P.U.F., 1962), Klossowski's Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux (Paris: Mercure
de France, 1969), Michael Foucault's L 'Ordre du dicours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), and Sarah
Kofman's Nietzsche et la mctaphore (Paris: Payot, 1972). For critical assessments of these
and more recent studies, see Podtique, no. 5 (1971), Critique, no. 313 (1973), and Cahiers
de la Compagnie Renaud-Barrault, no. 87 (1974).
At somewhat of a greater temporal remove are the writings of Georges Bataille whose
meditations on Nietzsche in volumes 5 and 6 of his Oeuvres complktes (Paris: Gallimard,
1973) are a necessary complement to those of Blanchot. It is not enough to note that France
has been prolific in Nietzsche studies, for Nietzsche was also the object of study in earlier
periods. To understand why the current wave of readings has taken a specific direction, one
might pursue a comparative reading between Bataille's studies dating from the mid-1940's and
the more traditional approaches commented on by Pierre Boudot in his Nietzsche et les
dcrivains francais, 1930-1960 (Paris: Union g6ndrale des 6ditions, 1975). For additional
studies on the Hegel-Nietzsche problematic, see Derrida, "Un Hegelianisme sans reserve,"
L'Ecriture et la diffdrence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), and three texts by Denis Hollier: "Le
Dispositif Hegel/Nietzsche dans la bibliothique de Bataille," L'Arc, no. 38 (1969), "De
l'au-deli de Hegel A l'absence de Nietzsche," in Bataille (Paris: UGE, 1973), and the first
chapter of Hollier's La Prise de la Concorde (Paris: Gallimard, 1974).
At present the French approach to Nietzsche from the perspective of rhetorics of truth and
falsity is best represented in the United States by Paul de Man whose Blindness and Insight
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1971) provides the frame of reference for views
expressed in "Genesis and Genealogy in The Birth of Tragedy." Diacritics, 2, no. 4 (winter
1972), pp. 44-53 and "Nietzsche's Theory of Rhetoric,'" Symposium, 28, no. 1 (spring 1974),
pp. 33-51. A forthcoming study, "action and Identity in Nietzsche" has been announced to
appear in Yale French Studies, no. 52 (1975).

23. Cldmence Ramnoux, "La Tradition prnisoeratique et les problimes du langage," La Revue de
Mdtaphysique et de Morale, 79 (1974), p. 277. In a 1969 interview, Ramnoux situated her
interpretation of the fragments somewhere between the "excessive rationality" of F. S. Kirk in
Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954) and the
sympathetic readings of Heidegger: "Un Kirk suggbre toutes les lectures possibles, et choisit

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 Parts and Holes 141

tris judicieusement les plus probables, mais il place un 6cran entre la sensibilit6 ancienne et la
n6tre, alors qu'un Heidegger nous apprend & risonner de fagon sympathique avec les textes"
("Entretien avec ClimenceRamnoux," in Raymond Bellour, Le Livres des autres [Paris:
Herne, 1971], p. 228). Heidegger is likely the prime figure behind the current rethinking of
Western philosophy which originates with Heraclitus, characterizes Nietzsche as the last of the
metaphysicians, and finds restatement in the Derridean argument against logocentrism. InAn
Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Garden City: Anchor, 1961),Heidegger
returns to Nietzsche's portrait of Heraclitus in "Philosophy During the Tragic Age of the
Greeks" and argues that Nietzsche was himself a victim of a then current (and false)
opposition between Parmenides and Heraclitus. Additional comments by Heidegger on
Heraclitus are to be found in Votrage und Aufsa'tze, Teil III, 3 ed., (Pfulligen: Neske, 1967),
What is Called Thinking? ,trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row,
1968), and Heraklit (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1970), the proceedings of a seminar directed by
Heidegger and Eugen Fink in 1966-67 at The University of Freiburg in Breisgau.Boundary 2
has announced a forthcoming issue (winter 1976) devoted to "Heidegger and Literature."

24. Edward Hussey, The Presocratics (New York: Scribner's, 1972), p. 44.

25. L'Arret de mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), pp. 7-8.

26. Ibid., p. 148. The postscript was deleted in the 1971 reprint by Gallimard. The ramifications
of this textual change are the pretext of Pierre Madaule's critical narrative, Une Tdche
sdrieuse? (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). See also Roger Laporte's "White Night" in the present issue.

27. L'Attente l'oubli (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), pp. 45, 50, 84.

28. "Le Discours philosophique," p. 4. Compare with the following passage by Merleau-Ponty:
"The philosopher speaks, but this is a weakness in him, and an inexplicable weakness: he
should keep silent, coincide in silence, and rejoin in Being a philosophy that is there
ready-made. But yet everything comes to pass as though he wished to put into words a certain
silence he hearkens to within himself. His entire 'work' is this absurd effort. He wrote in order
to state his contact with Being; he did not state it, and could not state it since it is silence.
Then he recommences..." The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1968),.p. 125.

29. L'Amitid (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 321.

30. Le pas au-deld p. 187.

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