Looking at the limits of language, and the limits of death.
Blanchot
Blanchot has described both literature and death as mountains with two slopes (1). In terms of literature, you have the slope of negation, where in giving something a name you are moving away from its essence, abstracting it in order to communicate it. This is the slope of 'meaningful prose'. On the other hand, there is a slope to literature which resists revealing, which holds itself back and doesn't make itself clear.. This side Blanchot relates to poets (especially his main rave Mallarme), this is not about conveying a meaning but looking at words and language itself, and looking at the things and beings that are there that are not in the world, words referring to nothing other themselves and each other (not 100% on this mysterious opaque slope but I think it goes something like that).
Mallarme
On these this first 'slope', the limit then. Literature cannot actually translate experience, interiority, essence, or singularity (these are beyond its limits). I can have a profound experience of any type, write about it in words, and what I've done is transformed a singular experience in a shared and universal form, and moreover the words I've used do not actually relate to my experience but to the other words they are structured alongside. So, in this sense, literature's limit is singularity of expression, conveyance of interiority. There is also the limit which falls within literature, the limit of what we are able to see as readers or writers. This relates to the second slope, and inscribes the way we are only able to access or connect to part of what literature is, part of literature will always unavoidably lie beyond our limit (Blanchot says it is in this opacity that the quality of literariness resides). Literature will always, in a different sense to the singularity it denies on the first slope, retain its own stubborn singularity and autonomy, beyond the reader or writer.
The two sides of death also relate to singularity. There is first what is known as the 'authentic' death, the death which philosophers talk about, the death which inscribes life - any knowledge of the world is dependent on our ability to transcend our immediate surroundings (to connect with for example, 'truth', literature, imagination, or even God - Heaven forbid). This philosophical death describes a relation to truth which transcends life, and for which we need to negate our immediate existence to find. In this philosophical death, we find we gain our lives by this relation to death (this negating of life); we find the the possibility of impossibility (if impossibility is the lack of life, or possibilitites); we also find the possibility of singularity (whilst in most parts of our life we can be replaced - in our jobs, homes, even families - we are the only ones who can die our deaths). Only in our deaths are we truly individualised or made singular(2). As death offers possibility and self by delimiting and demarcating the borders of life so that we may transcend those borders and thereby find knowledge, death is also the limit of these possibilities, the possibility of impossibility.
Blanchot, in response to this philosophical death, points out that as well as offering 'possibility' in a positive sense, death is also the impossibility of possibility, a negation. In in a turning inside out of the philosophical concept of death, Blanchot's death just wears us down. Dying, for Blanchot, is interminable. 'I' disappear in the 'passivity' of dying, death does not offers the meaning which philosophical death does, Blanchot shows that meaning to be impossible, and therefore says that death is impossible - what he means, probably (I mean really who actually knows) is that authentic, individuated or meaningful death is not possible.
Death, instead, is a way we are exposed to the horror of an existence deprived of the world. 'Instead of finding in death the ground of my individuality, that which is properly mine and in regard to which I cannot be replaced, 'my' death exposes me to the dissipation of myself, to experience of an insufferable anonymity.'(3)
So literature and death are both liminal, they inscribe the limits of the possible.
Literature denies the writer their singularity, they expose the interiority of their experience to abstraction and universalising. Death denies possibility, denies the possibility of an authentic and meaningful death, it makes the possible impossible.
The space of literature, in its self-contained existence, denies us clarity, stability, openness - in all cases, part of a text remains shut to us (it is as 'other'). Similarly, we cannot experience death, we can only know death through the death of the 'other'; it is the unexperienced experience at the ultimate limit of our existence. Literature, also, is unexperienced (abstract) experience at the ultimate limit of our existence, it cannot relate to 'being', existence or the world as it is, only to itself.
Both literature and death, then expose us to what Blanchot calls us 'the horror of existence without meaning' (4). Literature guards part of its meaning, in dying we face the impossible, meaning is again denied us. I'm sure Blanchot says somewhere, or I've read someone who said that he said, that we as people do not face this, that we look for certainty, that we cultivate it where-ever possible, but that if we are honest about the nature of literature, and the nature of death, we find ourselves up against our limits before we even know it.
It's hard to get your head around the kind of absence Blanchot proposes at the heart of literature, he refers to it as the absence of a centre, but a centre which is still present in a displaced way. There is something about literature which feels solid in an immersive kind of way, and maybe that's why I feel this resistance, because that solidity is comforting. Looking at Blanchot and Derrida cannot help but show this to be the impossibility it is, words do not create solid worlds, they're meaning is relational (relational to other words, not external reality) and within the worlds they create there is always, but always, somethings beyond our grasp.
Second post on this topic will be looking at the other and how our comfortable and typical boundaries between life / death, text / world, literature / truth are (but of course) problematic, and what can be said about the relationship of the limit of literature and the limit of death.
(1) Literature - see Blanchot's Literature and the Right to Death, published in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, 1999, (Station Hill: Barrytown NY), pp385-389 Death - see Maurice Blanchot, Haase and Large, 52
(2) MB, pp46-48
(3) MB, p53
(4) L&TRTD, p389
