This article was downloaded by: [North Dakota State University]On: 03 November 2014, At: 07:28Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal for Cultural ResearchPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcuv20

Impersonal Speech: Blanchot, Virno,MessianismLars IyerPublished online: 20 Oct 2009.

To cite this article: Lars Iyer (2009) Impersonal Speech: Blanchot, Virno, Messianism, Journal forCultural Research, 13:3-4, 281-296, DOI: 10.1080/14797580903101185

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14797580903101185

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH VOLUME 13 NUMBERS 3–4 (JULY–OCTOBER 2009)

ISSN 1479–7585 print/1740–1666 online/09/03-40281–16© 2009 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/14797580903101185

Impersonal Speech: Blanchot, Virno, Messianism

Lars IyerTaylor and Francis LtdRCUV_A_410291.sgm10.1080/14797580903101185Journal for Cultural Research1479-7585 (print)/1740-1666 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & Francis133/4000000July-October 2009Degree Programme Director LarsIyerlars.iyer@ncl.ac.uk

This article addresses Virno’s diagnosis of the capture of the ability to speak inpost-Fordist capitalism by bringing his notion of virtuosity into dialogue withBlanchot’s notion of messianism. As the author shows, Virno explores the way inwhich what he calls virtuosity draws upon what he calls the “background” ofspeech, which, the author argues, is linked to the idea of the impersonal form“one speaks” in Deleuze and Guattari. Blanchot gives an alternative account ofthis “background”, focusing on its operation in the interpersonal relation hecharacterises as messianic. Since Blanchot’s account of the interpersonal rela-tion is developed in his theoretical work chiefly through a reading of Levinas, theauthor traces Blanchot’s divergence from his friend on the key question of thesignificance of the Other, which Levinas places at the heart of his reflections onthe ethical. The author then shows that this divergence also accounts for the wayin which Blanchot reads Levinas’s notions of Judaism, God and the Messiah.Finally, the author shows how a redeveloped notion of virtuosity might give riseto a practice in which the capture of our ability to speak is challenged at the levelof our interpersonal relations. The author uses Blanchot’s reflections on theevents of May 1968 as an example of the way in which we might “affirm thebreak” such virtuosity or messianism constitutes.

In “Subjectivity in Language”, Emile Benveniste notices something peculiarabout the word “I”. It is not a concept that would grasp the particular in termsof a universal. Nor does it refer to that particular in its singularity, since the word“I” is wholly taken over by anyone who speaks. But here, it is not as if there firstexists a subject who then expresses himself using language. The “I” is a positionafforded by language that gives birth to the subject. As Benveniste (1971, p. 227)writes: “In some way language puts forth ‘empty’ forms which each speaker, inthe exercise of their discourse, appropriates to himself and which he relates tohis ‘person’.” As such, the capacity of the speaker to relate such forms to himselfdepends upon his birth as a speaker. He does not take up the empty form of the“I”, since he, as a subject, does not pre-exist the personal pronoun. Thenlanguage is not first of all personal, lending itself to the subject who can thensay “I”, but the condition of the subject to use personal pronouns. Somehow, thesubject takes up a position with respect to the impersonal streaming, the “empty

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

th D

akot

a St

ate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

7:28

03

Nov

embe

r 20

14

282 IYER

forms” of language. But how is this possible? What is the relation betweenimpersonal speech and the language spoken in the first person?

It may seem to imply that there is a transcendental structure of language, asthough language as such and in general exists before and after its speakers. Butthe structure itself is in the individuals who speak, even as it cannot be reducedto any one individual speaker. As an emergent pattern, it has a kind of agency ofits own, depending upon the relations of feedback that give it an ever-provisionalsubstance, letting it quiver above a particular community of speakers like a rain-bow over a waterfall. Language is not, accordingly, an interior affair — it is notsolely a matter of answering to the desire to articulate inner states — but belongsto our interrelation. As Deleuze and Guattari (1988) explain, between us, andfloating among those networks of practices and institutions of which we are apart, our utterances are collective and never simply individual, so that we mustbe thought together with others, as part of a whole that we speak when wespeak.1 This might seem to suggest that we would have to supplant the emphasison the “I speak”, the linguistic cogito, replacing it with the “we speak” of alinguistic community, but it is not simply a question of replacing the individualsubject with a collective one. Rather, the individual speaker must be thought inthe context of more complex networks, through whom local connections hardenthemselves into what is taken for granted in the social world through those feed-back loops that reinforce and replicate particular forms of social relation. Thisdoes not mean that the individual agent does not matter, but implies that tothink the individual without the structure is to forget the interdependency, therelation of interdetermination between these terms. The same follows if oneprivileges structure, treating it as invariable and eternal, forgetting thereby thefluid dynamism of the social relations that give it life. Neither structure nor indi-vidual exist in their own right, which means language cannot be thought eitherin terms of the exclusivity of a linguistic structure — that is, as a set of differen-tial oppositions that define phonemic relations — or particular acts of speech, inwhich a particular subset of relations is selected from the system. This meanslanguage is never entirely in possession of the individual; indeed, it is not “in”the agent at all. We might say the agent is in language, and that language is atrans-subjective phenomenon.

This is what Deleuze and Guattari suggest when they claim language is notrepresentational. Language, rather, is in the world, acting within it and mixingwith it. As such, it does not simply facilitate communication by means of refer-ring to the shared world of a given society, but is itself a structuring process thatconstructs that world. On the one hand, language lends itself to the productionof a stable plane of meanings and subjects who communicate them, giving riseto the representational account of language, but on the other, there is also thechance that it introduces instability into that plane, distributing the relationshipbetween word and world anew. Language does not simply correspond to theworld, but changes it. As such, language must be understood to circulate rather

1. I am indebted to Lecercle (2002) in my account of Deleuze, Guattari and language.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

th D

akot

a St

ate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

7:28

03

Nov

embe

r 20

14

IMPERSONAL SPEECH: BLANCHOT, VIRNO, MESSIANISM 283

than merely represent; words do not signify things, but are themselves things.Meaning is not only what is meant; speaker and listener are part of an unstablerelation of forces that means the relation between the represented and whatwould be represented is never simply given.

But what happens when these forces dominate the speaker, when they capturewhat can be said? Foucault shows us how the relation of speakers to the “onespeaks” passes through different regimes. In the classical age, the being oflanguage is confined by the regime of representation. By the nineteenth century,it has begun to escape these limits, losing its unifying function and rediscoveringit in a new sense in a certain literature. But one possibility Foucault does notconsider is explored by Paolo Virno (2004) who, in A Grammar of the Multitude,explores the capture of language use in contemporary capitalism, arguing thatthe ability to speak — along with other generic capacities — has been directlyappropriated by post-Fordist capitalism. This appropriation has its limits: Virnoexplores the way in which what he calls “virtuosity” might draw upon the “back-ground” of speech — what I have been thus far calling the “one speaks” or imper-sonal speech — such that it outplays the use to which it has been put. It is interms of his diagnosis of post-Fordist capitalism, and the emancipatory promiseof his notion of virtuosity that I want to present the idea of the Messiah and, inparticular, Blanchot’s notion of messianism, which, although scarcely developedin his own work, can be lent substance and distinctness by reading it alongsidethat of Levinas. Broadening and refining the notion of virtuosity by bringing itinto dialogue with messianism, I want to explore its relation to politics, present-ing Blanchot’s notion of community and his participation in the events of May1968 as attempts to understand how the “background” of speech might beproductively engaged.

***

In A Grammar of the Multitude, Paolo Virno (2004) refocuses our attention onidle speech as part of his more general attempt to rethink political praxis. Forhim, the Fordist conception of production is defunct, but not the Marxian analysisof labour power which, indeed, completes itself in our world. As the aggregateof mental and physical capacities of the human being — the generic aptitudes suchas the ability to use language and to learn, the ability to memorise and abstract,the potential of the living body in general — labour power is more suitable thanever as a name for the changed conditions of production, which now refers to themost generic aptitudes or capacities that have been mobilised in contemporarycapitalism. The potential of the living body, of human labour power, can now bebought and sold like any other commodity. “[T]he totality of poietic, ‘political’,cognitive, emotional forces” directly powers post-Fordist production (Virno 2004,p. 78). So it is that the post-Fordist model of production is now projected “intoevery aspect of experience, subsuming linguistic competencies, ethicalpropensities, and the nuances of subjectivity” (Virno 2004, p. 108).

Virno’s broader aim is to indicate the possibility of a retrieval or recapture oflabour power such that the forces in question might be engaged anew. In so doing,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

th D

akot

a St

ate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

7:28

03

Nov

embe

r 20

14

284 IYER

he points to a feature of language that should remind us of Foucault, Deleuze andGuattari’s conception of the “one speaks”. In so doing, Virno retrievesHeidegger’s notion of idle speech, Gerede, which is contrasted by the Germanphilosopher to that form of discourse, Rede, which allows Dasein to articulate thestructure of its being-in-the-world. Idle speech reflects the aimless curiosity ofDas Man, the anonymous “one” or the “they” who, in place of singularised andresolute Dasein, are content to pass the word along, assuming no responsibilityfor what they actually say. It is not individual Dasein who speaks in idle speech,but the impersonal “one”, who is merely a relay for chatter. Rejecting the ideathat idle speech would be a speech of convention or stereotype — and passingover the discussions in Heidegger’s work of the impersonality of Dasein andfundamental mood2 — Virno claims to value it because it is without foundation,without a secured correspondence to the things themselves. As such, it promisesthe chance of invention and experimentation — a kind of communication thatdoes not merely reflect the world as it is, but acts to transform it.

Considered for itself, Virno says, idle speech resembles background noise. It isquite insignificant, and yet it is also that repository for “significant variances,unusual modulations, sudden articulations”; a noise that is no longer linked toanything specific — as a drill is to drilling or the roar of an engine to a motorbike— but to the aimlessness of chatter (Virno 2004, p. 81). Idle speech, for Virno, isa way of naming the background from which speech in the first person — speechfor which the speaker is responsible and that confirms a particular conception ofthe world — emerges. It names the murmuring indeterminacy speech carries withit; the “one speaks” upon which personal speech depends. Just as authenticityis, for Heidegger, a modification of inauthenticity, what I say in the first personis a modification of the impersonal streaming of speech, the “third person”,whose dummy subject is the anonymous “one” which receives Heidegger’s appro-bation. Speech draws upon this “one” such that the relationship between speakerand language is never secure. But this lack of security — the fact that languagenever simply articulates the structures of a pre-existing world — is, for Virno, thestrength of labour power. Without script, open-ended and improvisational, thespeaker is a kind of virtuoso. It is in terms of such virtuosity that Virno attemptsto think the interaction between background and foreground, between third- andfirst-person forms of speech (see Virno 2004, pp. 52–56).

Virtuosity becomes with Virno a name for a particular engagement with the“one speaks” that is found between language and the speaker as each term isprecipitated out of their interaction and altered thereby. It is a question neitherof speaker nor language by themselves, but of their interaction, understood as aspace of engagement in which we cannot distinguish the active from the passiveas, for example, Kant does in the distinction between the spontaneity of theunderstanding and the passive receptivity of the aesthetic of intuition.3 But, as

2. For an excellent discussion of the importance of the impersonal in Heidegger, see Large (2002).3. These formulations were developed in conjunction with the author of Larval Subjects (Sinthome2009).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

th D

akot

a St

ate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

7:28

03

Nov

embe

r 20

14

IMPERSONAL SPEECH: BLANCHOT, VIRNO, MESSIANISM 285

such, virtuosity is liable to capture by those forces which would put it to work inpost-Fordist forms of capitalism. Language, for Virno, does not describe theworld or represent it, but changes it, selecting and making salient that encounterwith the background which gives it consistency. This is its performative dimen-sion; the act it is able to accomplish. But how does virtuosity show us how wemight escape the absolute interweaving of the pre-individual with the individual,the complete fit between potential and execution towards which contemporaryproduction tends?

Perhaps messianism — Blanchot’s messianism — offers something of an answer.

***

Towards the end of The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot retells the Talmudicstory of the Messiah who waits in hiding with the beggars and lepers at the gatesof Rome. He is recognised and asked, “When will you come?” Blanchot comments:“His being there is, then, not the coming.” The Messiah is, in one sense, present— he is there with the others, a beggar among beggars, a leper among lepers; heis one to whom questions can be asked (Blanchot 1986a, pp. 141–142). But, forBlanchot, “His presence is no guarantee”; “With the Messiah, who is there, thecall must always resound: ‘Come, come’” (Blanchot 1986a, p. 142).

“When will you come?” The Messiah, as Scholem (1971, pp. 11–12) comments,is often understood in the rabbinical literature to be already amongst us. He ispresent, but occulted; and here, Blanchot highlights that this occultation occurseven in the Messiah’s ostensible presence. It is as though the Messiah were hereand not yet here, present and not yet present, still to come. This, to be sure, isalso in keeping with the literature on the Messiah. The Jewish idea of the Messiahis not eschatological, as it is in Christianity. The Messiah does not arrive at theend of a linear course of time, but interrupts it, redeeming it. Is it for thisredemption that Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, the questioner of the Messiah, is asking?“When will you come?”, he asks. “Today”, the Messiah replies to his questioner.

In the traditional recounting of this story, the Rabbi does not believe him, andcomplains to Elijah, suspecting he is being lied to. What the Messiah means is“Today, if you will hear his voice”, says Elijah. In The Writing of the Disaster,what Elijah says is put into the mouth of the Messiah. To the unnamed ques-tioner’s “When will you come?” we find, “Now, if only you heed me, or if you arewilling to heed my voice” (Blanchot 1986a, p. 142).

When will the Messiah come? The messianic literature sometimes suggests acausal link between the morality of human beings and the Messiah’s coming. TheMessiah will come only if specific conditions are met. Is this why the Rabbi isunable to truly hear his voice? Certainly, the Messiah is, for him, a man amongmen, a human being as ordinary as you or I. But in another sense, he is not thereyet; he is still to come. Then, to hear the Messiah means a condition must havebeen met. One would have to have been able to receive the Messiah’s speech; tohave earned the capacity to hear it.

Still commenting on the messianic literature as it passes through the readingsof Levinas and Scholem, Blanchot notes that the Jewish Messiah is not necessarily

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

th D

akot

a St

ate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

7:28

03

Nov

embe

r 20

14

286 IYER

divine. Certainly he is a comforter, even “the most just of the just”, as is histraditional apothegm, “but it is not even sure that he is a person – that he is some-one in particular” (Blanchot 1986a, p. 142). As Scholem (1971, p. 22) comments,the figure of the Messiah is always vague in the literature: “Features of thevarying historical and psychological origins are gathered into this medium offulfilment and coexist within it so that they do not furnish a clear picture of theman.” But Blanchot (1986a, p. 142) sees in this vagueness something other thanunderdetermination: “When one commentator says, The Messiah is perhaps I, heis not exalting himself. Anyone might be the Messiah — must be he, is not he.”Anyone might be the Messiah — this is truly surprising. For Scholem, the Messiahis occulted, waiting in hiding; perhaps there are conditions set for his arrival. Butnow Blanchot suggests that the Messiah is hidden in each of us, inseparable fromus, and that we each of us might be in some way the “comforter” and “the mostjust of the just”. But how so? What licenses this interpretation?

***

Blanchot’s reflections on messianism are inextricable from his accounts ofJudaism, religion and the ethical, which are almost exclusively developedthrough readings of the work of Levinas. To understand his notion of messianism,it is therefore necessary to enter into the tangled web that draws together theirmajor publications and, in particular, the extended commentary on Totality andInfinity (Levinas 1969) one finds in The Infinite Conversation (Blanchot 1993).

Levinas focuses in Totality and Infinity on a particular kind of relation, therelation to the human Other, Autrui, which he claims obtains in a particularact of language, as speech. He characterises this relation as asymmetrical,insofar as one of its terms, the Other, is said to be higher than the other, theego, and unilateral, insofar as the Other is said to face the ego and to call itto its responsibility. For Levinas, this moment of facing, of expression, grantsthe ego a stable and enduring ipseity, a selfhood. Prior to this moment, wehave what can be called a proto-self, separate and selfish, concerned only tosecure its nourishment in an uncertain environment. At the moment of expres-sion, the self comes together in its response to the Other, which Levinasthinks as the linguistic act in question. Speech opens in the response of theego to the Other’s silent expression. It is in discourse, language, that I cancome to myself as an ego.

What does this mean? I become a self only at the moment when I can say “I”in response to the face of the Other (or imply the first-person position in myresponse to another). As such, I owe my egoity, my ipseity, to the alterity of theOther which, with respect to the meditation which occurs, for Levinas, at a prac-tical and conceptual level by the ego (he calls it the “same”), can be calledimmediate. Whereas philosophers have, according to Levinas, traditionally priv-ileged the mediating activity of consciousness, this activity is predicated upon alinguistic act of acknowledgement and hospitality that is upstream of anythingthe ego might want or not want to do. Consciousness cannot help but be affectedby the Other such that its constitutive activity fails. That is to say, consciousness

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

th D

akot

a St

ate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

7:28

03

Nov

embe

r 20

14

IMPERSONAL SPEECH: BLANCHOT, VIRNO, MESSIANISM 287

does not measure the form of the relation to the Other in advance, which is whyLevinas says the Other reaches me as the immediate.

Here, speech is very different from the ideality that consciousness introducesin the form of language. As we have seen, language, to the extent that it dependsupon universals, passes over the singularity of the immediately given. But forLevinas, speech, understood as the address to the Other, acknowledges thisimmediacy (that is, it responds to the singularity of the relation to the Other) bysuspending the constitutive work of consciousness. Speech, accordingly, is notvoluntary, since it does not stem from the will (which is governed by the sameautonomous demand that governs consciousness), though nor can it be calledinvoluntary either, since consciousness is not present to speech such that it mightstruggle against it. Speech simply happens as the acknowledgement of the Otheras it suspends that form of relation which Levinas calls the same. This is why Levi-nas uses formulations such as “relation without relation” when writing aboutspeech: what he wants to emphasise is the suspension of the constitutive workthat makes reality seem to be the result of linguistic representation.

***

There is, however, a danger implicit to Levinas’s presentation of the Other towhich Blanchot is alert — that the relation to the Other is accorded a status thatmerely reproduces the constitutive activity of consciousness, mirroring it in adifferent form.4 Rather than constitution, the work of mediation lying on theside of the ego, it would lie on the side of the Other in its relation to the ego. Inthe series of conversations in the first part of The Infinite Conversation,Blanchot worries that the special nature of the relation to the Other is deter-mined by Levinas in terms of a particular feature of the Other that grants it akind of power or authority. Blanchot, by contrast, wants to emphasise that therelation to the Other implies that just as the identity of the ego is broken apartin the relation in question, so, too, is the Other. Neither term is allowed to restin a simple self-identity.

We can understand Blanchot’s argument as a way of placing emphasis upon theinterhuman relation rather than upon the Other as a term of the relation. In thisway, he guards against understanding the Other as a self of commensurablepower, as the ego. Blanchot’s focus is on what is internal to the relation in ques-tion rather than drawing on a quality of either of its terms, either on the ego, aconsciousness as the guarantor of mediation, or on the Other, as the equivalentof a more powerful ego. Blanchot supplants Levinas’s emphasis on the Other inthe interhuman relationship with an emphasis on what he calls “conversation”,entretien.

Drawing on an obscure passage in Totality and Infinity, Blanchot notes thereversibility of the unilateral, asymmetrical and exclusive relation to the Otherwith respect to the ego. Since there is no special feature of the Other that

4. For the most nuanced account of Blanchot’s reading of Levinas in the secondary literature, seeLarge (2005).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

th D

akot

a St

ate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

7:28

03

Nov

embe

r 20

14

288 IYER

explains the alterity of the ego’s relation to the Other, the ego can, in turn,become the Other for this other human being. Even as I am exposed andobligated in my relation to you as the Other (as a generic human being, a man orwoman without qualities), you can be exposed and obligated in your relation tome as the Other (as I, in turn, become generic — anyone in particular — for you).This is not a reciprocal relation, since, each time, it remains dissymmetrical andunilateral (that is to say, it suspends, each time, the constitutive work ofconsciousness). Nevertheless, it is also possible that, between two people — or,indeed, a group of people — there will be a criss-crossing of relations, a series ofreversals, which Blanchot will call (attributing these terms to a nameless conver-sationalist) a “redoubling of irreciprocity”, a “double dissymmetry” or a “doublesigned infinity”, but also, surprisingly, “community” (Blanchot 1993, pp. 70–71).

However fleetingly it is used, community is meant for Blanchot to mark theoscillation wherein each term of a relation between human beings becomesOther, Autrui, for the other. This curious alternative to Levinas’s notion of thethird (a notion to which Blanchot gives his full consent later [see Blanchot 2007])provides him with a source of reflection on the political to which I will returnbelow. In the meantime, I want to continue to explore Blanchot’s transformationof Levinas’s central religious concepts.

***

It is in terms of this notion of speech that both Levinas and Blanchot present therelation to God, and indeed the Messiah. For Levinas, to summarise some difficulttexts, God is present only in my spoken answer to the Other.5 When I speak tothe Other, God likewise speaks. It is not that there is anything specific about theOther outside of my relation to him that commands this response. A kind ofcommandment is already present in what I say to the Other (“the command isstated by the mouth of him it commands” [Levinas 1981, p. 147]). In speech, inwhat Levinas calls “witnessing”, there is produced something in me that is not ofme (“the other-in-the-same”); the infinite — conceived by analogy withDescartes’s idea of the infinite in the “Third Meditation” — breaks into the closedorder of my finitude.

Blanchot’s “Being Jewish”, published in The Infinite Conversation, appears tobe orthodoxly Levinasian. The one God, Blanchot maintains, is given in speech.Rather than following Levinas’s argument, he passes rapidly through a series ofreadings. Firstly, he invokes God’s address to Adam after the latter had lapsed.“Where are you?”, says God — where is Adam, man? This is a question that,Blanchot (1993, p. 128) says, sees God speak a human language and in such a way“that the depth of the questioning concerning us is handed over to language”. Hemoves on to discuss the figure of Jacob, of whom it is written in the Bible thathe was with God “as with men” (Blanchot 1993, p. 128). Blanchot’s conclusion tothis discussion has a strongly Levinasian twist:

5. For an engaging discussion of Levinas’s account of God, see Kosky (2001).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

th D

akot

a St

ate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

7:28

03

Nov

embe

r 20

14

IMPERSONAL SPEECH: BLANCHOT, VIRNO, MESSIANISM 289

Jacob does not say to Esau “I just saw God as I see you” but “I see you asone sees God” which confirms this suggestion that the marvel (the privilegedsurprise) is indeed human presence, this Other Presence that is Autrui – noless inaccessible, separate and distant than the Invisible himself. (Blanchot1993, p. 129)

Blanchot follows the same interpretational line when, in a late essay, he reflectsonce again on the significance of Judaism, this time focusing on the election ofthe Jews and the revelation of the Thora, which, he claims, gave them a notionof equality foreign to those other “chosen people”, the Greeks. The Hebrews,Blanchot says, were chosen to acknowledge this equality, responsibility andfraternity that is given in the relation to the Other. Once again, it is the relationof speech that is crucial, “a speaking that does not mediate in the way of thelogos and does not abolish distance, but which cannot be heard other than by theabsolute interval of separation, infinitely maintained” (Blanchot 2007, p. 31). Theabsolute distance of God, he claims, will not be signified as a movement in sensu-ousness (as religious experience), but “‘turns into my responsibility’” (emphasisin original), which thus becomes infinite, so to speak, by making itself into analways insufficient obligation towards the other (Blanchot 2007, p. 31). Thequotation is from Levinas. It is not that God’s alterity may find a substitute or ananalogue in the alterity of the Other, to whom I am called upon to respond withlimitless responsibility. God is other, admittedly, “but otherwise other, otherwith an alterity prior to the otherness of the other, transcendence to the pointof absence and excluded from Being, making possible its denial or disappearance”(Blanchot 2007, p. 32). Here, once again, Blanchot is quoting Levinas, this time“God and Philosophy”, alluding to a crucial passage in which his friend considersthe possibility of a different understanding of the significance of God. Thispassage culminates in Levinas’s surprising claim that the alterity of God is liableto “a possible confusion with the stirring of the il y a” (Levinas 1998, p. 69). It isthe possibility of this confusion which interests me here.

Levinas introduces the notion of the il y a in an early lecture series by invit-ing us to entertain a thought experiment, through which beings and personsare returned to nothingness. “What remains after this imaginary destruction ofeverything is not something, but the fact that there is [il y a]” (Levinas 1987,p. 47). The imaginary destruction of every being, it would seem, leaves uswith an empty field of existence — a “field of forces” purged of particularbeings. Beneath such beings and things, Levinas argues, we can discover theoriginal form of the given, the il y a, understood as the paradoxical “pres-ence” of existence itself, free from all reference to existents. As Levinas(1987, p. 47) writes: “the fact of existence … is anonymous: there is neitheranyone nor anything that takes this existence upon itself. It is impersonal like‘it is raining’ or ‘it is hot’.” Levinas compares the fact that there is, il y a,with phrases like il pleut (“it is raining”), il fait nuit (“it is dark”) or il faitchaud (“it is hot”), in which the il (the “it”) does not refer to a personalsubject. All that remains, according to Levinas (1987, p. 48), is “the very workof being”, i.e. the field of existence that “is never attached to an object that

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

th D

akot

a St

ate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

7:28

03

Nov

embe

r 20

14

290 IYER

is”. On this account, existence is but the surge and flow of the void, the workof the “it” before or after discrete existents come into existence.

For Blanchot, the encounter with the il y a must be understood linguistically— as the impersonal field of language that is prior to anything I would say in myown name.6 For the most part, he explains, we are able to use language; the realworld — the world of things and people around me — subjects itself to thatlinguistic operation that allows me to speak of it. But language does not alwayspresent itself to be such a tool. I am not always able to speak or write, and atthis moment, I come into contact with what one of his commentators, Foucault,calls the “being of language” (Foucault 1987, p. 15). It is in a certain literatureabove all that language reveals itself as the “outside”, not by abdicating fromsense, from the capacity to mean altogether, but by drawing it towards what inlanguage does not mean or make sense. It is the heaviness or weight of words,their sonority or rhythm, to which certain writers and readers are drawn and thatmarks itself in a “narrative voice” that must be distinguished from that of anyparticular narrator. Characters in Blanchot’s fictions no longer quite coincidewith themselves; events do not happen punctually. Likewise, as he shows in hisliterary criticism, the fictional worlds of our most familiar novels are not asstable as they appear. The novel bears a secret story — a kind of telling that, overand over again, draws writer and reader to the limits of the ability to write or toread. Blanchot does not celebrate the ineffable — that is, the chance of leavinglanguage behind — but the indefinite murmuring of a language that will not besilent.

Just as Levinas’s notion of the il y a is claimed to engulf the self, undoing thatlabour through which it is bound to itself, Blanchot’s linguistic il y a engulfs thespeaker or writer, allowing the “I” to give way to the impersonal il. All that isleft, once again, is what Levinas calls the “work of being”. As Blanchotcomments, referring to Existence and Existents (Levinas 1978), the

anonymous and impersonal flow of being that precedes all being, being that isalready present in the heart of disappearance, that is in the depths of annihila-tion still returns to being, being as the fatality of being, nothingness as exist-ence: where there is nothing, il y a being. (Blanchot 1995b, p. 332)

We are back, here, with the distinction between the “one speaks” and the “Ispeak”; back to the account of experience of language as an impersonal fieldover and above anything I would want to say by means of it. But what is new —and what distinguishes Blanchot’s focus from that of Foucault, Deleuze andGuattari — is his emphasis upon the interpersonal relation. From the late 1950sonwards, in his theoretical reflections at least, Blanchot begins to explore whatwe might call ethical and political questions alongside literary ones. They arerooted in his account of the relation to the Other, of speech, which, unlikeLevinas, he understands as an acknowledgement of the il y a. This is what marks

6. For the full version of this argument, see Iyer (2005).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

th D

akot

a St

ate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

7:28

03

Nov

embe

r 20

14

IMPERSONAL SPEECH: BLANCHOT, VIRNO, MESSIANISM 291

the key difference between Blanchot and Levinas, which accounts for the diver-gence of their thought, despite the seemingly unconditional approval Blanchotappears to grant the work of his friend. The alterity of the Other, for Levinas, isother than the alterity of the il y a; likewise, the alterity of God, which, forBlanchot, is simply another name for the il y a — for impersonal speech as it isencountered in the relation to the Other.

Blanchot himself already provided a commentary on the passage under consid-eration from “God and Philosophy” in an essay from 1980, “Our ClandestineCompanion”, where he remarks of Levinas that

he gives us a presentiment that, without being another name for the Other(always other than the Other, “other otherwise”), the infinite transcendence,the transcendence of the infinite, to which we try to subject God, will always beready to veer off “to the point of a possible confusion with the stirring of the ily a”. (Blanchot 1986b, p. 49)

A little later, Blanchot (1986b, p. 49) adds: “the ‘il y a’ is one of Levinas’s mostfascinating propositions. It is his temptation, too, since as the reverse of tran-scendence it is not distinct from it either.” If Blanchot is tempted, it is becauseGod, for him, names that relation between the background — impersonal speech— and the linguistic operations that occur in the foreground, when speech ispossible in the first person.

When we read Blanchot on the interpersonal relation, he already pushes ittowards exactly this kind of structure. Like Levinas’s Other, Blanchot’s Othercommands that I speak. But unlike Levinas, this speech is understood in terms ofan anonymous “background” of speech. This is what we find dramatised in “TheInfinite Conversation”, the story (récit) that begins his eponymous book, whichstages the criss-crossing of alterities that occurs in what Blanchot calls commu-nity. Blanchot’s récit narrates an encounter between two weary men, a host anda guest, who are frustrated in their apparent desire to learn something from thisweariness.7 Both men, the narrator tells us, are “weary”, and yet “the wearinesscommon to both of them does not bring them together” (Blanchot 1993, p. xiii).It is as if, one of them says,

weariness were to hold up to us the pre-eminent form of truth, the one we havepursued without pause all our lives, but that we necessarily miss on the day itoffers itself, precisely because we are too weary. (Blanchot 1993, p. xiii)

Weariness would seem to promise something to those who are weary together —that is, a certain exposition of the truth of weariness that would happen as theresult of their encounter — but the conversationalists are prevented from grasp-ing what has been opened to them. As the host admits: “I even took the libertyof calling you … because of this weariness, because it seemed to me that it would

7. This section of The Infinite Conversation was originally published as an independent fiction(Blanchot 1966) before being incorporated untitled at the outset of The Infinite Conversation.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

th D

akot

a St

ate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

7:28

03

Nov

embe

r 20

14

292 IYER

facilitate the conversation” (Blanchot 1993, p. xiv). But the ambition of comingtogether in order to explore what their common weariness would reveal is frus-trated: “I had not realised that what weariness makes possible, weariness makesdifficult” (Blanchot 1993, p. xiv). Weariness opens a space, but prevents this veryopening from revealing any truth about weariness.

The conversationalists ask each other what they might have said if they werenot quite as weary as they were: if, that is, they were just weary enough to graspthe truth of weariness but not weary enough to grasp hold of this truth, to seizeit. It is weariness in its twists and turns — “I believe we know them all. It keepsus alive”, one of them says — that brings them together, giving them life andpermitting them to speak (Blanchot 1993, p. xv). But it does so without everrevealing itself as such because it is not something that happens to me as to anintact “I”. Weariness, one conversationalist tells the other, is “nothing that hashappened to me”; nothing, that is, that has happened to him in the first person(Blanchot 1993, p. xv). Even as the conversationalists attempt to think from andallow their thought to answer to weariness, as they continue their fragmentary,hesitant conversation, they are said to hear a “background” behind words — thatis, the re-echoing of a murmuring that interrupts the words they use to expressthemselves (Blanchot 1993, p. xvi). It is their weariness that permits this otherimpersonal speech to occur insofar as it precedes the words that are enunciatedin the first person.

It is in this way that the relation to the Other can be understood as a relationto what Virno and Blanchot alike call the “background” of speech. This back-ground is another name for the il y a, to which the “I” opens in its relation to theOther and which is confusable with what Levinas calls God. Who is Blanchot’sOther? The one in relation to whom the “I” is brought into a further relation withthe il y a, or the impersonality of speech. Who is Blanchot’s God? The il y a oflanguage as it is shared in the to and fro of speech in the community of speakers.But who, then, is Blanchot’s Messiah?

***

As we have seen, God, for both Levinas and Blanchot, never names an entity thatwas “there” or present, considered in relation to the temporal order as it isconceived in terms of a synthesis of past moments. As such, God is never encoun-tered as a unitary One, and Jewish monotheism must be understood to refer toa difference and a pluralism; to a diachrony that cannot be closed up into thelinear order of time. Blanchot’s “God” can be known only through the act ofspeaking. We might say the same of Blanchot’s Messiah of The Writing of theDisaster (Blanchot 1986a), who is revealed only in the performative of myresponse to the Other, which occurs upstream of my conscious will. As such, theMessiah is always occulted, since the performative in question is not experiencedby a conscious “I”. Anyone might be the Messiah, but no one need know anythingabout it, since the Messiah lives only in a particular kind of speech, in andthrough the dispersal of the ego that occurs when the il is called forward by therelation to the Other.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

th D

akot

a St

ate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

7:28

03

Nov

embe

r 20

14

IMPERSONAL SPEECH: BLANCHOT, VIRNO, MESSIANISM 293

If I had space, it would be worth showing how all the features one mightattribute to the Messiah in thinkers such as Cohen, Rosenzweig, Scholem andBenjamin8 are transformed by Blanchot’s account, as well as taking up therelationship of Blanchot’s interpretation of the leper Messiah with Levinas’s inDifficult Freedom (Levinas 1990, pp. 59–98). But here it must suffice to considerhow Blanchot’s messianism might allow us to transform Virno’s account of virtu-osity. As I have argued, the significance of Levinas’s thought, of Judaism ingeneral and the messianic idea in particular for Blanchot lies in its account of therelation to impersonal language as it occurs in the relation to the Other. ForVirno, post-Fordist production is social and interpersonal, and depends upon thegeneric faculty of speech, of labour power. From Blanchot, we learn that thisfaculty depends upon pre-individual, impersonal speech — upon an engagementwith the “one speaks” as it is given in the relation to the Other. Speech, orcommunication, is not only a matter of signification. Words, to be sure, do notmerely signify things, but are themselves things; they act in the world, theychange it — but so, too, does the sheer capacity to speak or write. Communicationis something; it is part of the circulation of things. Each time it occurs, it impliesanother raid not on the inarticulable or the ineffable beyond language, but uponthe anonymous murmuring, the “one speaks” that is the outside of language.

But in what sense can the event of messianism — the acknowledgement of theOther — be affirmed in turn, breaking it from the channelling of production inpost-Fordism? How would Blanchot’s alternative to Virno’s multitude awaken toits virtuosity and reclaim it — if this is possible — for itself?

***

An answer comes in Blanchot’s own political interventions and his subsequentreflections upon them. During May 1968, Blanchot was a member of the Studentsand Writers’ Action Committee, who were responsible for many handbills, post-ers and bulletins, which were the result of a collective labour and meant as acollective enunciation. These writings were not to be read as representing whathappened at the Events, supplementing the accounts of May 1968 that werealready being published, but to continue their movement. The writing on thewalls and the tracts distributed in the street are “disorderly words”, say one oftheir texts (published many years later under Blanchot’s name), words “free ofdiscourse” that, accompanying the rhythm of the marchers and their shouts,belonged, simply, “to the decision of the moment”; transitory, ephemeral, “theyappear, they disappear” (Blanchot 1995a, p. 204). What matters, this anony-mously authored text suggests, is not what the demonstrators would say — therepresentation of what was happening — but the celebration that somethingcould be said, that a new kind of speech, of writing was possible. “Written ininsecurity, received under threat”, the handbills, graffiti and posters are present

8. For an excellent discussion of the significance of the messianic idea for these thinkers, see Kavka(2004).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

th D

akot

a St

ate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

7:28

03

Nov

embe

r 20

14

294 IYER

only to “affirm the break” — whether their message is lost, forgotten or passedon (Blanchot 1995a, p. 204).

But a break with what? As Blanchot reflects in his own name on the Events 15years later in The Unavowable Community:

It was not even a question of overthrowing an old world; what mattered was tolet a possibility manifest itself, the possibility — beyond any utilitarian gain of abeing-together — that gave back to all the right to equality in fraternity througha freedom of speech that elated everyone. Everybody had something to say, and,at times, to write (on the walls); what exactly, mattered little. Saying it wasmore important than what was said. (Blanchot 1988, p. 30)

The “freedom of speech” to which Blanchot appeals here is quite the opposite ofthe speech of the engaged intellectual — of the thinker who would speak onbehalf of everyone else. The movement of May 1968, he says, needed no politicalrepresentation, whether through established channels like the French Commu-nist Party (which repeatedly condemned the student left) or the various tradeunions (which sought during the Events merely to bolster their bargaining posi-tion); they needed no one — no vanguard — to speak on their behalf. In the actioncommittees and street demonstrations, Blanchot (2000, p. 33) remembers in“For Friendship”, “there were no friends, only comrades who immediatelyaddressed each other without formality and accepted neither age differences northe recognition due to prior celebrity”. The role of the various committees anddemonstrations, Blanchot suggests, was merely to bear witness to the freedomof speech in the same manner as the collective, anonymous writings of theStudents and Writers’ Action Committee.

Freedom — but from what? From conventional social structures, to be sure,which kept apart student and worker, shop steward and cheap immigrantlabourer. But Blanchot suggests there also occurred a liberation of speech itself— in Virno’s terms, a freedom not only from speech uttered in the first person,but from that engagement of the “one speaks” to the linguistic cogito that orderscontemporary forms of production. On Blanchot’s account, the Events borewitness to a capacity to speak that belonged to everyone, to that acknowledge-ment of the Other which happens as messianism. This was possible because ofthe provisionality of the forms of communal organisation, the fact that they didnot seek to mimic conventional political entities:

[T]he people (above all if one avoids sacralising them) are not the State, not anymore than they are the society in person, with its functions, its laws, its deter-minations, its exigencies which constitute its most proper finality. Inert, immo-bile, less a gathering than the always imminent dispersal of a presencemomentarily occupying the whole space and nevertheless without a place(utopia), a kind of messianism announcing nothing but its autonomy and itsunworking (on the condition that it be left to itself, or else it will change imme-diately and become a network of forces ready to break loose): this are mankind’speople whom it is permissible to consider as the bastardised imitation of God’speople (rather similar to what could have been the gathering of the children of

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

th D

akot

a St

ate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

7:28

03

Nov

embe

r 20

14

IMPERSONAL SPEECH: BLANCHOT, VIRNO, MESSIANISM 295

Israel in view of the Exodus if they had gathered while at the same time forget-ting to leave), or else making the same as “the arid solitude of the anonymousforces”. (Blanchot 1988, p. 33)

The freedom of speech, then, is given in a relation of camaraderie, insofar as onecan address the other anonymously, impersonally, speaking as no one in particu-lar to no one in particular in the turbulence of the movement. Who, indeed, wereBlanchot’s “people” of May 1968 but this field of relations, in which freedombelonged not to the individual who would possess speech, laying claim to it in thefirst person, but to the speaker who acknowledges the Other in impersonalspeech? The demand of the students for the freedom of speech and movement,the occupations of educational institutions and factories, the teach-ins andbattles in the Latin Quarter, the sit-downs and refusals to disperse, as well as aseries of strikes are reread by Blanchot solely in terms of the way in which theyanswered to the messianic event that lies at the core of interpersonal relations.It is, as such, that the participants in the Events remained, for Blanchot, disor-ganised and unorganisable. If the action committees of the Events took on someof the responsibilities of civil administration, they in no way formed a rivalcentre of government. They were only “pretending to organise disorganisationwhile respecting the latter”, says Blanchot; they did not distinguish themselvesfrom the “anonymous and innumerable crowd, from the people spontaneouslydemonstrating” (Blanchot 1988, p. 33). The committees did not represent themovement, articulating the interests of demonstrators, but affirmed a new wayof being together, of being-in-common, even in the vigorous disagreements intheir debates.

When Blanchot writes of the authorities, the men of power, discovering in themovement “the carnivalesque redoubling of their own disarray” (1988, p. 33), itis to mark the difference between constituted forms of political, legal andeconomic power and the messianism that was at play between the demonstra-tors. But, as such, the movement was terribly vulnerable — the demonstratorsare assembled only to be simultaneously dispersed; they are only the “bastard-ised imitation” of the chosen people and cannot be made subject to a deter-mined political will. The play of messianism between the participants makestheir particular disorganisation, in Blanchot’s words, “autonomous” with respectto any particular form of political organisation. It is this autonomy which makesmessianism fragile and fleeting, and in need of a commentary, of which TheUnavowable Community is an example, but which also separates it from thejudgement of history which is predicated upon the linearity of time. The revoltof May 1968, accordingly, is not, for Blanchot, a failure, since the messianismwhich it set in motion does not belong to the continuous and homogeneous timeof history. Writing The Unavowable Community, remembering the Events, Blan-chot is in the position of the Benjaminian historian who retrieves a virtual pastin which the possibility of different futures becomes visible. But here, the futuresmust be understood to be given in the relation to the Other that is their origin —the inextinguishable hope that is the source of Blanchotian messianism.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

th D

akot

a St

ate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

7:28

03

Nov

embe

r 20

14

296 IYER

References

Benveniste, E. (1971) Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Meek, M. E., University ofMiami Press, Miami, FL.

Blanchot, M. (1966) ‘L’entretien infini’, La Nouvelle Revue Française, no. 159, March,pp. 385–401

Blanchot, M. (1986a) The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Smock, A., University ofNebraska Press, Lincoln, NE.

Blanchot, M. (1986b) ‘Our Clandestine Companion’, trans. Allison, D., in Cohen, R. (ed.)Face to Face with Levinas, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY.

Blanchot, M. (1988) The Unavowable Community, trans. Joris, P., Station Hill Press,Barrytown, NY.

Blanchot, M. (1993) The Infinite Conversation, trans. Hanson, S., University of MinnesotaPress, Minneapolis, MN.

Blanchot, M. (1995a) The Blanchot Reader, ed. Holland, M., Blackwell, OxfordBlanchot, M. (1995b) The Work of Fire, trans. Mandell, C., Stanford University Press,

Stanford, CA.Blanchot, M. (2000) ‘For Friendship’, trans. Hill, L., Disastrous Blanchot, special issue of

Oxford Literary Review, vol. 22.Blanchot, M. (2007) ‘Peace, Peace to the Far and to the Near’, trans. Hill, L., in Holland,

M. & Hill, L. (eds) Blanchot’s Epoch, Edinburgh University Press, EdinburghDeleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1988) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Massumi, B., Athlone

Press, LondonFoucault, M. (1987) ‘The Thought from Outside’, trans. Massumi, B., in Foucault M. &

Blanchot, M., Foucault/Blanchot, Zone Books, New YorkIyer, L. (2005) Blanchot’s Vigilance, Palgrave Macmillan, BasingstokeKavka, M. (2004) Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy, Cambridge University

Press, CambridgeKosky, J. (2001) Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion, Indiana University Press,

Bloomington, IN.Large, W. (2002) ‘Impersonal Existence: A Conceptual Genealogy of the “There Is” from

Heidegger to Blanchot and Levinas’, Angelaki, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 131–142Large, W. (2005) Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot: Ethics and the Ambiguity of

Writing, Clinamen Press, ManchesterLecercle, J.-J. (2002) Deleuze and Language, Palgrave Macmillan, BasingstokeLevinas, E. (1969) Totality and Infinity, trans. Lingis, A., Duquesne University Press,

Pittsburgh, PA.Levinas, E. (1978) Existence and Existents, trans. Lingis, A., Martinus Nijhoff, The HagueLevinas, E. (1981) Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Lingis, A., Martinus

Nijhoff, The HagueLevinas, E. (1987) Time and the Other, trans. Cohen, R., Duquesne University Press,

Pittsburgh, PA.Levinas, E. (1990) Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Hand, S., John Hopkins,

Baltimore.Levinas, E. (1998) ‘God and Philosophy’, in Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bergo, B.,

Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, pp. 55–78Scholem, G. (1971) The Messianic Idea in Judaism, Schocken Books, New York.Sinthome (2009) Larval Subjects, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/ (accessed April

2009).Virno, P. (2004) A Grammar of the Multitude, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

th D

akot

a St

ate

Uni

vers

ity]

at 0

7:28

03

Nov

embe

r 20

14