Maurice Blancot
Interruption: As on a Reimann Surface
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The definition of conversation (that is, the most simple description of the most simple conversation) might be the following: when two people speak together, they speak not together, but each in turn: one says something, then stops, the other something else (or the same thing), then stops. The coherent discourse they carry on is composed of sequences that are interrupted when the conversation moves from partner to partner, even if adjustments are made so that they correspond to one another. The fact that speech needs to pass from one interlocutor to another in order to be confirmed, contradicted, or developed shows the necessity of interval. The power of speaking interrupts itself, and this interruption plays a role that appears to be minor—precisely the role of a subordinated alteration. This role, nonetheless, is so enigmatic that it can be interpreted as bearing the very enigma of language: pause between sentences, pause from one interlocutor to another, and pause of attention, the hearing that doubles the force of locution.
I wonder if we have reflected enough upon the various significations of this pause that alone permits speech to be constituted as conversation, and even as speech. We end up by confining someone who speaks without pause. (Let us recall Hitler’s terrible monologues. And every head of state participates in the same violence of this dictare, the repetition of an imperious monologue, when he enjoys the power of being the only one to speak and, rejoicing in possession of his high solitary word, imposes it without restraint as a superior and supreme speech upon others.) But let us take the most steady conversation, the conversation least exposed to chance caprice; even if its discourse is coherent, it must always fragment itself by changing protagonists. Moving from one to the other interlocutor, it interrupts itself: interruption permits the exchange. Interrupting for the sake of understanding, understanding in order to speak.
It is clear, however, that the stops that punctuate, measure, and articulate dialogue are not always of the same kind: some block conversation. Kafka wondered at what moment and how many times, when eight people are seated within the horizon of a conversation, it is appropriate to speak if one does not wish to be considered silent. But such silence, even if disapproving, constitutes the part that moves discourse. Without it, one would not speak, or only to ask oneself belatedly if one had not mistaken the interlocutor’s attitude and if it had not been the other who made you speak (just as, in other circumstances, one might reproach the host for having made you drink – it is, after all, the same intoxication). And even when remaining silent is a refusal it is rarely abrupt; it takes part in the discourse, inflecting it with its nuances, contributing to the hope for, or the despair of, a final concord. Silence is still only a deferred speech, or else it bears the signification of a difference obstinately maintained.
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Interruption is necessary to any succession of words; intermittence makes their becoming possible, discontinuity ensure the continuity of understanding. There would certainly be a great deal to conclude from this. But for the moment, I would like to show that the intermittence by which discourse becomes dialogue, that is to say dis-course, presents itself in two very different words.
In the first case, the arrest-interval is comparable to the ordinary pause that permits the conversation’s “each in turn.” Here, discontinuity is essential since it promises exchange – essential, but relative. What it aims at, be it later or never, and yet at the same time starting from today, is affirmation of a unitary truth where coherent discourse will no longer cease and, no longer ceasing, will merge with its other, silent side. From this perspective, rupture still plays into the functioning of common speech, even if it fragments it, thwarts it, or impedes it. Not only does rupture give meaning, but it also brings common sense forth as a horizon. It is the respiration of discourse. In this category could be grouped all the forms of speech that belong to a dialectical experience of existence and history – from everyday chatter to the highest moments of reason, of struggle and of practice. Interrupting for the sake of understanding.
But there is another kind of interruption, more enigmatic and more grave. It introduces the wait that measures the distance between two interlocutors – no longer a reducible, but an irreducible distance. Having mentioned this often in these investigations, I will simply allude to it again. Within an interrelation space, I can seek to communicate with someone in a number of ways: first, by considering him as an objective possibility in the world, according to ways of objectivity; another time, by regarding him as another self, perhaps quite different, but whose difference passes by way of a primary identity, that of two beings each equally able to speak in the first person; and a third time, no longer by a mediate relation of impersonal knowledge or of personal comprehension, but by attempting to achieve an immediate relation wherein the same and the other seek to lose themselves in one another or draw near to one another through the proximity of a familiar address that forgets or effaces distance. These relations have in common the fact that all three tend toward unity: the “I” wants to annex the other (identify the other with itself) by making of it its own thing, or by studying it as a thing, or, yet again, in wanting to find in it another myself, whether this be through free recognition or through the instantaneous union of two souls. There remains another modality (without a mode). This time, it is no longer a question of seeking to unify. In the other I no longer want to recognise one whom a still common measure – the belonging to a common space – holds in a relation of continuity or unity with me. What is in play now is the foreignness between us, and not only the obscure part that escapes our mutual knowledge and is nothing more than obscurity of the self’s position – the singularity of the self; this foreignness is still very relative (a self is always close to a self, even in difference, competition, desire, and need). What is now in play, and demands relation, is everything that separates me from the other, that is to say the other insofar as I am infinitely separated from him – a separation, fissure, or interval that leaves him infinitely separated from me, but also requires that I found my relation with him upon this very interruption that is an interruption of being. This alterity, it must be repeated, makes him neither another self for me, or another existence, neither a modality nor a moment of universal existence, nor a super-existence, a god or non-god, but rather the unknown in its infinite distance.
An alterity that holds in the name of the neutral.
To simplify, let us say that through the presence of the other understood in the neutral there is in the field of relations a distortion preventing any direct communication and my relation of unity; or again, there is a fundamental anomaly that it falls to speech not to reduce but to convey, even if it does so without saying it or signifying it. Now it is to this hiatus – to the strangeness, to the infinity between us – that the interruption in language itself responds, the interruption that introduces waiting. But let us understand that the arrest here is not necessarily or simply marked by silence, by a blank or a gap (this would be too crude), but by a change in the form or the structure of language (when speaking is first of all writing) – a change metaphorically comparable to that which made Euclid’s geometry into that of Riemann. (Valéry once confided to a mathematician that he was planning to write – to speak – on “a Riemann surface.”) A change such that to speak (to write) is to cease thinking solely with a view to unity, and to make the relations of words an essentially dissymmetrical field governed by discontinuity; as though, having renounced the uninterrupted force of a coherent discourse, it were a matter of drawing out a level of language where one might gain the power not only to express oneself in an intermittent manner, but also to allow intermittence itself to speak: a speech that, non-unifying, is no longer content with being a passage or a bridge – a non-pontificating speech capable of clearing the two shores separated by the abyss, but without filling in the abyss or reuniting its shores: a speech without reference to unity.
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The difference between these two kinds of interruption, as I have just schematised them, is theoretically very firm. It corresponds to the two kinds of experience we have with speech: one is dialectical, the other is not. One is the speech of the universe, tending toward unity and helping to accomplish the whole; the other, the speech of writing, bears a relation of infinity and strangeness. This decisive difference is nonetheless always ambiguous: when two persons speak, the silence that permits them to speak in turn as they speak together is still no more than the alternating pause of the first degree; but in this alternance there may also, already, be at work the interruption by which the unknown announces itself. Yet there is something more grave; when the power of speech is interrupted, one does not know, one can never know with certainty, what is at work: the interruption that permits exchange, the interruption that suspends speech in order to reestablish it at another level, or the negating interruption that, far from still being a speech that recovers its wind and breathes, undertakes – if that is possible – to asphyxiate speech and destroy it as though forever. When, for example, interruptions arise out of fatigue, out of pain or affliction (all forms of neutral), do we know to which experience it belongs? Can we be sure, even though it may be sterilizing, that it is simply barren? No, we are not sure (and this, moreover, adds to the fatigue and the affliction). We sense as well that if pain (fatigue or affliction) hollows out an infinite gap between beings, this gap is perhaps what would be most important to bring to expression, all the while leaving it empty, so that to speak out of fatigue, out of pain or affliction [malheur], could be to speak according to the infinite dimension of language. And can we not go still further? Let us suppose an interruption that would in some sense be absolute and absolutely neutral; let us conceive of it being no longer within the sphere of language, but exterior and anterior to all speech and to all silence; let us call it the ultimate, the hyperbolical. Would we have attained with it the rupture that would deliver us, even if hyperbolically, not only from all reason (this would be little), but from all unreason, that is, from the reason that madness remains? Or would we not be obliged to ask ourselves whether from out of such an interruption – barbarity itself – there would not come an exigency to which it would still be necessary to respond by speaking? And would we not even have to ask whether speech (writing) does not always mean attempting to involve the outside of any language in language itself, that is to say, speaking within this Outside, speaking according to the measure of this “outside,” which, being in all speech, may very well also risk turning speech back into what is excluded from all speaking? To write: to trace a circle in the interior of which would come to be inscribed the outside of every circle…
Let us go no further and summarise. We have, first of all, two important distinctions: one corresponding to a dialectical, the other to a non-dialectical exigency of speech: the pause that permits exchange, the wait that measures infinite distance. But in waiting it is not simply the delicate rupture preparing the poetic act that declares itself, but also, at the same time, other forms of arrest that are very profound, very perverse, more and more perverse, and always such that if one distinguishes them, the distinction does not avert but rather postulates ambiguity. We have “distinguished” in this way three of them: one wherein emptiness becomes work; another wherein emptiness is fatigue, affliction; and the other, the ultimate, the hyperbolical, wherein wordlessness (perhaps thought) indicates itself. To interrupt oneself for the sake of understanding. To understand in order to speak. Speaking, finally, only to interrupt oneself and to render possible the impossible interruption.
Taken from The Infinite Conversation by Maurice Blanchot.
Translation by Susan Hanson.
HOIC 