BLANCHOT AND THE RESONANT SPACES OF LITERATURE, SOUND, ART AND THOUGHT

Abstract

This article sets out to think through the double absence of literary language posited by Blanchot in L’Espace littéraire in the shadow (or, rather, echo) cast by a consideration of Alvin Lucier’s piece I am sitting in a room and the sound installation practice of Bernhard Leitner. What I wish to suggest is that a consideration of these sound works enables us to identify a parallelism in the mechanics of the literary sign that creates the space of literature in Blanchot and the (quasi-)phenomenological experience of the visitor entering into and thereby enacting the space of installation. If the term “phenomenological” here requires a parenthetical qualifier, this is because the double absence enacted on the sign in Blanchot is deployed here from within the visitor in the creation of the space of installation in a move that requires us to reformulate our thinking about the creation of space of all kinds. In revisiting Blanchot’s L’Espace littéraire in this way, it is suggested that the ethical and political potential of the work of art that was to occupy Blanchot ever more as his career progressed was always already present in this early work and that it is not so much that literature’s essential solitude later becomes an essential relationality but, rather, that it always was precisely this. If this is so, it is suggested, this is because for Blanchot literature is an experience of extreme passivity, the potential of which becomes apparent when thinking through Blanchot’s conceptualisation of the phenomenon of resonance.