The Exigency of the Figure

Abstract

The Exigency of the Figure Christopher Fynsk I take my point of departure from an issue I have raised in a reading of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's Phrase that involves what might seem a rather minor difference of interpretation, almost a technical matter.1 I believe, however, that it goes to the heart of Lacoue-Labarthe's concern with the question of literature and might allow an approach to some core dimensions of the practice of writing through which he pursued his literary and critical thought. Once I have developed this issue of a "figural exigency," I will explore what is perhaps a striking instance of its constraint on this text that was so profoundly haunted by the problem of mimesis. So, I begin again with Lacoue-Labarthe's effort to come to grips with the textual fate of a short text he had himself commissioned from Maurice Blanchot as early as 1976 for the journal he edited with Mathieu Benezet, Première livraison. This is the "primal scene" (72) that would be presented by Blanchot in a slightly revised form in The Writing of the Disaster (1983),2 its title held in parentheses and suspended with a question mark. Lacoue-Labarthe took the application of the question mark to the original title of this very brief narrative as an indication of Blanchot's awareness that his presentation of the scene required something like a deconstruction, which Blanchot began to undertake, in Lacoue-Labarthe's reading, in the latter part of The Writing of the Disaster. I write "deconstruction," but a better term would probably be "defiguration," a task whose necessity would belong to the broader [End Page 1236] undertaking of "demythologisation" that Lacoue-Labarthe outlined in other important statements in his later work. Lacoue-Labarthe himself knew, obscurely, but perhaps no less acutely for this, that this task would bear upon important dimensions of his own work and commitments. My concern with the argument presented in Lacoue-Labarthe's late book on Blanchot regarding this necessary de-figuration3 centers on a brief statement made by Blanchot shortly before the appearance of the scene in question in The Writing of the Disaster, a statement in which Blanchot evokes the necessity ("for speech and life") of figuring what he terms "the death of the infans" (67–70). Pages devoted to psychoanalytic work undertaken by Winnicott and Laplanche preceding this passage in The Writing of the Disaster had questioned the status of their appeal to a fantasy regarding a child quite powerfully. Blanchot suggested that a notion such as that of the "marvellous child" could never reach, in a conceptual or theoretical manner, what he called "the impossible necessary death" (67). The psychoanalytic work in which this notion was elaborated was comparable in this respect, he argued, to the work of the dialectic, to which Blanchot also devoted powerful paragraphs. Lacoue-Labarthe took this critique to bear, in some measure, on Blanchot's own effort at figuring the death of the infans. Blanchot would thus have known the necessity of undertaking the effacement or de-figuration of the figure that Lacoue-Labarthe reads late in The Writing of the Disaster.4 But in the paragraphs immediately preceding the scene in question, Blanchot makes a series of statements that appear to revise his respectful, but critical account of the work performed by the psychoanalytic concept. He allows the necessity of a form of figuration that would precede what psychoanalysis would produce in its conceptual labor. He writes, first, the following with respect to the Hegelian dialectic and an aporia at its heart that stems from the fact that the experience of death that puts the dialectic underway also arrests it: I will not go into detail about the way in which, from the early philosophy onward, and through a prodigious enrichment of thought, the difficulty was overcome. This is well known. It remains, however, that if death, murder, and suicide are put to work, and if death dampens itself in becoming [End Page 1237] powerless power and then negativity, there is, each time one advances with the help of possible death, the necessity of not passing over the death without phrasing, the...