Abstract

In his work Blanchot makes reference to several stories or rØcits by two of his contemporaries, Marguerite Duras and Georges Bataille. I am thinking here particularly of Duras’ The Malady of Death, and Bataille’s Madame Edwarda. In the phantasmagoric worlds of these stories strange encounters occur between a man and a woman. We are told little about these people by way of personal attributes, but we do know that each of the women is beautiful. It is this feminine beauty which seems to give the women a status of being in some way separate or outside. Blanchot subjects these stories to a reading which is informed by Bataille’s own theoretical work. He sees this feminine separateness functioning for the man as the absolute Other, God. As such the Other has a double aspect, one which may mark a crossroad, a moment of truth. This is what Bataille calls the “interior experience,” and which Blanchot renames in The Infinite Conversation as a “limit-experience.” One direction from this crossroad leads to taking the Other as the place of unity, wholeness. Here we may, as Blanchot puts it in his essay on the limit experience, be tempted “by the repose offered by Unity” . Here we give ourselves to the Other as the site of complete knowledge and of the supreme Good. But there is another direction. Here the Other is negativity. As such it holds for each one of us, whether man or woman, that which in exceedingus dis-confirms us in our being. This excess thus makes a demand of us,but in pursuit of a good which is without utility, a good which “escapes allemploy and all end” . This is an impossible demand. Blanchot’s recognition of the excess of the Other as constituting a demand holds for each one of us, whether man or woman, that which in exceeding us dis-confirms us in our being. This excess thus makes a demand of us, but in pursuit of a good which is without utility, a good which “escapes all employ and all end” . This is an impossible demand. Blanchot’s recognition of the excess of the Other as constituting a demand which is at once inescapable and impossible is redolent of the work of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. In this paper I will explore these connections a little further. For this purpose I will draw principally on Blanchot’s essay on Duras’ The Malady of Death, which was re-published as part of The Unavowable Community, and on Lacan’s seminar from the 1970s entitled Encore. I will however begin with Freud