word might at first seem only to silence language (because it encourages us to look through or past it), but it relies upon the essential silence of language in order to function, despite its efforts to hide it. The distinction of the crude word and the essential word by their relation to silence thus becomes problematic. Blanchot writes of the crude word: “A word which does not name anything, which does not represent anything, which does not outlast itself in any way, a word which is not even a word and which disappears marvelously altogether and at once in its usage: what could be more worthy of the essential and closer to silence?” (39-40). Since, as Blanchot demonstrates in “Literature and the Right to Death,” everyday language presents the absence of what it has made disappear, it does “[express] the fact that beings are silent,” just like essential language—perhaps even more essentially, precisely because it pretends otherwise, because it attempts to hide this absence. It seems that the distinction of crude and essential language relies on the ability of the crude word to make the concept appear, to make it immediate to us; this veils the more “essential” silence at work. Blanchot continues, “[ . . . ] it is nothingness in action: that which acts, labors, constructs. It is the pure silence of the negative which culminates in the noisy feverishness of tasks” (40). This usefulness, the activity of crude language in the world, does seem to distinguish it from essential language, in the sense that the latter separates itself from the labor of the world; but Blanchot draws attention to the way that everyday language merely presents the illusion of immediacy and actually hides within it the silence that characterizes Mallarmé’s notion of essential language.
After exploring the questions that arise with the definition of crude language, Blanchot turns to the way that essential language figures into Mallarmé’s thought. It would seem that the uselessness of essential language, its separation from the labor of the world, would take it out of the realm of constructive negativity; essential language makes no claim to signify and to make appear things in the world. In crude language, language is silent and beings speak. In essential language, “beings fall silent” (41). Blanchot then takes us to the next step in Mallarmé’s thought:
The poetic word is no longer someone’s word. In it no one speaks, and what speaks is not anyone. It seems rather that the word alone declares itself. Then language takes on all of its importance. It becomes essential. Language speaks as the essential, and that is why the word entrusted to the poet can be called the essential word. [ . . . ] From this perspective, we rediscover poetry as a powerful universe of words where relations, configurations, forces are affirmed through sound, figure, rhythmic mobility, in a unified and sovereignly autonomous space. (41-42)
While the first part of this passage might recall Blanchot’s discussion of the neutral voice, the “third person substituting for the ‘I,’” it soon takes a decisive turn. In a sense, the power of the poet is exchanged for the power of language; in this formulation, the poet does not use language as a means of expressing himself or herself, or the world, but relies upon the language of the poem, as a self-contained totality, to bring itself to light. We already know that, for Blanchot, writing has nothing to do with power, but begins at the point of power’s exhaustion. For Mallarmé, it seems that the poem is able to make itself appear, to exist, through essential language. The poet constructs something out of absence and silence, even if it has no voice, and if no one speaks it; therefore, from this perspective, writing does not differ from the activity—the constructive negativity—of the world. The lack of voice seems to reflect the poem’s autonomy and separation from the world (including the poet perhaps), rather than a more radical turning toward silence and disappearance, in which it would lose itself. For Blanchot, at this point in Mallarmé’s thought, the poem remains “a particular being [ . . . ] and for this reason is by no means close to being, to that which escapes all determination and every form of existence” (42). The poem, as a thing or a being, still misses a more essential movement towards its own disappearance.19
Blanchot proposes that the “experience proper” of Mallarmé begins at the point when “he moves from the consideration of a finished work which is always one particular poem or another, or a certain picture, to the concern through which the work becomes the search for its origin and wants to identify itself with this origin” (42). Writing becomes a question for Mallarmé—the question of whether or not it exists, and the implications of such a question. The poem, as a linguistically manifest “thing,” would seem to affirm the existence of poetry, and, furthermore, the poet’s work would presumably require the writing of poetry. Even if essential language silences the world and the poet, even if it says nothing, the poem, as a thing, appears. But what, exactly, appears? And does that which appears have anything to do with the work? After all, Blanchot has already told us that Mallarmé falters when he thinks of a poem as a being, which would suggest that poems do not exist—at least not in the sense that we commonly understand things in the world to exist. It’s as if once the poem exists, poetry ceases to exist; once the poem arrives at the appearance of itself, as the work of poetry, it is lost. Blanchot insists on maintaining the openness and the endlessness of the question of literature, which is assured by the infinite self-referentiality of language and by the impossibility of arriving at the origin that would assure its existence. Blanchot explains, “[language] is wholly realized in literature, which is to say that it has only the reality of the whole; it is all—and nothing else, always on the verge of passing from all to nothing” (43). Literature takes us to the point of language’s accomplishment—a point that it realizes through a movement of negation, or disappearance. But this point of accomplishment, of wholeness, becomes a point of passage; as language achieves its own end, through the power to the make the world and itself disappear, it reaches its limit, where it passes from all to nothing. And, paradoxically, it is at this “end point” that literature begins, or starts over, in a time without time, where nothing appears, and where we can no longer measure the accomplishment of anything. Blanchot describes this as the “central point” of the literary experience: “This point is the one at which complete realization of language coincides with its disappearance” (44). Once completely realized, yet still lacking, language disappears into the superfluous movement of disappearance itself.
Blanchot considers the ambiguous “central point” of the work more closely once he has posed the question of literature as an endless search for its origin. He cites Mallarmé, writing that “the work must ‘allow no luminous evidence except of existing’” (44). The darkness allows nothing to appear, maintaining only the movement of negation and absence. Blanchot continues:
It is very true that only the work—if we come toward this point through the movement and strength of the work—only the accomplishment of the work makes it possible. Let us look again at the poem: what could be more real, more evident? And language itself is “luminous evidence” within it. This evidence, however, shows nothing, rests upon nothing; it is the ungraspable in action. There are neither terms nor moments. Where we think we have words, “a virtual trail of fires” shoots through us—a swiftness, a scintillating exaltation. A reciprocity: for what is not is revealed in this flight; what there isn’t is reflected in the pure grace of reflections that do not reflect anything. (44-45)
The work takes us to the point of its accomplishment, and therefore to the central point of the work. We arrive at the moment where the word, after turning itself over completely to darkness, seems to emerge as “luminous evidence.” But Blanchot explains that this evidence makes nothing evident; the words only reflect each other in an endless chain of signifiers that grounds itself in nothing. The moment of accomplishment therefore reveals the inability to grasp or take hold of anything that would assure it. Language opens onto that which cannot be negated, accomplished, or made to appear, precisely at the moment of its completion. “What is left? ‘Those very words, it is’” (45, emphasis in original).
Mallarmé describes that residual pronouncement—it is—as a “‘lightning moment,’ ‘dazzling burst of light’” (45, cited by Blanchot). The work reaches the central point of the work, where, after the negation of everything, nothing exists; but at this moment of brilliant achievement, the work simultaneously
