give being to the ‘feint’—that ‘literature exists’—declares the exclusion of everything, but in this way, excludes itself, so that the moment at which ‘every reality dissolves’ by the force of the poem is also the moment the poem dissolves and, instantly done, is instantly undone” (45). And yet still for Blanchot this formulation does not quite reach the moment of radical reversal that makes the work impossible. Here, in Mallarmé’s words, the undoing of the work also constitutes the ultimate achievement of the work—the point at which it disappears in the movement of disappearance it has accomplished. “Those very words it is” appear as the extreme possibility of the work, even if only for a brilliant moment.20 This point marks the work as “pure beginning,” since the accomplishment of the work gives rise to the it is—the light of being that disappears at the moment it begins. But, Blanchot explains, “we must also comprehend and feel that this point renders the work impossible, because it never permits arrival at the work. It is a region anterior to the beginning where nothing is made of being, and in which nothing is ever accomplished” (46). The work exceeds the ability of the work to begin, which prevents its accomplishment and its initiation. Writing takes us toward the central point, toward the origin of the work—from which it issues, but also from which it is infinitely excluded. For this reason, the task of the work remains endless and impossible, but this condition sustains the work in the movement that characterizes it—a search for a beginning that cannot possibly begin. Disappearance, then, does not refer to an ideal moment where being momentarily pronounces itself in the absence of everything; rather, disappearance becomes the stubborn refusal of anything to appear, to begin, to be—even itself.
At the central point of his own work, Blanchot reflects upon the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and the way that this myth recounts the infinite search for the work’s origin. Orpheus’s journey toward Eurydice demonstrates the power of art to open the nothingness of the underworld at the same time that it confronts the moment of the work’s impossibility and undoing. From the perspective of the world, Orpheus, in his impatience, fails to bring Eurydice to the light of day, but Blanchot suggests that Orpheus must fail in order not to fail the work. Orpheus’s betrayal and loss of Eurydice becomes a sort of faithfulness to the work, even if this faithfulness can only be achieved through a turning away. Blanchot explains that Eurydice “is the profoundly obscure point toward which art and desire, death and night, seem to tend. She is the instant when the essence of night approaches as the other night” (171). And, here, we can imagine that the obscurity of this point only becomes more obscure in the approach to it. If the first night—the space of the empowered descent toward Eurydice—maintains a certain clarity in its darkness, and promises the possibility of Eurydice’s retrieval, the other night looms in the distance, at the point where the power and possibility of art to make anything appear are exhausted.
Orpheus is capable of everything, except of looking this point in the face, except of looking at the center of night in the night. He can descend toward it; he can—and this is still stronger an ability—draw it to him and lead it with him upward, but only by turning away from it. This turning away is the only way it can be approached. This is what concealment means when it reveals itself in the night. But Orpheus, in the movement of his migration, forgets the work he is to achieve, and he forgets it necessarily, for the ultimate demand which his movement makes is not that there be a work, but that someone face this point, grasp its essence, grasp it where it appears, where it is essential and essentially appearance: at the heart of night. (171)
From this perspective, it seems that the ability to see poses the greatest threat to the work, and the turning away of one’s vision, in a sort of blind and backwards approach to the work, becomes the extreme expression of the artist’s ability. Concealment, here, rests upon the artist’s power to resist looking, and therefore arises out of the masterful patience of the artist. But, in order for there to be a work, one must eventually look, in an effort to see and to grasp the essence of the night. This moment marks the disappearance of the work, in the most profound concealment, which, paradoxically, responds to the ultimate demand of the work.
At the point when Orpheus looks back, Eurydice recedes beyond his grasp, and he loses her forever. He fails to bring her back up to the light and the world, despite his power to transgress the normal limits of human endeavor by opening the depths of Hades with his song. Orpheus achieves miraculous feats, accomplishes all that can be accomplished, but the myth tells us of his ultimate failure. His look back to Eurydice not only marks the moment of Orpheus’s failure to retrieve her, but also disposes of the value of the journey he makes to get to that point; in losing Eurydice, the journey is ruined. Blanchot writes:
When he looks back, the essence of the night is revealed as the inessential. Thus he betrays the work, and Eurydice, and the night. But not to turn toward Eurydice would be no less untrue. Not to look would be infidelity to the measureless, imprudent force of his movement, which does not want Eurydice in her daytime truth and everyday appeal, but wants her in her nocturnal obscurity, in her distance, with her closed body and sealed face—wants to see her not when she is visible, but when she is invisible, and not as the intimacy of a familiar life, but as the foreignness of what excludes all intimacy, and wants, not to make her live, but to have living in her the plenitude of death. (172)
The work requires that Orpheus not look if he wants to bring it to a successful conclusion. But the work also requires Orpheus to look, in the sense that his loss of Eurydice, his experience of her disappearance, affirms her obscurity, concealment, and infinite recession beyond his grasp. If Orpheus seems to have the power to retrieve Eurydice, to make her appear again in the world, it would rest upon his ability to transform her into something he does not seek and that has little to do with his work. Orpheus cannot capture the nocturnal Eurydice by making her visible, so he must look, in order to experience the only relation he can have with her—one based on her invisibility and her disappearance. Orpheus seeks Eurydice in her profound absence; when he looks, he does not experience her absence in a “lightning moment” that marks the accomplishment of the work, but, rather, confronts the depth of her concealment and refusal to appear.
Blanchot’s discussion of patience and impatience as it relates to Orpheus’s descent and ultimate look back at Eurydice demonstrates the resistance of his reading of the myth to dialectical understanding. Blanchot often describes the writer as a sort of wanderer whose work consists of an interminable, undirected movement, rather than an arrival at a final destination. This fits with the notion that the writer disappears into an anonymous, neutral space where he or she no longer operates from a place of power, individuality, or decisiveness. As we saw earlier, the writer’s mastery has nothing to do with an ability to write, but, rather, refers to the capacity to interrupt the errant and unending process of writing—to the moment when he or she decides to stop writing. The work would seem to require infinite patience from the writer, since it pulls him or her into a space and a process without a horizon and demands that he or she sustain an endless movement. But in order to have a work, and in order to confront the ultimate refusal of the work, the writer commits an act of impatience, an interruption, a look back. As Orpheus descends into the Underworld, he must exhibit patience, submitting to the law that forbids him to look back at Eurydice until she returns to the light of day. And the myth encourages us to imagine that if he sustained this patient movement while drawing Eurydice upwards, he would succeed in having her again, with him, in the world. But he can’t keep himself from looking:
Orpheus is guilty of impatience. His error is to want to exhaust the infinite, to put a term to the interminable, not endlessly to sustain the very movement of his error. Impatience is the failing of one who wants to withdraw from the absence of time; patience is the ruse which seeks to master this absence by making of it another time, measured otherwise. But true patience does not exclude impatience. It is intimacy with impatience—impatience suffered and endured endlessly. (173)
Blanchot shifts our attention from what the myth seems to present as a possibility—resurrecting Eurydice—to the impossibility of Orpheus’s essential work. The myth suggests that Orpheus’s task has a goal and an end
