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Blanchot, Writing and the Politico-Religious

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14797585.2011.642106

1740-1666

Franson Manjali,

Social Movements and Cultural Identity

Abstract Footnote 1 This article provides a brief critical introduction to the essays by Maurice Blanchot that appear or are the subject of discussion in this issue of the Journal for Cultural Research. These essays, in one way or the other, relate to the Indian context. More than the question of Blanchot’s critical attitude towards the reception of either Mahatma Gandhi or Indian spirituality in the European intellectual milieu, the author attempts to understand the basis of Blanchot’s argumentation, especially with reference to the “politico-religious” and “writing”. The importance of the notions of the “impossibility of death” and “passivity” which he developed in relation to Levinas’s work has been focused on. In spite of his early orientation in the Christian religion, we see that Blanchot, in his later writings which emphasize an ‘extreme’ literary mode, seems to have striven towards the dissolving of the opposition between East and West, between theism and atheism, and between religion and literature. It is possible that he was thus heralding a post-Christian, post-theological, post-theistic and a postmodern world. 1. This article is dedicated to the memory of Paul Fletcher. Notes 1. This article is dedicated to the memory of Paul Fletcher. 2. Perhaps it is worth mentioning here that during his Italian visit, Gandhi was denied permission to meet Pope Pius XI — see Prayer (Citation2009) for more details. Prayer also presents a well-documented account of the Catholic Church’s strong opposition to Gandhi during the 1930s. See Prayer’s article in this issue. 3. The essay originally appeared in Journal des Débats on 17 February 1942. The English translation of the book Faux pas was published by Stanford University Press in 2001. 4. According to the bibliographic information available, the book contained texts by Jacques Masui, Jean Herbert, René Daumal, Shankaracharya, Chandidas, Ravidas, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, Kabir, Pratima Tagore, Satyaryana, Swami Pavitrananda, Anilbaran Roy, Siddheswarananda, Camille Rao, Akshaya Banerji, K. G. Mashruwala, Dr G. B., Lizelle Reymond, Louise Morin, Humbert-Sauvageot, L. Barbillion, Emile Dermenghem, Lanza del Vasto, F. Le Lionnais, Jean Grenier and Benjamin Fondane. 5. Commenting on the first two essays, Jean-Luc Nancy says that ‘they are truly remarkable in that they show Blanchot rigidly clinging on (“crispation”) to a Christian model of religion and a rejection of everything that seemed inauthentic or confused and diffused; for Blanchot, the Christian source of a very “sublime” representation of God, of the “Very High” with its great mysteries (Trinity, Incarnation, Redemption, Resurrection) and the idea of “communion”, has always played an impor- tant and hidden role’ (personal communication; translated from French by the author). 6. The words in inverted commas are taken from the titles of works on Blanchot: Gerald L. Bruns’ (Citation1997) Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy; Leslie Hill’s (Citation1997) Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary; and Lars Iyer’s (Citation2005) Blanchot’s Vigilance: Literature, Phenomenology and the Ethical. 7. I use the word ‘literature’ broadly to stand for both literature and art. ‘Literature’ appears in the title of Blanchot’s most popular work, The Space of Literature. But more appropriately, one could use Blanchot’s preferred word, ‘writing’, which is meant to denote any politically significant and deconstructive literary or artistic activity. 8. In a short foreword to this work, the author says that he started writing it in 1932, it was delivered to press in May 1940, and was published 1941. 9. The title Faux pas may be interpreted as the acknowledgement of the wrong step that the author had taken towards religion or, more generally, religion as the wrong step. Later, in the 1970s, Blanchot wrote a short work entitled Le pas au-delà, translated into English as The Step Not Beyond (Blanchot Citation1992b). 10. This question is too vast to be discussed here. For a useful account, see Watts (Citation1998) and also Manjali (Citation2008). 11. It is not possible, within the space of this article, to do justice to the variety of issues that have been discussed by philosophers under the rubric of Gandhi’s religious thought. For a useful reference, see Chatterjee (Citation1983). 12. It is useful to consider the specifically Gandhian method of ‘passive resistance’, also known as satyagraha or the ‘adherence to truth’. Gandhi described passive resistance in terms of the ‘soul- force’ (see Gandhi Citation2010, pp. 63–70). It is also tempting to try and compare Gandhi’s ‘passive resis- tance’ with the Levinas–Blanchot notion of ‘passivity’, but that is beyond the scope of this article. 13. In the title of his 1998 biography, Bident aptly calls Blanchot the ‘invisible partner’ (‘partenaire invisible’). Also, Blanchot, a man of the least public presence, was hardly ‘represented’ in the modern visual medium of photographs; not more than three photographs of him are said to have survived for posterity from his long life of 96 years. 14. G. K. Chesterton, journalist and detective fiction writer, was a favourite of many a writer of his time. Gandhi admired his writing. In an article entitled ‘White’s Views on Indian Awakening’ that appeared in his edited journal Indian Opinion (1910), he writes about Chesterton: ‘Mr. G. K. Chesterton is one of the great writers here. He is an Englishman of a liberal temper. Such is the perfection of his style that his writings are read by millions with great avidity … I too believe what he has said is reasonable’. After having quoted profusely from a Chesterton article that appeared in Illustrated London News of 18 September 1909, where the author expresses his strong support for an Indian version of the nation’s freedom, Gandhi concludes: ‘Indians must reflect over these views of Mr. Chesterton and consider what they must demand. What is the way to make Indian people happy? May it not be that we advance our own interests in the name of the Indian people? Or, that we have been endeavouring to destroy what the Indian people have carefully nurtured over thousands of years? I, for one, was led by Mr. Chesterton’s article to all these reflections and I place them before the readers of Indian Opinion’ (Gandhi Citation1910, translated from Gujarati; the present author has referred to the full text of Gandhi as quoted in Parel Citation1993, online version available at http://www.gandhiserve.org/cwmg/VOL010.PDF). In an afterword to Chesterton’s ‘allegorical’ detective fiction, The Man Who Was Thursday, Robert Giddings says: ‘Although he is now a rather neglected literary figure, G. K. Chesterton was one of the most prolific and influential writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. He was a literary and social critic, historian, playwright, novelist, poet, Catholic theologian and apologist and a tireless debater. His literary output included several hundred poems, five novels, some two hundred short stories, four thousand essays and several plays, but he still considered himself primarily a journalist. His … The Man Who Was Thursday – written in 1908 when he was in his mid-thirties – is arguably his best-known novel and, some say, his masterpiece’ (Chesterton Citation2008, p. 175). 15. For an illuminating account of an attempted spiritual convergence, see Aravamudan (Citation2007), particularly Chapter 3, ‘Theosophistries’. As per the author’s succinct account: ‘The Theosophical Society was founded … in New York, in 1875, by Helena P. Blavatsky and Henry S. Olcott. Flirting with Dayananda’s Arya Samaj and integrating itself into the Buddhist and Hindu aspects of spiritual tradition, Theosophy was a cosmopolitan alternative when compared with the parochial nature of the Raj. Founded in the transidiomatic environment generated by the British Empire, Theosophy explored the fungibility of occult practices drawn from plural religious and spiritual traditions’ (Aravamudan Citation2007, p. 105). 16. It is to be noted that Gandhi is more directly denouncing the rise of ‘modern civilisation’. He writes in the preface to Hind Swaraj: ‘The British Government in India constitutes a struggle between the Modern Civilisation, which is the Kingdom of Satan, and the Ancient Civilisation, which is Kingdom of God. The one is the God of War, the other is the God of Love’ (Gandhi Citation2010, p. 8). Gandhi appreciated the deeper values, not only of Christianity, but also of all other major religions. Mahadev Desai, his long-term personal assistant, writes that Gandhi read out passages from the Koran and the Bible, and interpreted them for the benefit of college students at his Sabarmati ashram, near Ahmedabad. When he was charged of being a ‘Christian in secret’, he is reported to have replied: ‘The charge … is both a libel and a complement — a libel because there are men who can believe me to be capable of being secretly anything, i.e., for fear of being that openly. There’s nothing in the world that would keep me from professing Christianity or any other faith, the moment I felt the truth of and the need for it. Where there is fear there is no religion. The charge is a complement in that it is a reluctant acknowledgement of my capacity for appreciating the beauties of Christianity … If I could call myself, say, a Christian, or a Mussalman, with my own interpretation of the Bible or the Quran, I should not hesitate to call myself either. For then, Hindu, Christian, or Mussalman would be synonymous terms’ (Desai Citation1973, pp. 377–378). 17. See the chapter entitled ‘Playing the English Gentleman’ in Gandhi’s autobiography (Gandhi 1927–1929, pp. 41–44). 18. Commenting on Blanchot’s ‘On Hindu Thought’, Jean-Luc Nancy says: ‘This text is milder, less aggressive than the other two. It suggests that Blanchot had to change his tone a little bit. His criticism is turned almost entirely against the chattering of the Westerners. In their loose talk (but Gandhi is not excluded, but in any case we are no longer talking of him) they drown the real issue, which is one of silence or, more precisely listening to the silence. There are a few biblical sources for this. Blanchot must have a silent, sublime “spirit” that retreats to an absolute distance … I admit that these texts leave me with an unpleasant impression of arrogance, not to the East or India, but to a “chatter” certainly rightly criticized (this epoch was very much taken to “Hindu spirituality”…) but also distrusted from a disdainful arrogance that does not explain what it really wants’ (personal communication; translated from French by the author). 19. The original French title of this work is Le Retrait du politique, where the word retrait is intended to mean a ‘retracing’ and a ‘re-treating’ of, as well as a ‘retreat’ from, the ‘political’. 20. Broadly speaking, the notion of ‘passivity’ which recurs in Blanchot and in Levinas may be char- acterised as the incessant surging/appearing in time of the potential within the actual. As absence that interrupts the presence, in a deconstructive movement, it is considered essentially transformative, of both the subjective and the objective as well as of the intersubjective. For instance, for Blanchot, literature as incessant murmur, with its provenance in silence, interrupts the given discourse of the world. 21. Heidegger’s notion of ‘unconcealment’ (aletheia) is also developed in this essay. 22. Nancy is referring to an essay entitled ‘Atheism and Writing: Humanism and the Cry’, a chapter in The Infinite Conversation (Blanchot Citation1992a, pp. 246–263). The original French work is L’entretien infini (Blanchot Citation1969). 23. Levinas has often spoken of ‘God’ in terms of the ‘wholly other’ or the ‘absolutely other’. However, Gérard Bensussan, an important French scholar on Levinas, points out that the notion of God as the ‘wholly other’ is not central to Levinas’s thought of God (personal communication).