The Workless Community: Blanchot, Communism, Surrealism

Author(s): LARS IYER

Source: Paragraph, Vol. 26, No. 3 (November 2003), pp. 51-69
Published by: Edinburgh University Press
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The Workless Community: Blanchot,

Communism, Surrealism
Communism is here necessarily in quotation marks: one does not belong to
communism, and communism does not let itself be designated by what names it.1

If Maurice Blanchot is known in the Anglophone world at all,

it is as a literary critic, the author of The Space of Literature and
'Literature and the Right to Death', whose reputation has been
perhaps obscured by those whom he influenced. Who doubts that he
exerted an extraordinary influence on Bataille and Lvinas, Foucault
and Derrida? Yet Blanchot might seem a writer who belongs to a
culture that has moved out of reach - to a world in which literature

was important in a way that is no longer possible. He risks appearing

as an aesthete, content to praise the artwork in its detachment

from the world. Is it in terms of a spirit of revenge for Blanchot's
apparent detachment from the world around him - for his apparent
aestheticism - that one might understand those who would account
for his post-war writings in terms of his effort to retreat from his
former career as a political journalist on the extreme right?2 But this

reading is too easy. Blanchot can never be claimed simply to have

retreated into the securities of a literary institution. His writings on
literature do not content themselves with upholding the value of the
great work of art or the great literary artist, but submit these notions
to a rigorous interrogation. Furthermore, it is never just literature
that is his concern. Blanchot's turn to the consideration of political
questions from the late 1950s onwards and his active interventions in
French political Ufe are a rendering explicit of an ongoing reflection
on the political, on community, in his volumes of literary criticism.3

Yet the relationship between such interventions and his literary

work remains poorly understood. As he emphasizes in The Unavowable
Community in 1983, his participation in the Events of May 1968, when
workers and students demonstrated in Paris, is continuous with his

reflections on literature. But the relationship between literature and

community in his work is already indicated, albeit in a manner that
remains enigmatic, in the preface to The Infinite Conversation, published

in 1969. 'Writing (. . .) passes through the advent of communism' (xii):

but how might one understand this strange conjunction of the literary

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52 Paragraph
and the political in his work? How might it permit a reading that would
allow Blanchot's work to be understood neither as an aestheticism nor
as a retreat from the political errors of his early journalism?

In an essay that owes a great deal to Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy

complains that the political stakes of the notion of community remain

unclear in the older writer.4 Even as he pays tribute to Blanchot,

in whose work he discovers a neglected reflection on community
associated with art and literature, Nancy claims that the older author's
theoretical elaboration of this notion remains sporadic and undevel-

oped. For Nancy, Blanchot has not been 'not truly able to communicate, explicitly and thematically (even if "explicit" and "thematic"
are only very fragile categories here) with a thinking of community'.5
Nancy would therefore supply the 'explicit' or 'thematic' rendering
of community that Blanchot was unable to accomplish.

Yet the very tide of Nancy's essay, 'La communaut dsoeuvre',

registers his indebtedness to the older author. It couples two crucial
words in Blanchot's lexicon: dsoeuvrement, which has the sense of
idleness, inertia, finding oneself with nothing to do, lack of work
(oeuvre), and communaut. This conjunction indicates an inversion

of the communist ideal, in which human beings are understood

as those whose essence can be produced through work. Human

beings are, for Nancy, unable to determine their communal essence

through production. As such, la communaut dsoeuvre, which I will
translate as 'the workless community' in order to keep memory of
the etymological connection between dsoeuvrement and oeuvre, does
not place itself in the service of the vanguard who would look to the
workers as embryos of a subject- position that it would take it upon
itself to wake up, addressing them in the second person, in view of
their potential as the subject of history, the proletarian community
to come. Nor does it lend itself to the attempt to recover the idyllic
society bound by a shared history, identity and fate (the Athenian city,

the early Christian community, the Roman Republic, the family or

the commune). Nancy does not understand community as a notion
to be granted new sense in the face of the breakdown of traditional
values, to the appeal of a 'we' whose collective body would mend all
the tears that have appeared in society. But nor would he call for us
to counter the power of a hegemonic community with an alternative
community of commensurable power that might lobby for its rights
or for its recognition. Indeed, the community in question cannot be

said to exist outside other groups and communities, but, as I will

show, for this also holds true for Blanchot, inhabits them insofar as

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The Workless Community: Blanchot, Communism, Surrealism 53

it is linked with a non-working idling, a slackening in the work of

identification. It refers to an experience of an determination that
precedes and oudasts the determination of any particular group.
As such, Nancy's essay on the workless community does not seek
to keep memory of a sense of the 'we' that its author would mourn,
but the disappearance of a certain dissension and difference that would
be constitutive of community. Nancy understands this disappearance
in terms of a certain regime of effectuation that belongs to a certain
conception of the fashioning of the human being in the face of which
the classic discourses of the right and the left must admit defeat.
But this does not prevent a certain left, open and receptive to what
the political might mean, from taking account of the dissolution of
community and witnessing it from another perspective. Community
cannot be achieved through a simple refusal of work, a laying down
of tools. If it happens, it does so as an experience of worklessness that
falls outside work and its voluntary renunciation. As such, it does not
offer itself to a conventional political programme. Indeed, from the
perspective of a conventional politics, it is questionable whether it can
be said to happen at all.
Thus, Nancy's title answers to the way in which dsoeuvrement,
when coupled with the word communaut, implies an active loosening
of the communal bond, an unworking or worklessness that is not to
be understood negatively, that is, as a pocket of heterogeneity that
would have to be overcome, but constitutively, insofar as the workless

community would be woven into our existing communities, as a

non- working reserve that cannot be overcome by work.

Is Nancy right, in this case, to claim that Blanchot was unable

to supply an 'explicit' or 'thematic' rendering of community? As I
will show, explicitness and thematicness, even if they appear between
inverted commas, are wagered as soon as one would attempt to write
on community. I will argue that Nancy has not read Blanchot patiently
enough, and that it is the older author who would have indicated the
limits of an explicitly thematic account of community.
Blanchot's explicit reflections on community are indeed sporadic.
Yet they are already present in his discussion of reading in The Space
of Literature, where he argues that the reader belongs to a community
of all readers - to a certain tradition of reception that encloses literary

works 'like angels with intertwined wings'.6 As he explains, at the

same time, a decision is at stake in any new reading, since the meaning
of a particular text is never entirely decidable. This does not mean
that its meaning lies entirely in the hands of the reader. Rather, it is to

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54 Paragraph

claim that the community of readers protects a certain determination

of the literary work, of literature, but that this determination can

never have the last word. Blanchot argues that another experience
of community, of reading, wagers this determination. Each reader is
given over to an experience the meaning of which it is not in his or

her hands to decide. Reading, to this extent, is a leap in the dark.

Blanchot's many essays, collected in larger volumes like The Space
of Literature, Le livre venir and The Infinite Conversation, set out this

equivocal experience of community through careful negotiations with

specific, singular literary or artistic 'objects'. It may seem inappropriate
to seek to authenticate a body of thought as distinctly Blanchovian. But
his thought emerges in its originality and specificity in his negotiations

of the texts of others. This is why any engagement with his texts
intended to indicate the contribution of his thought must take the
form of a reading - not the slavish reproduction of the course of his
encounters, but the attempt to answer the spirit that animates the
letter of his essays.

It is when his essays are gathered into larger volumes, when they
are organized in specific groupings, that it becomes clear that certain
common patterns emerge in his readings. The theme of community is
particularly insistent, but it cannot be detached from other, immensely

involved reflections in which it occupies no absolutely privileged

place. It would not suffice, in writing of community in Blanchot,
to trace every reference in his work to this word, detaching it from
the rich and complex movement of which it is a part. His reflections

must be approached in a particular context and not as a detachable

set of theses. This is why, no doubt, Blanchot's thought remains
relatively neglected, since few - even Nancy - have the patience
to be a patient and scrupulous reader without demanding quicker
'results'. I will show that Blanchot's reflections are as developed as they
can be if they are to attest to the happening of community.

A patient reading of Blanchot's texts is particularly important if

one is to understand those occasions to which he responds with

a certain impatience. In the year before the publication of The
Infinite Conversation, he involved himself in the Events of May 1968,

contributing unsigned essays to the review of the Students and

Worker's Action Committee, and marching on the street with other

participants. Whilst one looks in vain for an explicit and thematic
rendering of the notion of communism in The Infinite Conversation,
one can find, nevertheless, an indication in its preface that the essays
that follow are marked by this practice. In particular, he refers to

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The Workless Community: Blanchot, Communism, Surrealism 55

the 'magnificent surrealist experiment' that he examines in a long

essay towards the end of this volume ( IC vii). The impassioned texts
that Blanchot distributed anonymously during the Events find their
echo in 'Tomorrow at Stake'. It is necessary to read with Blanchot in
order to understand the meaning of communism in his work and his
political interventions. This is what I intend to do here with respect
to his essays on Surrealism.

It is easy to understand Surrealism as a failure - as the moment in

which the artistic vanguard could have realized itself. In one sense,
its achievements are clear; they fill our museums. But the Surrealists
sought something greater: the abolition of an art that would hold itself
apart from the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Surrealism
might seemed to have survived only as a style, yet its task was not
to change art, but to realize it by freeing it from the artistic field,
drawing out the consequences of an artistic obsolescence the Dadaists
had already understood, and rendering it political.
Yet Surrealism always risked appearing to be politically irrespon-

sible, opening itself with protean enthusiasm to dreams, trances,

practical jokes, automatism, the contradictory, party games and collaborations in a pursuit of the surreal, affirming above all an openness

to chance. But these techniques were the signs of an attempt to

discover a mode of research, of experiment, suitable to the age of
Marx and Freud; their goal was to rethink experience, to expose
each individual to the risk implicit in their hidden desires, to bring
about a revolution on the grandest scale. The emphasis on the ludic,
on the irrational, on imagination and inspiration was inspired by the
examples of Rimbaud and Lautramont, but the Surrealists were not
interested in merely constructing a new aesthetic, but in transforming
the world, in changing life.
As Breton emphasizes, the Surrealists would 'uproot thought from
an increasingly cruel state of thralldom,' in order to 'return it to its

original purity,' to adopt a tenet of 'total revolt, complete insubordination'; 'everything remains to be done, every means must be
worth trying, in order to lay to waste the ideas of family, country,
religion'.7 The surreal was not to become a pastime; Surrealist art or
painting were to remain experiments and not works of literature or
art, answering to the unyielding need 'to laugh like savages in the
presence of the French flag, to vomit their disgust in the face of every

priest,' to combat 'poetic indifference, the distraction of art, scholarly

research, pure speculation' (MS, 30). But few can answer this exacting

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56 Paragraph

demand. As Breton admits, 'unflagging fidelity to the commitments

of Surrealism presuppose a disinterestedness, a contempt for risk, a
refusal to compromise, of which very few men prove, in the long run,
to be capable' (MS, 129). The Surrealist is, for Breton, never Surrealist
enough; the Surrealist experiment demands an unyielding commitment to risk - to the dictates of desire that implies the resistance to
nationalism, militarism, racism, colonialism, and religion.

Has Surrealism ever begun? By 1945, as Blanchot writes in his

first major essay on Surrealism, it no longer names a school; it might

even seem irrelevant, but 'a state of mind survives'.8 Surrealism lives

on, wandering from the grave where it was laid to rest. Surrealism
is not dead but dispersed - it is a 'ghost' that cannot be exorcized.9
For Blanchot, it is difficult to assume an authority with respect to
Surrealism, assessing its failure or success, for it does not belong to a
milieu, to a place or time in terms of which it could be explained and
accounted for. The Surrealist demand is not the exclusive property of
those associated with its name, nor indeed of those who would take
up its name today. Surrealism, in this sense, belongs to no one, and those

who think themselves enfranchized to judge, to gauge its success, or

to recount its history, do so at their peril - for, as Blanchot warns us
in a later essay, Surrealism, or a certain ghost of Surrealism, will rise up

and 'demand justice' (JC 407).

But was Surrealism ever anything but a ghost? For Bataille, writing

in 1946, Surrealism failed because it placed 'work before being',

creating paintings and books where 'an arduous path to the heart of

being' should have been taken.10 But in another sense, as Bataille

acknowledges, Surrealism has yet to begin. The Surrealist school might

have seemed to have dispersed, but he suggests that this dispersal

is the condition of possibility for understanding its betrayal. This is
why he can write, 'the great Surrealism is beginning' (AM 51). For
Bataille, one must understand its ghostly demand not in terms of its
production of particular works, but as part of a broader practice of
communal existence.

As I will show, Blanchot does not seek, like Bataille, to dissolve

Surrealism into a practice of existence. Surrealism failed, but its failure
did not prevent it from answering to the possibility of another kind

of communal existence, to the workless community, in the works

written in its name.

Surrealism is nearly as well known for its internal disputes as for

the artworks associated with its name. There is no doubt that the

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The Workless Community: Blanchot, Communism, Surrealism 57

group was extraordinarily well organized, but its discipline came at

the price of purges and excommunications. Bataille observes that there
was, on the part of Breton, 'a desire for common consecration to a
single sovereign truth, a hatred of all forms of concession regarding

this truth, of which he wanted his friends to be the expression,

otherwise they would cease to be his friends' (AM 31). Bataille is
not unsympathetic; Breton's failing was not to have proposed the

affirmation of a communication of friends around 'the truth', but to

have reduced friendship to certain 'outward forms of fidelity' (AM

31). Breton, no doubt, was capricious and arrogant, but these traits
coexist with others that permitted him to answer to the Surrealist
demand. But those who left the group did so out of a commitment

to a new form of communication that would allow them neither to

retreat into the solitariness of the life of the writer nor to content

themselves with forms of sociability that depend upon reciprocity and

mutuality. They, too, and perhaps Bataille most of all, responded to

the call of or from Surrealism.

This is why in 1947, long after he was expelled from the group,
Bataille reaffirmed his commitment to Surrealism in opposition 'to all
accepted limits, a rigorous will to insubordination', declaring himself

'its old enemy from uHthir (AM 49). In this sense, Bataille can be
called the enemy of Surrealism because he is and always was a friend
of the surreal - a friend whose friendship demands a struggle. Is this
what Breton understood in his ruthlessness, his intransigence, in the
expulsions and excommunications that led him to be nicknamed the
'Pope' of Surrealism?
For Blanchot, writing in 1966, Surrealism demands the maintenance
of a friendship with the surreal that is more important than any
particular relationship between individuals. As he suggests, although

Breton gave himself a guiding role, orienting its proceedings and

co-authoring its programs, this was only in order to recall its partici-

pants to the demand of Surrealism insofar as it made every one of

them 'each one's Other (l'Autre)' (IC 408). But to claim that Surrealism is an affirmation of friendship does not mean that surrealists
were simply friends, bound to one another by shared interests and
mutual respect. Surrealism is, Blanchot insists, 'always a third person
in the friendship; an absent third term through which passes and
through which issues this relation of tension and passion that effaces
characters as it gives rise to and motivates initiatives and attractions'
(IC 408). The friendship of one Surrealist for another invokes the

surreal itself.

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58 Paragraph

How should we understand Blanchot's claim that the surreal might

be grasped as 'the unknown', as 'a non-simultaneous set of forces,
a space of difference' (JC, 410)? What is particularly striking about
The Infinite Conversation is that the opening to 'the Outside', the
'unknown', or the 'obscure' is presented in terms of the opening to
the Other (Autrui) (JC, 51). Doubtless this apparent turn in Blanchot's
work is occasioned by the publication of Levinas's Totality and Infinity .

This book permitted an enrichment of Blanchot's vocabulary and a

new refinement of his thought, if not a change in its orientation. In
particular, it afforded him an opportunity to develop his previously
inchoate notion of community.
For Lvinas, the face of the Other - nude, destitute, which is to
say, prior to any social or cultural determination - addresses me, and
I respond. This response occurs upstream of what I can remember and
synthesize; indeed, it occurs before I can choose to accede or to refuse
the opening to the Other. As Blanchot emphasizes, Lvinas presents
this opening in terms of an acknowledgment of the Other figured as
the 'here I am' that Abraham utters to God. Blanchot hesitates about

Levinas's formulations of this opening. The conversationalists declare

that the name God is 'too imposing' (and perhaps the names ethics
and the Other, too).12 It is doubtful whether the relation in question
can even be qualified as good, or rather, as the opening of goodness,
for Blanchot. As Leslie Hill notes, Blanchot is concerned to secularize
and multiply the relation in question.13
We can hear the effects of this reading of Lvinas in Nancy's Blanchovian title The Inoperative Community. Firstly, in place of the appeals

to the good or to V thique, the ethical, Blanchot's conversationalists

appeal to worklessness, to an idleness or slackening that is always at

issue in or relation to the Other. Secondly, Blanchot appears to

move quickly from a reflection upon the unilateral relation to the

singular Other to considering the possibility that a criss-crossing of such

relations might occur. As he lets a conversationalist observe:

the Other who looms up before me - outside my horizon and as one coming
from afar - is for himself nothing but a self who would like to be heard by the
other, be received by the Other and stand in my presence, as if I were the Other
and because I am nothing other than the Other: the unidentifiable, the "I" -less,
the nameless, the presence of the inaccessible. ( IC 70)

The conversationalist then evokes 'a double dissymmetry, a double

discontinuity' - a space that is doubly distorted, a 'double-signed

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The Workless Community: Blanchot, Communism, Surrealism 59

infinity' ( IC 71). A few lines on, this double dissymmetry is linked

explicitly to the thought of community.
One cannot understand the notion of community in Blanchot solely
in Levinasian terms. Later on, Blanchot attests to just such a community - a community of two - in his relation to Bataille, writing of
the doubly dissymmetrical opening that did not simply sustain their

friendship, but was its condition. The two friends, caught in a

criss-cross of unilateral and dissymmetrical relations, did not content

themselves with convivial discussion or the undisturbed accord of

individuals who share an outlook. Indeed, Blanchot underlines the

fact that words were not so much exchanged by the friends, but repeated,

as if it were the sheer fact of the address that is important, not its
content. This repetition is not a formal relation, a dialectics, just as it
is not a simple immediacy. It is a repetition of a difference, in which
it is a redoubled exposure that is at issue insofar as each, for the other,
shatters a certain determination of sociality.
As Blanchot emphasizes, friendships of the kind he enjoyed with

Bataille 'are strange, privileged, sometimes exclusive, and that can

only with difficulty withstand being shared with others; relations of
invisibility in full light that are guaranteed by nothing, and when
they have endured over a lifetime represent the unforeseeable chance,

the unique chance in view of which they were risked' (IC 217).
It was, Blanchot argues, in order to sustain a relationship of this
sort that the Surrealists struggled. The surreal names the greeting or
acknowledgment of the Other that never settles into a mutuality or
reciprocity, into an experience that might be, in the ordinary sense

of the word, shared. It is the 'absent third term' that is invoked

in the friendship, the community that Breton demanded in the

name of Surrealism.15

Certainly, the friendship between the Surrealists overturns many

social categories, to the extent that they break with the model of
a certain mutuality and reciprocity. Nothing is expected in return;
friendship, as a response to a demand, must remain unilateral and
intransigent, because the Other is another Surrealist. It exposes the

Surrealist to a reserve that cannot be dominated or contained. In this

way, the surreal tears open the ordinary notion of friendship, binding a

group of extraordinarily individualistic individuals to a common cause

by refusing to allow what they share to collapse into something simply

held in common. This is what Breton's intransigence achieves - as

Blanchot notes, 'he had the particular power not of being the one any

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60 Paragraph

more than the others, but of making surrealism each one's Other';
he would have the Surrealists open themselves to the demand of the
Other (l'Autre) - 'of living it with friendship in the most rigorous
sense of this exacting term: making the surrealist affirmation, in other

words, a presence or a work of friendship (oeuvre d'amiti)' (IC 408).

The practices - automatic writing, sleeping experiments etc. - with
which one associates Surrealism are, according to Blanchot, rendered
possible by the practice of friendship that Breton required. To fall
short of the friendship in question would be to fall short of Surrealism.

But this implies that friendship is always revocable since it is liable to

contract into a simple reciprocity and never quite measures up to the
demand of Surrealism, that is, to the collective, communal affirmation
of an encounter that would happen by chance.
On Blanchot's account, then, Surrealism would name an encounter

with the surreal in and as friendship. But the encounter in question

cannot be a deliberate choice. A communal event that occurs when

that group is exposed to an experience for which it cannot prepare.

Surrealist friendship permits no concordance between its terms; the
surreal, in this context, designates a point of juncture that is also
a point of (/^juncture, a haunting of mutuality and reciprocity that
withdraws itself even as it occurs. That is to say, it opens a relation to
'the Outside' or 'the unknown' that can never be secured and to this

extent means that Surrealism, as a practice, can never arrive as such.

Does this mean, like Bataille, that one needs to pass over the works
of the Surrealists in order to understand Surrealism as a practice of
existence? One cannot contrast work and existence in this way. The
surreal leaves its traces in the surrealist work. Indeed, as I will now

show with respect to Blanchot's commentary on Breton's tale Nadja,

the surreal can mark itself in the work in a manner that is unbeknownst
to its author.

Breton's Nadja sets out to retrace the course of a series of episodes that
pertain to his encounter with the young woman who bears its name.
Its author presents his text as an ongoing narrative of a sequence of
events as they occur. He gives the impression that the book that will
come to be called Nadja would lay itself open to whatever happens. It
seems entirely by chance that Breton meets the wandering spirit whose

presence confounds him, who lends her name to his book. Who is
she? A young woman who sees visions, who is close to what Breton
would call the surreal and of whom he writes even as she slips out
of his reach. She surrealizes the city through which she passes, seeing

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The Workless Community: Blanchot, Communism, Surrealism 61

ghosts in the Place Dauphine and a fiery, spectral hand hovering about
the Seine. Her obliviousness to social convention, her insouciance
concerning clothes and friends entrance Breton. She is unpredictable
and enigmatic, playful yet grave, her conversation a mixture of the
trifling and the profound; she offers startling exegeses of the essays of
the La Rvolution surrealist , composes allegorical sketches and seems to
be able to predict the future.

In reading Nadja, one must bear in mind the vehemence with

which the Surrealists rejected what they saw as redundant literary

forms. One remembers, for example, Breton's protest against what he
argues is the insignificance of the details recorded in the realist novel.
Yet Breton's text is itself artfully arranged; far from opening itself to
the risk of an encounter, it preserves itself from risk, taking refuge in

a teleology, a narration in which the encounter with Nadja occupies

a carefully allotted role.
Breton risks appearing as a literary author among other authors,
a writer for whom experience is the raw material for the creation
of a work. For Nadja is more than the threshold of the surreal. She

is also the young woman who subsists on menial work, willing, as

she tells Breton, to stop at nothing to obtain money. Breton finds
her too demanding: she wants money and affection; her conversation
is interminable and self-absorbed. The real Nadja who exasperates
Breton, the real woman who threatens to leave Paris to take up a
position as a domestic servant, disappears from the book that bears her
name. Breton tells us quickly and callously that she was incarcerated
in a mental institution. He turns from Nadja to the woman to whom
the latter part of his work is addressed - to the new lover who has, he
writes, 'turned me from enigmas forever'.16 As such, Nadja is merely
a stage in the author's Bildungsroman. Breton turns his attention away

from the young woman who he presented as an enchantress. Nadja

becomes, ultimately, a literary work of art and disappears into the
literary establishment from which Surrealism was supposed to break.17
Blanchot argues that Nadja attests to the surreal in a way its author
does not anticipate. Breton appears to have risked nothing because of
the way in which he related the events, reducing them in the end to
just another incident or episode in his life. But Blanchot insists that
Breton is risked - he is exposed to an outbreak of chance that cannot
be internalized or appropriated. True, Breton does not remember this
exposure as such, but then the event in question is one that cannot

be easily synthesized into a memory. For Blanchot, the particular

achievement of the Surrealists is to have attempted to hold themselves

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open to the experience of the surreal. Surrealism would attest to the

relation between work and worklessness - an 'attestation of default',
that does not permit it to merge 'with the trace it leaves or with the
phenomenon that bears it' ( IC 417, 418). In this sense, worklessness
is to be understood as a name for friendship itself - for the relation to
the surreal that was at stake in all the relationships of the Surrealists. Is
it friendship that Breton sought with Nadja?

As Blanchot notes, worklessness, the absence of work 'is used by

the current ideology to designate as "madness" what it rejects'; he also
claims that 'the absence of work, confined in the asylum, is also always
walled up in the work' (IC 420). Nadja is walled up in an institution,
but Breton's response to her as the Other is confined in the book that
bears her name - in a work that allows itself to become part of the
literary institution from which Surrealism would break. The absence
of the work, 'cites the work outside itself, calling it always in vain to
its own worklessness and making the work re-cite itself, even when it
believes it has its sights on "the outside" that it does not fail to include'
(IC 420). Breton's rcit points beyond itself not simply because Nadja,

its object, was committed to an institution, but because its author

would tell us a well wrought story about madness, about a mad love
affair. But even as Breton succumbs to the temptation to realize a
literary work, allowing the encounter with Nadja to become another
episode in his life; he cannot wall himself up from his relation to the
surreal. Nadja cannot protect him from Nadja.

But this does not mean that Nadja can become a work of pure
worklessness. It is, after all, a book among other books, a book
that opens to the commentator who would teach us how to read.

Worklessness leaves a trace in a book that the Blanchovian commen-

tator can discern. Worklessness cannot take the form of a book; nor,
indeed, does it tolerate any particular determination. Friendship and
community are always linked in Blanchot to the relationship to this
resistance - to a differentiation, a worklessness, that prevents them
from closing upon itself.18 In this way, they ultimately escape what
Blanchot, following Nancy, calls 'immanence', that is, the desire for
a community to produce itself through labour, with which all forms
of communitarianism and community have been associated (see IC,
7). 19 But even as it escapes the movement of a community to realize

its own essence, the workless community is not to be understood

as a reserve that rests in itself. Work is always co-implicated with
worklessness. Whilst to work is, in the broadest possible sense, to
identify or to permit identification to occur, worklessness cannot be

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The Workless Community: Blanchot, Communism, Surrealism 63

understood as a countermovement of equal force. It names, rather,

a lability, a withering or dissolution that inhabits work. Is it not the

awareness of this same worklessness that calls for work and identification? Blanchot indicates the failure of identification as it marks itself in

Nadja, showing us that Breton's work shelters a relation that testifies

to the perpetual incompletion of work even as it calls for completion.
As Timothy Clark observes, Breton aestheticized the surreal in his
rcit because he operated with an excessively determined and, in the
end, thoroughly traditional conception of the surreal.20 But Breton
does allow an aperture through which the surreal can reveal itself.

Breton incarcerates Nadja in the book that bears her name and in
so doing bricks himself into his work, foreclosing the relation to the
surreal that he sought. But Nadja is haunted, a ghost passes through

the walls and the surreal affirms itself as a worklessness that Breton

cannot banish.21 This is why one cannot simply indict Breton as

the 'Pope' who prevented Surrealism from realizing its potential as
great Surrealism. Great Surrealism can never begin as such, because

it is impossible to envisage a practice of existence without work.

But if there can be no such thing as a project of worklessness, this
does not prevent worklessness from weaving itself into our works,
waiting for us, haunting us. The question concerns the way in which
this withdrawal can be witnessed: it concerns Blanchot's critical

commentary as it witnesses the happening of community.

One cannot, then, as Bataille would argue, understand Surrealism as a

practice of existence that would preserve itself from particular works.

The surreal, as Blanchot shows, is affirmed in those same works.

Surrealism fails in terms of its aspiration to join the artistic and political

avant-gardes; but an opening to the outside, to the unknown, to the

Other is affirmed even in its failure. Yet Surrealism cannot happen as
such, bringing itself once and for all into our presence. This is why its
ghostly demand, its call for justice, has eluded us.

In this sense, Surrealism is close to the Events of May 1968,

in which Blanchot himself was a participant. As he remembers in
a text published in honour of Foucault, 'Whatever the detractors
of May might say, it was a splendid moment, when anyone could
speak to anyone else, anonymously, impersonally, welcomed with no
other justification than that of being another person'.22 What was
important was not its failure or success measured by political science
or political philosophy, but the opening that could occur there, in
which each is exposed to other participants as an Other; where each

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64 Paragraph

participant might be encountered as an Other. This is why Blanchot

emphasizes that he had no 'personal relations' with Foucault, even

though they were both participants of the Events in which 'anyone
could speak to anyone else, anonymously, impersonally, welcomed

with no other justification than that of being another person'.23

Blanchot, whose writings meant so much to Foucault, greeted him
as another participant - not as another famous man of letters, but as
the Other to whom he is bound in a certain 'fraternity' (UC, 22).
True, as Blanchot comments, May 1968 provides 'no solution'; yet

'whether it endures or does not endure, it is sufficient unto itself, and

since the failure that eventually rewards it is none of its concern'.24

The participants were not unified by a determinate project - by

a set of reforms they had in mind to accomplish. They did not seek
to constitute a political group, choosing leaders from amongst their
number to coordinate their activity. How then should one understand
their interrelation? At several points in The Infinite Conversation,
Blanchot invokes a 'plural speech', an affirmation that permits the
community neither to unify itself by common work, by a shared
attempt to determine an essence, nor to allow itself to be unified
(IC, 215). What do the participants say? They repeat only the address
that affirms a relation that escapes unity. But in this repetition, it
is no longer a matter of an exchange of words between intact and
unaltered subjects. Writing of his friendship with Bataille, Blanchot
observes 'One could say of these two speaking men that one of them

is necessarily the obscure 'Other' that is Autrui ' (IC, 215). In the
Events, the other person might also be the obscure 'Other' who one
acknowledges. Each participant might also be acknowledged as the
Other in turn.

The Events, like Surrealism, quickly yielded works: books of all

kinds, by participants and non-participants, which risked passing
over the workless community that manifested itself there. But the
happening of this community was witnessed in the wall writings in
which the participants recognized testimony to their own disarray.
It is in this recognition, in the absence of reaction to the 'men of
power', that the participants of the Events liberated themselves from
the reactionary tendencies that still evidence themselves in Surrealism,
as exemplified in Breton's inability to recognize his own disarray in
the book in which he records his encounter with Nadja (UC, 31).
From what perspective might one gauge the failure or the success
of the Paris Events or Surrealism? One can only bear witness to this

opening to the Other by negotiating its opening in each particular

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The Workless Community: Blanchot , Communism , Surrealism 65

context. It calls for a writing that is patient enough to remain with

its particular 'object', answering to the opening to the Other that is
folded within it. This is why Blanchot's critical practice is as 'thematic'
and 'explicit' as it can be. It is not a question of translating his work
into a philosophical treatise that could show us that the exposure to the
Other is a structural component of any experience. Levinas's Totality
and Infinity is just such a treatise, yet, as the conversationalists of The
Infinite Conversation show, it determines and demarcates the opening to

which Blanchot would answer. Likewise, Nancy's 'The Inoperative

Community' remains too impatient, passing over texts that bear
witness to the happening of community by refusing to acknowledge
that such witnessing can never be as 'explicit' or as 'thematic' as a
classic work of philosophy. I would suggest that Blanchot's scrupulous
essays in The Infinite Conversation and elsewhere exemplify the way in
which one might attest to the happening in question.
LARS IYER

University of Newcastle upon Tyne

NOTES

1 Blanchot, Friendship , translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford,

University Press, 1997), 295 n2.

2 In Scandal and Aftereffect , Blanchot and France Since 1930 (Minneapol

sity of Minnesota Press, 1995), Stephen Ungar seeks to account for B

post-war writings in terms of the aftereffect. In Legacies: Of Anti-Sem

France (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1983), Jeffrey M

reads Blanchot's fiction as an allegory of his political itinerary.

3 See, for more balanced texts on Blanchot, Leslie Hill's Blanchot -

Contemporary (London and New York, Routledge, 1997) and Gerald B

Maurice Blanchot - The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore and London

Hopkins University Press, 1997), which provides an excellent o

of Blanchot's work as a whole. See Christophe Bident's Maurice B
partenaire invisible (Paris, Champ Vallon, 1998) for a reliable a
Blanchot's life and work.

4 Nancy's essay, 'La communaut dsoeuvre', published in Ala in 1983, was

later collected in a book of the same title (Dtroits, C. Bourgois, 1990). This
book is translated as The Inoperative Community translated by Peter Connor
and others (Minneapolis and Oxford, University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 7.
5 The Inoperative Community, 7.

6 The Space of Literature, translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln and London,

University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 195.

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7 Andr Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism , translated by Richard Seaver and

Helen R. Lane (The University of Michigan Press, 1972), 124, 127, 128;
hereinafter MS, references given in the text.

8 The Work of Fire translated by Charlotte Mandeli (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1995), 85. The essay I quote in translation was originally published

in 1945 as 'Quelques reflexions sur le surralisme' in L'Arche, 8: 1945,

93-104 and republished in La Part du Feu (Paris, Gallimard, 1949), translated
as The Work of Fire. The other essay of Blanchos I comment upon in this

paper is the substantial 'Le demain joueur' in La Nouvelle Revue Franaise

172 (1967): 863-888 and republished in L'Entretien infini (Paris, Gallimard,
1969), translated as 'Tomorrow at Stake' in The Infinite Conversation, translated

by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press,

1993), hereinafter IC, references give in the text.
9 The Work of Fire, 85.
10 The Absence of Myth. Writings on Surrealism translated by Michael Richardson

(London and New York, Verso, 1994), 49, hereinafter AM; further references
are given in the text. Bataille exhibited a similar indefatigability to Breton
in his single-minded demand to bringing himself and those around him to

contest the reigning order of experience. See Richardson's introduction to

AM for an account of Bataille's relation with Surrealism and Andr Breton.

1 1 See, on the relationship between Blanchot and Lvinas, Gary Mole's Lvinas,
Blanchot, Jabs: Figures of Estrangement (Gainesville, University Press of Florida,

1997). See also Paul Davies's 'A Linear Narrative? Blanchot with Heidegger
in the Work of Lvinas', Philosophers' Poets edited by Andrew Benjamin

(London and New York, Routledge, 1990) 37-69 and my essay, The
Sphinx's Gaze. Art, Friendship and Philosophical in Blanchot and Lvinas",
Southern Journal of Philosophy, 39:2 (Summer 2001), 189-206.

12 Blanchos essays on Lvinas are couched in the form of conversations. One

should not assume that the views expressed by the conversationalist are
his own. But in the final conversation, Blanchot underlines several points
in the preceding discussion in his own voice. Blanchos conversationalists
express several reservations about the work of Lvinas, finding the name God
'too imposing' (IC, 50) and expressing certain general reservations about his
vocabulary. They prefer, for example, the word l'tranger to Autrui (IC, 52),
interruption to distance (IC, 68) and reject the word l'thique entirely (IC, 55).

13 Hill makes this claim as part of a sensitive commentary on the stakes

of the shift from Levinas's term 'asymmetry' to Blanchos 'dissymmetry'
(Blanchot - Extreme Contemporary, 176).
14 See Steven Shaviro's Passion and Excess: Blanchot, Bataille and Literary Theory

(Tallahassee, Florida University Press, 1990) on the relationship between

Blanchot and Bataille. See also Lars Iyer's 'Literary Communism. Blanchos
Conversations with Lvinas and Bataille', Symposium, Journal of the Canadian
Society for Hermeneutics and Postmodern Thought, 6:1 (2002), 45-62.

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The Workless Community: Blanchot , Communism , Surrealism 67

15 I do not seek to draw a rigorous distinction between friendship and commu-

nity in Blanchos work. They are often found in close proximity in his
writings. The 'explosive community' of participants of May 1968, for
example, are presented as bound by ties of fraternity (see The Unavowable Community , translated by Pierre Joris (Barrytown, Station Hill Press,
1988), 29-32. Hereinafter UC; further references are given in the text).

16 Nadja translated by Richard Howard (New York, Grove Weidenfeld, 1960),

1 58.

17 Nadja , Mark Polizzoti tells us, was warmly praised by L'Europe nouvelle , Les
Nouvelles littraires , La Voix and L'Humanit (see Revolution of the Mind. The

Life of Andr Breton (New York, Da Capo Press, 1997), 301).

1 8 Blanchot introduces this term when writing of the surrealist experience - 'an

experience of that which does not obey the reigning order of experience,'
the ordeal of an experience that would hold itself 'between two orders, two
times, two systems of signification and of language,' holding apart a distance
between work and itself.

19 Blanchot, following Nancy, also finds immanence the determining horizon

of existing reflection on community: 'Communism, by saying that equality is
its foundation and that there can be no community until the needs of all men

are equally fulfilled (this in itself but a minimal requirement), presupposes

not a perfect society but the principle of a transparent humanity essentially
produced by itself alone, an "immanent" community (says Jean-Luc Nancy).'

(UC, 2).
20 See Timothy Clark, The Theory of Inspiration. Composition as a Crisis of
Subjectivity in Romantic and Post- Romantic Writing (Manchester and New
York, Manchester University Press, 1997), 217.

21 One has to admit, as Derrida has argued, that these passages make an
unfortunate appeal to a certain fraternalism from which Blanchot - and
indeed Nancy - is not free. In his preface to Politics of Friendship , Derrida
observes that 'the concept of politics rarely announces itself without some

sort of adherence of the State to the family, without what we will call
a schematic of filiation: stock, genus, species, sex ( Geschlecht ), blood, birth,
nature, nation - autochthonial or not, tellurian or not' (translated by George

Collins (London, Verso Books, 1997), viii). In a long endnote, Derrida

observes 'there is still perhaps some brotherhood in Bataille, Blanchot and
Nancy'; it is the same fraternal motif that he argues should be subject to a

loosening (dprise) (48). Does Blanchot not evoke, writing of the Events 'a
being- together that gave back to all the right to equality in fraternity through

a freedom of speech that elated everyone' ( UC , 30)? One might agree that
Blanchos vocabulary is marked by a certain traditionality. But this is already
the case with the word community. But it is impossible to start afresh - as

Blanchot writes, 'dishonoured or betrayed concepts do not exist' (UC, 1).

One might write of an impossible community or a community without

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community, to use two characteristically Blanchovian locutions, but it is not
possible to write of a fraternity without fraternity without referring to the
same fraternal motif to which Derrida draws attention. Does this mean it

is simply a matter of abandoning a vocabulary that keeps memory of the

familial schematic and taking up a new one? Would it be possible simply
to purify Blanchos language? Community is, Blanchot argues, linked to
failure - but does he not compound this failure in the manner of Breton
and the Surrealists by allowing Nadja to become simply a Veiled woman'?
But one must understand that for Nadja, Breton, too, is veiled. It is a doubly

dissymmetrical relation to which Nadja bears witness. This is evident in

her enigmatic drawings, reproduced in Breton's book, and in particular, her
symbolic portrait of them both: of Breton as a strange mixture of an eagle
and an owl, and of herself as the Siren whose back is turned to us. In a sense,

Nadja is Nadja's tomb - but it also attests to the fact that Breton became
ghostly to her, that he came towards her as if the walls had fallen. In this way,

Blanchot should be understood to do justice to both the ghost of Nadja and

the ghost of Breton in their doubly dissymmetrical relation. See, for an opposing

view, Huffer's essay 'Blanchos Mother' ( Yale French Studies 93, The Place
of Maurice Blanchot , edited by Thomas Pepper (New York, Yale University
Press, 1998), 175-195). For Huffer, Blanchot remains trapped in a nostalgic
determination of heterosexual relationships not only in his staging of the
encounter involved in literary creation but in his writings on literature and
art. Her essay recounts the 'dmystification' that allowed her to understand
that the attraction of his work to her was associated with her own 'libidinal

yearnings' that have changed over the course of time (175). Can one simply
grow out of Blanchot in this way? Without denying that Blanchos tableaus
of the encounter with alterity are often couched in terms of a relationship
between a male protagonist and various figures of the feminine, for example,
a dead woman (Eurydice), mythological beasts (the Sphinx, the Sirens and the
Erinyes), or with fictional women (the young woman of Duras's The Malady
of Death, Breton's Nadja), it remains the case that the doubly dissymmetrical

relation need not be presented in this way. One should, perhaps, focus on
male figures of alterity in Blanchos writings: the dead Lazarus, rotting in
his tomb, the male character of Duras's The Malady of Death, of the narrator
Breton in Nadja etc. Likewise it would be important to understand how one
might take account of his relation to Judaism as a privileged locus of alterity,

or the dead Bataille, or even his relation to Lvinas. Blanchot addresses a

late text, 'For Friendship' 'to all my friends, known and unknown, close and
distant' (translated by Leslie Hill, In Disastrous Blanchot, edited by. Timothy

Clark, Leslie Hill and Nicholas Royle, Oxford Literary Review, 22 (2000),
25): is the Blanchovian friend precisely the one to come whose sex is yet to
be determined?

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The Workless Community: Blanchot, Communism, Surrealism 69

22 'Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him', translated by Jeffrey Mehlman,

Foucault /Blanchot (New York, Zone Books, 1987), 63.
23 'Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him', 63.
24 The Blanchot Reader , edited by Michael Holland (Oxford, Blackwell, 1998),
224.

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