The Scene of the Voice by Michael Eng;

Author:Michael Eng;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Voice of Writing: An Atheistic Interruption

Blanchot’s essay “Atheism and Writing. Humanism and the Cry” from The Infinite Conversation constitutes an instructive point of departure for studying his reconfiguration of the voice.4 In addition to developing many of the themes that Blanchot unfolds in The Infinite Conversation overall, it also elaborates ones he had begun to theorize in earlier writings. These include writing, the Work, désoeuvrement, the outside, and the neuter. Blanchot identifies these themes as crucial to the possibility of realizing a nonmetaphysical conception of the voice distinct from what he describes as Heidegger’s “faithful belonging to the ontological logos” (IC 261). In this way, “Atheism and Writing” signals its intersection with the general critique of the persistence of onto-theology in Heidegger’s thought; yet, in stating through its title a focus on the relationship between atheism and writing, it also suggests a connection to the problem of an atheistic writing that we saw Lacoue-Labarthe evoke in the concluding sections of chapter 4.

As Blanchot conveys in the essay’s opening, he had been motivated to take up the theme of atheism by Foucault’s The Order of Things (Les Mots et les choses [1966]), which had then just been published. He was inspired specifically by the critical reaction generated by Foucault’s controversial declaration in the book’s conclusion that “man” is a “recent” (i.e., modern) invention that came about with the very disciplines designed to analyze “him” (IC 246–47).5 Blanchot characterizes the critical reaction as a form of paranoid panic around the implications of Foucault’s claim, namely, that by exposing man as an invention of modern thought, man will cease to exist along with the humanism that elevates the figure of man as a replacement for the theological worldview of previous epochs (IC 247).

However, Blanchot is surprised by these critics’ attachment to humanism. Who among serious thinkers, he wonders, ever really took humanism seriously? (IC 247). Had it not, ever since its championing by those such as Feuerbach, “been constantly knocked about and rejected by all important research”? (IC 247). For that matter, what does it even mean to “believe” in humanism in the first place? What is there in humanism to believe in?

These last two questions prompt Blanchot to revisit the event of the death of God as proclaimed by Nietzsche and the way that proclamation appears to announce the advent of humanism. But he finds in Feuerbach’s humanism, which centers man as “truth” and “absolute being” (IC 247), a curious insistence of the theological. With humanism, Blanchot observes, not only has “religious man … taken his own nature as object” (IC 247); he has simultaneously transferred onto that object qualities that were previously attributed to God (IC 253). This is one reason why Nietzsche, according to Blanchot, lists the death of man as part of the sequence following from the death of God: God’s death leads to man’s death, which then allows for the arrival of “the overman” (der Übermensch). However, Blanchot notes that throughout this sequence in Nietzsche, the figure of man persists.

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