Anarchic revolution does not simply suspend what came before. On the contrary, literature, Blanchot argues, “gives us a premonition it perhaps lives only on its transformations” (BC 109). While literature is a “powerful negative moment” and “coincides with nothing for just an instant,” it is also “immediately everything, and this everything begins to exist: what a miracle!” (WF 301–302). The birth of a work is
43 Leslie Hill, “‘Not in Our Name’: Blanchot, Politics, the Neuter,” Paragraph 30.3 (2007): 141–159
(155).
44 Blanchot sees Marquis de Sade as “the writer par excellence.” Sade’s words “I am the revolution, only
freedom allows me to write” become for Blanchot “a state of affairs that any writer has to recognise” (WF 321).
marked by chance, unpredictability, the surprise of something outside expectation and control. Style, in this context, is not simply formal innovation but something that can allow for the possibility of an incalculable and unforeseeable event. Neither is style as an event the result of a project of change, for instance, the product of a manifesto. The temporality of style open to the impossible is “that of surprise.” The encounter, the irruption of the outside can happen “at all times but in a time impossible to determine” (IC 412).
Style as an event has a fundamental relation to the law, not in the sense that it is produced to annihilate the law or to renew it but in the way it provokes “exceptions to itself, which form a law and at the same time suppress it.” Blanchot does not present a groundbreaking work of “inimitable originality”—what we might call a work written in an absolutely singular style—as the exception to the law, but that which, on the contrary, reveals the law: “in these exceptional works in which a limit is reached, it is the exception alone that reveals to us this “law” from which it also constitutes the unusual and necessary deviation. […] [W]e could never recognize the rule except by the exception that abolishes it” (BC 109). Style as an event, then, reveals the law of style retrospectively rather than through a conscious attempt to supersede existing genres and literary styles.
Clearly, as Blanchot argues, style as an event is “difficult to attain, [and] more difficult to sustain” as it becomes prey to institutionalisation, the work of the critics, but also of “the disciples, the imitators.” Those who imitate or comment about the style of a groundbreaking work “rationalize it” (BC 108). However, while non-teleocratic freedom is an ideal, literature derives its force precisely from its continuous confrontation with the question of its ground and determination, and this eventhood remains in the future singular encounters with singular readers. As Iyer argues, the “absorption is never complete” and the singularity of the revolutionary work and of its style keeps refusing complete appropriation as it is encountered always singularly, by different respondents.45 A singular reading of style—what we have also been calling an ethical response to the singularity of style as an event—would sustain this singularity.
Derrida, as shown in Chapter 4, also allows us to think of the event of style non- teleocratically, but he also reminds us that if at the heart of the law there is always already transgression and innovation, there is also no transgression or innovation without the law from which it departs. In Blanchot, the resistance to teleocratic
45 Lars Iyer, Blanchot’s Communism: Art, Philosophy and the Political (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
conceptions of literature is even more radical, almost absolute, and it takes two main forms. Firstly, as seen above, Blanchot often thinks of the relationship between the author, the work, and the reader in terms of what we have been calling paradoxical anachrony, whereby the author or the reader is conceived as both the origin and product of the work thus disturbing the linear and chronological structures at the heart of most theories of style. Secondly, the need to “radically affirm [...] the rupture,” the break, is arguably the dominant (non)structure in Blanchot’s writing, whether that oriented towards politics, towards literature or, as is often the case, to a consideration of both simultaneously (PW 88).
The temporality of the event of literature, for Blanchot, is also the temporality of certain significant historical revolutions in which the established order is suspended and, at least momentarily, there is an opening to a future of possibilities not determined by past realities. May 1968 is one such “event” that keeps reappearing in Blanchot’s political writing. Blanchot interprets the happenings, protests, slogans and posters that appeared in the events as not merely oppositional to established power but as demanding an affirmation of a radical and “decisive” break from the notion of power, including the notion of opposition to power (PW 93).
In this context, the radical freedom after the revolution cannot simply be understood as a reaction against oppression. The revolutionary freedom that the writer embodies and enacts is not freedom to be used instrumentally in, for instance, attacking a political reality but “the power of non-employment” (F 64). If, in engaging with established power, one becomes an accomplice in power, what Blanchot sees in the May 1968 events is the structure of a non-dialectic conception of revolution which goes beyond simple negation in that it is the negation even of what has not yet been advanced and affirmed. May 1968 actualises such a revolution because it is an “anti-authoritarian movement” and not messianic since nothing came of it. As such, it is “sufficient unto itself, and [...] the failure that eventually rewards it is none of its concern” (BR 224).
In Bruns’s words, presented in this way, “[i]t is as if a revolution were like a work of writing.”46 The anarchic revolution is “a rupture in time,” a refusal but also an affirmation that does not bring any arrangements but rather undoes arrangements, including its own. It is “a present without presence” that suspends time, and, at that moment, “there is a state of arrest and suspension. In this suspension, society undoes itself entirely. The law collapses. Transgression occurs: for a moment, there is innocence; interrupted history” (PW 100). As Blanchot conceives it, revolution emerges
not as a disruption but as a destruction of the world order. It does not simply fine-tune society or overturn structures of power to replace them with others but detaches itself absolutely from power, affirming, for a moment, a break with order and the creation of an event. Literature inhabits and affirms such “a revolutionary regime,” that is: “the time of between-times when between the old laws and the new reigns the silence of the absence of laws, that interval which precisely corresponds to the gap in speaking when everything ceases and stops, including the eternal drive to speak, because, then, there is no longer any prohibition” (IC 226).
With Blanchot, style appears as a surprising and creative aspect of the event of art, its coming into being as “a new possibility” of thought (DSR 185). Echoing Schleiermacher, one may say that in Blanchot, at least momentarily, style as an event is non-conceptualisable and free from any kind of determination. Style as that which escapes conceptualisation, therefore, but also style as Heideggerian self-creation, that is, unmotivated opening to future possibilities without any pre-established designs and beyond determination by genre or human creativity.