introduction (translator)
On translating ‘espace’ (Ann Smock intro):
But, although words such as ‘region’ or ‘domain’ or ‘realm’ are often used to designate this zone, it imples the withdrawal of what is ordniarily meant by ‘place’; it suggests the site of this withdrawal. Literature’s space is like the place where someone dies: a nowhere, Blanchot says, which is here. No on e enters it, though no one who is at all awarew of it can leave: it is all departure, moving off, eloignement. It is frequently called le dehors, ‘the outside’. Here we might think again of the dreamer we evoked earlier in this discussion who, dreaming that he only dreams, falls back into the dream to the very degree that he never enters the dream at all; he only ever dreams he does. Literature’s ‘space’ is likewise inaccessible and inescapable; it is its very own displacement or removal. it is the space seperating this space from itself. In this strange ambiguity literature dwells, as in a preserve.
Yet ‘in’ must always be taken back, for literature’s space shelters nothing within it: it is also called le vide, ‘the void’. Sometimes it is associated with the anonymity of big cities, sometimes with the gap left by the absence of the gods , but sometimes, too, with what Rilke calls ‘the Open’, or the ‘world’s inner space’, the intimacy of an expansive welcome, the inward yes which death can say in the song of one who consents to fall silent and diasppear. Or it is connected with the interval whcih for Holderlin is the sacred, between gods that abandon the world and men who, likewise, turn away from God – the sheer void in between, which the poet must keep pure. Almost always, it is the origin which is anterior to any beginning, the image or echo of beginning – that immense fund of impotence, the infinitley futile wherewithal to start over and over again. Literature’s sapce, in other words – the void which literature introduces in place of the place it takes – is analogous to the ‘other time’ in the time measured by acheivements; sterile, inert time, ‘the time of distress’. But the very freshness of every dawn is safeguarded in this distress and nowhere else, whcih is whay literature demands that we return there (though this justification is never granted), risking the clear light of day in the name of sunshine, but more tha just that; jeopardising even this capacity of ours to take risks in the name of something, for some purpose. [11]
With considerable regularity, literature’s ‘space’ is described as exile or banishment, and the writer as one wondering in the desert, like Kafka far from Canaan, too weak to collaborate in the active concerns of competent men; but then, too, the desert is a privileged zone of freedom and solitude, and if literature is exiled from the world of valuable acheivements, it is also exempted from the world’s demands. It has to bear no responsibility for anything; it is kept safe to itself: the desert is its refuge. Or it would be, if to be so gratuitous were not a grave danger for literature, and also if the desert were a here one could actually reach. Kafka is never quite convinced that he isn’t still in Canaan after all.
Thus, l’espace litteraire, or l’espace de l’oeuvre, is the ‘distance’ of the work, or of literature, with respect, not only to ‘every other object which exists’, but with respect to itself. The work is remote from itself, or not quite itself. For example, when it isn’t finished yet. Bt when it is done, when it comes into its own, this distance persiests: it constiutes the opening of the work onto nothing but itself – this opening, this vacancy. And since the work appears, then, as pure deferral, a void or vacuum, it lends itself to being filled up with everything it isn’t: with useful meanings, for example, which multiply and change as history progresses. Or this void can masquerade as the prestigious aura that surrounds the timeless masterpiece in its museum case. Yet these apparent travesties, these various ways in which the work is misrepresented and forgotten, sustain it: they protect its essence, whicih is to disappear. They provide it with its ‘space’, which is not its location. But this is not to say that literature is to be found anywhere else.
On the translation of oeuvre (Ann Smock):
The French text practically always distinguishes between the word oeuvre and the word travail: between the ‘work of art’ and ‘work’ in the sense of productive labour – man’s action upon nature, his mastery and appropriation of the given [‘travail’ as ‘worldmaking’, cf. here on appropriation (of land in nomos, establishing of a spatial order)]. Thus, le souci de l’oeuvre, ‘concern for the work of art’ (which is also the work’s own troubled concern), is regularly contrasted with le souci realisateur, ‘the concern for real achievements,‘ which implies effective action. This real purposefulness is the process by which history unfolds, by which darkness is made to recede before the broad light of day. Man becomes free; he discovers his potentialities and fulfils them. All this takes place in what Blanchot regularly terms ‘the world’, or on the level he calls ‘the worldly plane.’ The world is this historical process; it is its own gradual realisation. But the artist is ineffecutal. He has no place in the world. It is not that he belongs to what we ordinarily think of as the other world. If he is allied to the sacred, this is because he belongs neither to this world nor to any other, but to the ‘other of all worlds’ in our own.
[…]
The difference […] between l’oeuvre and le travail is that while le travail is diametrically opposed to inaction and passivity, l’oeuvre requires them. Indeed, Blanchot frequently describes l’oeuvre, not as the union of contraries, but as their restless alliance, their torn intimacy.
I have consistently used the English word ‘work’ to refer to l’oeuvre, the work of art. For travai I have used various expressions such as ‘productive or purposeful activity’, ‘labour’, ‘effort’, ‘real endeavour’, ‘effective or useful action’.
[…]
Occasionally, Blanchot does use the word oeuvre to refer to something other than the work of art: notably, to history as a whole – completed history as mankind’s oeuvre, the total realisation of human freedom and the ultimate goal of humanity. The phrase l’oeuvre humaine en general recurs several times in section VII where, precisely, Blanchot is stressing a tendency on the part of the artist, who acknowledges only l’oeuvre as his task, to confuse this work with the work of history. Or, if he doesn’t make this mistake – and to the very extent that he doesn’t – his tendency to renounce his own task in favour of the other. I have translated l’oeuvre humaine en general as ‘the human undertaking as a whole’, or ‘the overall work of humanity’.
general rule:
‘work’ always means the ‘work of art’, as opposed to le travail, just as lucidity in the deep of night means the phantom lucidity of the insomniac poet, as opposed both to the good sense of broad daylight and to the peaceful sleep of the honest oblivion, which reason requires at regular intervals.