Thomas the Obscure by Maurice Blanchot
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Existentialist Kabbalah

Interwar existentialism appeared as a sort of overnight philosophical and literary mushroom. Typically attributed to the intellectual spores thrown off by the 19th century philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, the single word description of existentialism is ‘absurd’. Absurdity is lack of reason in every sense - the absence of implicit meaning, the sterility of human action, and ultimately the pointlessness of life. According to Martin Heidegger, for example, the event which provokes the question of the reasonableness of life is its inevitable termination, death, which is the triumph of unreason.* For the writer Albert Camus, the possibility to personally choose death rather than life gives life its foundational significance, despite the obvious indifference of the universe.

Maurice Blanchot is an existentialist. But he is not an absurdist in the same way that Heidegger or Camus are absurdists. Blanchot believes that because none of us can have an experience of death, it can’t be a motivating factor for life. Death is a rumour which can’t be taken seriously. For him, life itself, the experience of existence is the only motivation necessary to fill it with meaning, purpose and reason. Experiencing existence in the midst of the daily pressures, obligations, and distractions may not be easy, or even ‘natural’, but it is certainly possible. Being, as it were, is it’s own reward if we care to appreciate it.

At the very outset of Thomas the Obscure, Thomas experiences near-drowning, apparently intentionally. As everything about his world and even his own body dissolves in a sort of trance, he experiences “a sort of holy place, so perfectly suited to him that it was enough for him to be there, to be;” To be; not to die is his intention and his experience; and it is an attractive experience not one of fear. He approaches death and spits in its eye when he feels his own existence quite distinctly from his other bodily sensations or his thoughts.

Later that night Thomas has another out of body experience, seeing and feeling himself simultaneously: “what he looked at eventually placed him in contact with a nocturnal mass which he vaguely perceived to be himself and in which he was bathed... outside himself there was something identical to his own thought which his glance or his hand could touch.” He is objectively present, even to himself. In other words he has some sort of unique significance in the world of things. He can simultaneously experience and reflect upon that experience. This is the miraculous character of his being. It is not necessary to look elsewhere for ‘reason.’ This is itself sufficient reason for his life.

The existential void, nothingness, exists for Thomas, but it is hardly a threat. His experience is that “through this void, it was sight and the object of sight which mingled together. Not only did this eye which saw nothing apprehend something, it apprehended the cause of its vision... Its own glance entered into it as an image... from all evidence a foreign body had lodged itself in his pupil and was attempting to go further... the body of Thomas remained, deprived of its senses. And thought, having entered him again, exchanged contact with the void.” Thought and the void are interchangeable (or perhaps better said: the void is an idea) - a challenging as well as provocative proposal. Where does it come from?

Blanchot is certainly not from the same intellectual gene pool as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Camus. His literary forebears are Flaubert and Kafka - the first aesthetic, the second spiritual. Blanchot testifies to both, especially the latter, in his writing and correspondence. And it is Kafka’s brand of existentialism - Jewish, Eastern European, and (knowing the inadequacy of the term) life-focussed - which Blanchot represents. As Thomas realises on the second night of the story, “He was really dead and at the same time rejected from the reality of death.” Death is not his enemy, nor his inspiration.

Blanchot was not merely incidentally interested in Kafka. He analysed Kafka’s work in detail and recognised its dominant influence: the Kabbalah, that mystical discipline which seeks to integrate language with living in a way which can only be described as existentialist. Gershon Scholem, the leading scholar of Kabbalah in the 20th century, considered Kafka’s work as canonical in Kabbalistic literature, on a par with the Zohar, and even the Bible itself.

The Kabbalah is absurdist in the manner in which Blanchot (and Kafka) is absurdist. It seeks to undermine not just the dominance and distortions of language but also the conventions of reason language embodies. Thomas explicitly reports at the evening’s dinner that he is “unsatisfied by the words.” The purpose of Kabbalah is to reveal what lies behind language, beyond the distractions brought about by everyday life, to expose us to, in a word, existence. This is what Heidegger called Dasein, the particular reflective mode of being of a person. But in Blanchot, there is Dasein with a difference (For a fuller explanation of Kabbalah and its interpretive use, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

Dasein, according to Heidegger, must decide what its life is, what it will be committed to, what its point will be. For Heidegger, the content of these choices is all there is, this is Dasein tout court. But not so for Blanchot. He knows that any fixation of purpose is already lethal. It implies the cessation of new interpretations, of new possibilities, of learning about oneself as well as the world, of life in a sense more profound that the stopping of physical processes.**

For Blanchot existence is a receptacle for the sort of content by which Heidegger defines Dasein. This receptacle is not a thing in any concrete sense (neither is Dasein) but something, nevertheless, which is, and is independent of its contents - a psyche, a life-force, or if one prefers, a soul. Its content is constantly changing. It certainly can’t be defined by some arbitrary choice at any moment in time.

In fact, in some sense this entity is entirely beyond time; it is eternal and the locus of a potentially infinite series of interpretations passed on from generation to generation of physical persons (largely through language!). It is an entity, therefore, not driven, like Dasein, by fear of death, but the continuously new possibilities of its interpretations of life.

Thomas explicitly uses the method of Kabbalah while reading after dinner. “He was reading with unsurpassable meticulousness and attention in relation to every symbol.” This is the technique by which Kabbalah ‘alienates’ language in order to re-establish it as subservient to human interests. Every word, every letter, each mark of punctuation has a potentially hidden meaning, in fact an infinity of potential meanings, to be discovered and explored. Others would think Thomas wasn’t really reading at all because he never turned a page, but this was only because he was being so excruciatingly attentive to his text.

The technique has an unusual effect. Words become active subjects rather than mere passive objects of Thomas’s perception: “he perceived all the strangeness there was in being observed by a word as if by a living being, and not simply by one word, but by all the words that were in that word, by all those that went with it and in turn contained other words, like a procession of angels opening out into the infinite to the very eye of the absolute.” This may seem dream-like but in comparison with Heidegger’s neologisms and prosaic complexity, Blanchot is at least comprehensible.

It’s as if the attention directed at the text enlivens the text itself and encourages it to provide its re-constructive judgment on Thomas: “he recognized himself with disgust in the form of the text he was reading, he retained the thought that (while, perched upon his shoulders, the word He and the word I were beginning their carnage) there remained within his person which was already deprived of its senses obscure words, disembodied souls and angels of words, which were exploring him deeply.” Heidegger claims that ‘Language speaks Man’; and in a sense it clearly does. But as Blanchot suggests, Language also interrogates Man. If so, there is no need to invent a new vocabulary as Heidegger has done. Much better to attend to the angels of words we already possess.

Thomas struggles with the merciless text as if he were a student with the Torah. But he is “thrust back into the depths of his being by the very words which had haunted him and which he was pursuing.” The Kabbalistic paradox of constructive deconstruction is complete. Thomas encounters his own existence through the existence of the text. Perfect ‘absorbtive’ Kabbalah, as Moshe Idel was later to describe it (See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

I am an expert neither in existentialism nor Kabbalah. But I don’t think Blanchot can be understood much less appreciated, at least in Thomas the Obscure, without a recognition of his unique combination of these two threads of intellectual and literary endeavour. Together I think they provide at least an entry into his method of writing and thought.

*Heidegger’s description of ‘Being-towards-death’ in Being and Time is clearly dependent on Kierkegaard, although he is not cited explicitly. This idea of death giving significance to life, although having Greek philosophical precedents, is most fully expressed in Christian theology. The Christian motive for living is salvation after and, crucially, through death. This is markedly different from the Judaic (and Islamic) motive of obedience to the divine will as an end in itself. It is, I think, the primary differentiating factor of Christianity as a dogmatic religion of faith, and Judaism as an ethical religion of correct behaviour. I believe my characterization of Kafka and Blanchot as ‘Jewish’ in the above is, therefore, apt both historically and culturally as a Kabbalistic rejection of the Christian standpoint that death provides the meaning for life.

** The distinction between purpose and purposefulness is at the heart of the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as well. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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