from the beginning again

“He [the narrator of L’Arrêt de mort] wants to maintain his privacy by establishing absolute closure, by making change impossible. But he cannot close himself off without also including Nathalie. As is the case with the animal protagonist of Kafka’s story ‘Der Bau [The Burrow],’ the narrator’s dwelling is the locus of his most intense privacy and self-communion; and, as in Kafka’s story, it is just here that the Other’s proximity becomes inescapable…” Shaviro, Passion & Excess, (and here he cites both Blanchot’s discussion of Der Bau and Libertson’s commentary on it in Proximity).

In the post-exotic works, too, this often happens to the solitary inhabitants of jail cells, that they find the Other enclosed along with them. But this is something that works against the jailers in post-exotic books, and the whole situation is slightly different than it is in Der Bau. To some extent, the post-exotic writer-dissidents are unwillingly jailed, though their characteristic amor fati makes the question of their will a vexing one.

Like the unnamable’s “it speaks of a prison… I’ll go there now,” the post-exotic writer-dissidents sometimes appear to have chosen prison (in this, they’re like the inhabitant of Der Bau); for example, in Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze, there’s a complex circular route by which the post-exotic writer-dissidents return themselves to prison, in solidarity with those who remain: if released “before their term, that is, before the end of their agony,” they then kill themselves, in order to get their “necrologies” into the newspapers, newspapers which will molder for at least eight months before the remaining living prisoners are finally allowed to have them:

Mais une nouvelle photographie finissait par être epinglée ou scotchée sur nos murs, quelque part sur les parois de cet univers parallèle… quelque part dans ce lieu fermé où notre utopie, bien au-delà de son naufrage, florissait, croissait radieusement, rayonnait, se reformulait, souffrait de maladies rares, ni infantiles ni séniles et jusque-là non-décrites, s’enfonçait dans des cauchemars, dégénérait, se régénerait, entre deux songes flottait. Nous examinions leurs portraits de nos défunts et nous leur parlions, ne rédigeant plus nos textes sur du papier, introduisant de plus en plus de silence et de non-dit dans la pâte romanesque avec quoi nous modelions les destins des êtres qui avaient été pour nous de fraternelles variantes de nous-mêmes. 

This narrating “we” is also already in photographs on the walls of Lutz Bassmann’s prison cell, as is made clear at the beginning and end of the book.  And, as I keep saying all over the place, the after-the-end narrative instance frees the work from having to make certain judgments: for example, beyond its wreck (au-delà de son naufrage), their utopia flourishes, and its maladies are not susceptible to diagnosis in terms of whether they’re behind or ahead of the world-historical revolutionary moment (“ni infantiles ni séniles”—neither the “infantile disorder” decried in Lenin’s Left Communism, nor the senility of still reading Lenin in this day and age. To do a bit of violent interpretation there).

All very interesting; none of that is really what I meant. One gets so carried away, quoting Volodine; it’s just so beautiful.

Shaviro notes that Libertson notes that for Blanchot, the whole matter of the irony of the burrow’s entrance—is it secure? will the outside get in by way of the entrance?—is beside the point, is never mentioned by Blanchot in those pages in L’éspace littéraire. Beside the point, because what matters is that the burrow has already, from the beginning, enclosed the Other along with it. (Edit: or, the burrow has already enclosed the solitary burrower in, in the path of, the approach of the other.)

Just so, breaking out of prison is mostly beside the point for the post-exotic writer-dissidents (and note that they’re not dissident writers, jailed for writing, but dissidents who turn to writing, having been jailed). Jailbreak interests them so little that they commit suicide to get back in; and likewise, they don’t much care about smuggling out samizdat post-exotic books (though that happens, to be sure, at least sometimes). As in the cited passage, it’s much more the case that the works smuggle themselves inside: more and more silent, less and less written down, the unsaid (le non-dit) between fraternal variants, between or among repetitions (and again, both the “nous” speaking here and those they describe are dead, are in photographs on cell walls). Which is to say, the solidarity and the resistance of the post-exotic writer-dissidents occurs in and as proximity—at a strange depth, or rather, to quote Le post-exotisme, between two dreams.

To put it in a less airy though still somewhat abstruse way: the post-exotic writers resist their jailers by communicating, but one would have to understand that term more the way Libertson does than as a straightforward smuggling of messages from inside to outside. (Or: the carceral world of post-exoticism turns on both senses of the word “cell,” both the solitary jail cell and the clandestine, fraternal revolutionary cell; the solitary is already the fraternal one, if only asymmetrically or onierically.) This is why it is so often a matter of indifference—of insouciance—whether the post-exotic auditor is dead or absent or inattentive.