Blanchot on Borges

it's all a tangle today. 

The burrow & the desert, Libertson points out, are spaces of proximity and errance in Blanchot. For Volodine, these are the cell and the steppe, or the cell and "black space." As with Blanchot's (Kafka's) desert, the post-exotic black space is differentiated--in Manuela Draeger's Herbes et golems, sections of the book are devoted to long poems that consist of nothing but names of grasses of the Mongolian steppe; invented, post-exotic names; non-Linnaean, non-hierarchical names: the empty space of the steppe is differentiated, but not in accordance with our familiar schemes for representing / containing difference, such as division into genus and species. (And Bardo or Not Bardo, too, is a marvel of putting black space en scene, letting characters wander in a nothing that is not quite nothing.) 

The two spaces, the cell and the steppe... often, in Volodine, one finds oneself in both spaces at the same time, or they're abruptly near, or capable of transforming into one another. (In Écrivains, Linda Woo simultaneously declaims in a prison cell and on the steppe.) Perhaps because, as Blanchot writes in the essay on Borges, a place without an exit becomes infinite. But also because errance begins at home, so to speak: "Mais supposons que, dans cet étroit éspace [apparently, this space is/could be notre chambre, notre vie, our bounded world?], soudain obscur, soudain aveugles, nous égarions."

*

No one forces the unnamable to speak, he/it says somewhere in The Unnamable. Someone forces the post-exotic writer-dissidents to speak, sort of (the police, the torturers). And yet, the police don't matter, maybe they've already stopped mattering before the book begins. The post-exotic writers resist by yielding to this survivance parlante (Blanchot's phrase, in his essay on Beckett) this remnant that won't cede, that goes on speaking when it has stopped. 

There's a disjunction between the harm done in being confined to the finite prison (a prison administered by jailers, visited by literary-critical journalists, etc) and the resistance that is sought (found) in the differentiated black space of the steppe or the bardo. I'm not getting this right at all, because it sounds like I'm talking about the physical and the mental; it's not "you can jail my body but my mind is free." It's something else. The post-exotics really are in prison, in the bad infinity, as Blanchot says in the Borges essay, in the literary infinity: "For the man of the desert and the labyrinth... the same space will be truly infinite, even if he knows that it is not, all the more so because he knows it is not."

At the end of Le post-exotisme, when the literature of post-exotisme has  achieved itself* has come to its end (has ended "itself," s'achevait) in its last book (Le goudron final Retour au goudron), and Lutz Bassmann is dead--the book began on the last day of his life and now he is dead-- there is still narration, still a voice that goes on past Bassman's death. Bassmann has been "devoted to the error of a journey" (Blanchot in the essay on Borges) that "necessarily lasts a little longer than his life."

*do I even know French? not really.