In the previous post, I approached the question of a last book signed by Volodine (and/or a last post-exotic book, since the publication of subsequent post-exotic books wouldn’t necessarily mean that Écrivains was not the last one)—I approached it from a fanboy perspective, with the kind of nutty hermeneutic precision one sees on TV-show fan sites (and a fan’s obsessive anxiety: will it continue, or was this one already the last?).
Despite that list of last words, it’s not certain that Écrivains is somehow more final, its endings more punctual and less interminable, or that this book is more concerned with endings than are the other post-exotic books. Or if yes, then it’s a matter of degree rather than of kind, and even within Écrivains’ several (seven) endings, there is a range, from the finality of the final chapter’s “il se pend” to the recursive nature of “rendormir.” In that range, where would one place the word finir (final word of the chapter “Comancer”)?
Nor is it certain that Volodine’s “today, I write in order to end” means the writing will come to an end; as in Blanchot’s remarkable passages on préhension persécutrice…
(I, on the other hand, might never start; I write here in order to hurry after a perpetually receding beginning. In this I’m like Volodine’s helpless Kouriline, in Écrivains, a writer who is hardly suited to writing, he’s not even especially literate; his projected work has a title he’s in love with but he has no idea how to write the thing. Me, too; me either: mine is After the End, which title I continue to like despite the fact that everyone writing about apocalypse seems to come up with it sooner or later, and despite, too, the fact that Lionel Ruffel already worked this idea out in his Le dénouement.)
(But I am not writing about apocalypse, or about post-apocalypse; despite their end-of-the-world décor, Volodine’s books accord ill with the conventions of post-apocalypticism, because they’re so indifferent to notions of apocalypse: the uncovering, the last revelation. They unfold in a milieu in which revolution has long since died, but to say this it’s necessary [for me, not for Volodine] to understand that death in a Blanchotian sense: having fallen from the power to die, revolution cannot die. This is the strange “harmony” and the “utopian” character of camps and prisons in Volodine; this is what is monastic about the enclosure of death into which the post-exotic writers retreat [cf the “Discours aux nomades et aux morts,” in Écrivains, and this why the carceral is the last redoubt of utopian egalitarianism in Le post-exotisme.] But beginning the narrative instance after the end of revolution does not mean the erasure of revolution, in a triumph-of-capitalism sense, and it’s far, too, from a Benjaminian, messianic always-still-to-come of revolution [farthest of all from Negri’s sense that kairos is now]. The revolution in Volodine is not a power [not any longer]; post-exoticism is revolution’s vie non-vie, its mort non-mort, to take up some Volodinian phrases which appear in both the Femelle du requin interview and Le post-exotisme.)
An attempt to gloss these terms, vie non-vie and mort non-mort, though that attempt is de trop, comme on dit; already the interview and Le post-exotisme explain them. Still: in Proximity, Libertson, like Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, writes about a Freud who tends to fall behind his own discoveries in the philosophy of difference, tends to return those discoveries to a logic of opposition and negation:
Freud’s difficulty in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is his tendency to pose reality and pleasure principles, repetition and death instinct in configurations of opposition, and his reluctance to point out and explain their inextrication from, or communication with each other—a communication which is required by the logic of differentiation which is their condition. … the death instinct is not a return to inanimation, but a tendency toward the same differentiation which produces and exceeds life (22).
You know who else discovers that the death instinct is a tendency toward the differentiation that produces and exceeds life? Gardel, that’s who, in the second lesson of Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze. The jailed revolutionary Gardel is in the process of immolating himself in his cell, when he thereby discovers la flambulance: “le déplacement dans le feu, la pétrification de la durée, la migration d’un corps à l’autre.” What is that migration but differentiation, individuation, ceaselessly repeated?
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Maybe Écrivains isn’t the last book, but it might be among the saddest. Volodine has a version of Blanchot’s “impossibility of dying,” often made grotesquely humorous in books like Bardo or Not Bardo. Again, to go back to Libertson (who is probably the thinker I mean every time I write the name “Blanchot”): “Involuntary prehension is one index of a most fundamental Blanchotian moment: the notion of a reality without power. This reality, whose dimensions are suggested by the burrow and the desert [for Volodine, the cell and the steppe, or the black space of the bardo], and whose mode of manifestiation is indecision and erreur, is not without differentiation.” That’s where Bardo or Not Bardo unfolds, in differentiated black space, where characters face the exhortation to stop being reborn, face it or rather turn repeatedly away from it, in indecision and error, in obtuseness or fatigue.
But I was saying, Écrivains might be among the saddest of Volodine’s books; alongside the black humor, there are moments when a nothingness surges up, a nothingness about which it’s not intimated that individuation might go on within it, passing from one body to another as in la flambulance. (There's no reason to think Kouriline's death will issue in a voyage like Gardel's, even if there's no reason not to think it.) In an interview with Jean-Didier Wagneur, in the longer version of it that’s in écritures contemporaines, Volodine remarks on his resistance to the notion of death. It’s a peculiarly atheistic resistance; against mortality, he doesn’t oppose the certainty of a religious belief. But then in response to the question “quelle est votre image de la mort (non celle de vos personnages),” Volodine answers, in part, that his stories insult death, that he allows himself that pleasure, but that such a pleasure is only transitory, and that “le néant existe, il est horrible, il est indicible…”
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LATE EDIT: But how did I overlook this?
C’est très important, et même fondamental, de savoir vers quel text on va, vers quelle phrase, vers quel moment, comment se fera la dissolution de tout, comment on arrivera à la nuit, au noir, au silence. (Volodine, La Femelle du requin interview, 2002.)
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