This post could have carried the title of "Death and Freedom". But how could anyone hope to fill out the space under such a title without giving in to platitudes and fear of saying anything that could be mistaken as mistaken certitude?
Blanchot and Bataille. The mysterious community called "Acéphale" of which Blanchot writes in "The Inavowable Community"/La communauté inavouable. A community made around the principle of a mutual act of decapitation. Yes, we are in the age of surrealism (what happened to it? it became so commonly widespread that noone notices it anymore, surrealism is everywhere around us, but we have stopped laughing, and there are less flying eggs and deliberate ironics), yes this is Bataille, but also the community of sociology around universities in Paris in the 30's. Blanchot writes:
"The impossibility of death in its most naked possibility (the knife which cuts the victim's throat and in the same movement cuts the head of the "executioner"), suspends the illicit action in which the exaltation of the most passive passivity would be affirmed, until the end of times."
(If you did'nt really catch that one, blame the translator, read it again, or blame Blanchot. He wrote like that every now and then..)
This image could only fascinate and captivate, in all its romanticism, a playful mind like Blanchot's. And one like mine, I guess. Imagine this community, where the only way to become a member is to cut your own head off and at the same time cut the head off one of the others, who would, siumultaneously, also become a member. Through this mutual act, we follow each other into the most impossible, that which we could not live together or give to each other, death itself. Which means, of course, that anyone who accomplishes this act will die. A community of dead people. Or, even better: a community of the dying, which brings us back to life and back to essence in Bataille's and Blanchot's thoughts on community: it is through recognising the dying of the other, through giving myself entirely to the dying of the other, that we can become commune, join in community. This is the community of the dying, the lovers (Tristan & Isolde, Romeo & Juliette, etc etc), the friends. But this is also where I strongly disagree. This is not the community of friendship, though it seems to have been more or less accepted as a truism since Aristotle. Maybe to the ancient greeks there was no difference between the community of friends and the one of romantic love (as this did not exist yet, obviously there wasn't!).
Today, we know both. We witness the consequences of thinking of community as giving your own dying to the other(s). I got a comment on another blog (and thanks, by the way, for the kind words, and for your comment, Matt), on the claim that every dying is different, which I made in one of the previous posts on creating communities. Matt understands my claim as saying that every death, that is, the place beyond life, is different. To this, he holds that Death is the great equalizer. I know nothing of this. I have never witnessed death. In fact, this very phrase is an oxymoron. Witnessing death. I can witness dying, but not death (read or re-read Heidegger on dying or Derrida on Heidegger on dying.. or read Blanchot, "l'attente, l'oubli" or "l'entretien infini"). I did write something like "the life from which it occurs", which could encourage such a reading. I should have written "the life in which it occurs", as dying of course occurs inside life, as a necessary element of life itself, in its ploysemy and multiple forming of the human condition, among others. Sorry for that, this is difficult to follow, I guess. Just a comment, hope it makes sense to some out there. The point was that there is no community in death, as there can only be a community of the living, not of the dead. Blanchot and Bataille state the community of the dying, not of the dead. Or, there may even be a community of the dead, but this belongs to its own realm, not the one of the living, I have no idea what it is like, and every image we could make of it, would be a reflection of the way we see life. We would have no idea, whether we were actually drawing an image of a community of the dead. I think Remarque's image of the meaninglessness of being a soldier killing another soldier can be carried further here. Remarque notices that the soldier: 1) does not know the other soldier, so why hold a grudge against him strong enough to kill, and 2) belongs to the same rank and class as he, so they have something in common - in life - which gives no reason to kill. Except to break the community, to abolish what they have in common, which would make death not the great commonizer, but maybe the great equalizer. And this may be used to gently state the claim that death does not bring us together, it draws us ultimately apart form ourselves and thus from each other. It is not a commonizer, though it may be an equalizer (but if it is an equalizer, it is simultaneously a differentiator and a negation of difference, making it a paradoxical force that draws the living apart into in-difference. First part of the second chapter of "Difference et repetition", if I am not wrong, describes this phase or state).
All right, back to the Acéphale community. Blanchot quotes the following phrase from Bataille (don't know where it comes from, but I will find out - anyone out there knows, help is welcome): "The community of those who have no community". Now, this could be read as the community of the dead, for they can have no community, according to what I just wrote. But is could also lie in the becoming of the community itself, that is, a community that is always in the making, always becoming, never past, never become, always only in the event of becoming (event=evenement=a-venir=coming, arriving). This is what fascinates me about the image, not its literal sense of cutting each others' heads off, which belongs in a romanticist universe. Leave it there. But the coumminty which is always on the way of becoming, is that one which we are able to choose, able to give ourselves to, without falling into the trap of dying for each other, of the Kamikaze or suicide bomber?
If dying for each other is one option, it is, however, also one that presents its own impossibility when the members perform the initiating act and die. This impasse is not satisfactory, however beautifully Blanchot may be able to play with it in his musing, lingering, floating waiting-narratives. There must be another way of defining the community which is in the becoming and thus, creating, creative. A community of becoming life, rather than becoming death, of dying. The solution to this is not the community of subjects, as these are all distinct from one another in the same matter as dying itself. The very act of sustaing the subject is the act of keeping the Other or Otherness outside, creating not a community, but an inside. This is the image, in which we have reflected our views of communities for a few milleniums, now. And Bataille's and Acéphale's masterpiece may be, not to show the beauty of the community of dying friends, but the atrocity of the impossible community of the dying.
More will follow.
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