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CAVE PAINTINGS AND WALL

WRITINGs: Blanchot's signatureLars IyerPublished online: 09 Jun 2010.

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General culture, Blanchot observes,would like to make to know a verb with-out an object: it is a matter of knowing in a waythat is absolute and substantial, not of learning

what one does not yet know (Friendship 55;

67). The notion of the work of art allows us to

draw the old and the new into the horizon of

culture: we know what it is and we know, for this

reason, what any work of art can be. Our capac-

ity to know outpaces everything; the avant-garde

is, for us, only the outward edge of a movement

whose origins and inner dynamic are alreadyfamiliar. Likewise, no artwork is too old, too

obscure or too unfamiliar to be recognised as

what it is and thereafter restored to its place

within culture. What matters above all else is

culture as a whole, the totality or the continuity

of the knowable as it is known by those of us

who live in the West. We recognise the artwork,

we know in advance what it is and how it binds

itself to a particular history, a particular institu-

tionalisation. We know but we do so in a manner

that is docile; we acquiesce to the substantiality

of the gallery, to the absoluteness of the

museum.

But is it not because art is already deadthat

the individual work of art seems to offer itself so

completely to a certain history, a certain monu-

mentalisation? This is why, perhaps, the crushed

face of Saint Elizabeth of Baberg and the adoles-

cent smiles of Praxiteles statues seem strangelycomplete, for they regard and smile at us from

an eternal immobility. Perhaps Hegel is right:

art belongs to the past (Aesthetics 11) since it

is no longer the absolute mode of expression and

self-understanding for European people.

Everything is ours artworks have been freed

from their subjection to religious, mythic or

civic purposes. The columns of the Greek temple

are no longer an integral component of a place

of worship, but realise and exemplify a style that

would come to influence Byzantine and Western

church architecture. Everything is ours the

tourists who admire the spectacle of the Japanese

Shinto temple are right to understand this expe-

rience in the same way as they might the Auriga

of Delphi, the Royal Portal of Chartres,

Khmerian heads, Wei and Tang Bodhisattvas

i.e., as the distant forerunners of contemporary

art. Everything is known but the object of

knowledge is already dead; the word artbelongs, in its modern usage, to a time it has

already outlived. To think the artwork as the

artwork to think the notion of art in its

historicity is to think what has already been

killed. Art cannot be resurrected, but we could

pronounce the words Lazarus, venture forth

that would have it approach us in its death not

in order to restore it to life nor indeed to mourn

art, to restore its purity by freezing it in immo-

bility, but in order to understand the extent of

its death and its distance from us. If art is dead,

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lars iyer

CAVE PAINTINGS AND

WALL WRITINGS

blanchots signature

AN GELAKIjour na l of th e th eo re tica l hu man it ies

volume 6 number 3 december 2001

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/01/030031-13 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors ofAngelaki

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blanchots signature

then this death cannot be made authentic,

personal, proper; it refuses itself to mourning.

The stench of death surprises us, for the corpse

of art is not like that of certain saints whose flesh

has not rotted from their bones: the saints who,

we could imagine, would rise again and walk one

day among us.

It might seem as if Saint Elizabeth of Baberg

craved for her face to be crushed or that the

caves of Lascaux waited only to be discovered in

order to fade: that the work of art was always as

it appears to us in the museum. But what we call

art, Blanchot would remind us, is real and it is

fragile; it belongs to history and is marked by its

adventures. The crushed face and the fading

cave walls are figures for a certain event thatdoes not befall the artwork from without as a

kind of empirical accident that is easily erased.

Rather, this event would attest to a worklessness

that can be said to unwork history, one that

implicates the history of art and, as I will argue,

disturbs historiographical and evolutionary

accounts of the origin of the human being.

Blanchot would confront us anew with the

artwork in its materiality, its ineradicable

historicity. In wresting art from historiography

and, thereby, from discourses on the history of

art and art criticism, he also invites a reconcep-

tion of the step into humanity the step into

history.

In his discussion of Batailles book on the

cave paintings at Lascaux, Blanchot focuses on

what he calls the signature a fragmentary

rcit or narrative that the painter of the cave

walls leaves in order to indicate his own masteryover the work of art: the fact that he and he

alone was responsible for it. But this signature is

a figure for a certain non-human worklessness

that divides any project, any attempt to accom-

plish a task, from itself.

In the second part of my discussion, I argue

that those who wrote on the walls in the events

in Paris in May 1968 can be said to append their

signature in a way that re-echoes the signatureBlanchot discovers on the cave walls. Discussing

Blanchots account of the events alongside his

discussion of Batailles book, I explore the ethi-

cal and political repercussions of Blanchots

account of worklessness.

the cave paintings

Blanchot writes:

it is certainly true that Lascaux fills us with a

feeling of wonder [la merveille; the translator

provides us with a word linked happily to the

experience in which philosophy has been saidto be sourced]: this subterranean beauty; the

chance that preserved and revealed it; the

breadth and scope of the paintings, which are

there not in the form of vestiges or furtive

adornment but as a commanding presence; a

space almost intentionally devoted to the bril-

liance and marvel of painted things, whose first

spectators must have experienced, as we do,

and with as much naive astonishment, the

marvellous revelation; the place from which artshines forth and whose radiance is that of a

first ray first and yet complete. (Friendship

1; 9)

The chance that let us witness the huge aurochs,

the unicorn, the red deer, oxen, horses and stags

is no doubt remarkable. Our curiosity is piqued

about the techniques that allowed our ancestors

to exaggerate the contours of the cave walls and

augment them with pigment. What, we might ask

ourselves, about the function of the Lascaux

paintings were the caves the focus of rituals, of

secret ceremonies? We turn to the commentaries

in the books in which we read about what we call

prehistoric art; we read learned articles about the

caves or turn the pages of reproductions. But

what incites our wonder, according to Blanchot,

is the self-affirming presence of a great work of

art. Ours would be the simple, awe-struck

response that captivated the first spectators ofthe paintings. What we confront is already a great

work; at Lascaux, we discover that the cave paint-

ings that are the birth of art reveal a profound

truth about art and its historicity: at its birth,

Blanchot writes, art is revealed to be such that

it can change infinitely and can ceaselessly renew

itself, but cannot improve (Friendship 1; 9).

The cave paintings would be both ancient and

contemporaneous, since they appear to awakenthe same wonder in us as they would in any spec-

tator.

This account of Blanchots evocation of the

cave paintings might seem persuasive. For who

now would insist that ancient art is cruder or less

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refinedthan newer art? Is it not a tribute to our

universal humanism that we can place the caves

of Lascaux alongside the primitivist sculptures of

Picasso in our imaginary museum?1

Furthermore, we might agree with Blanchots

claim that art can be said to happen as the expe-

rience of wonder it incites in its viewers. Art is

what satisfies us because it offers an unequivocal

experience: one that affects us when we catch

sight of a reproduction of a Van Gogh in the

boardroom. The work of art offers itself to us as

unbreached experience, a primal non-contradic-

tion, a unity that preserves itself despite the

commercialisation of art. We are reassured: art

remains art because the origin is not a discreet

point in the past, but continues to hold sway, togovern, measuring out the fate of what is to

come.

But Blanchot does not confirm us in this view

of art. Granted, he makes the claim that art can

always and already be said to be complete, since

alterations and refinements of artistic technique

do not alter what is marvellous about it. He

seems to affirm that art can be said to happen or

indeed be reborn as the wondrous, re-originating

for the first spectators at Lascaux just as it will

be born again for all subsequent spectators. But

in claiming that allorigination is but a re-origi-

nation that there is no absolute beginning of art

to which all its other re-beginnings could be

related Blanchot points to an experience on the

part of those who view the artwork that disturbs

the usual conception of wonder. At Lascaux,

according to Blanchot, we encounter the force,

brilliance and mastery of a power that is essen-tially the power of a beginning, which is always

to say, of a beginning-again that is always prior

(Friendship 10; 19).

Lascaux names a site where something has

recommenced that disturbs the inherited concept

of art. What recommences there can only be

understood if the notion of art along with atten-

dant notions of authorship, artistry, and creativ-

ity are rethought from an experience oftransgression. What sets Batailles account of

Lascaux apart from those by specialists in art and

prehistory, Stephen Ungar comments, is his

view that the work of art is distinguished from

the products of other work by a destructive force

associated with transgression and the sacred

(Phantom Lascaux 258). Batailles Lascaux

links the creation of the cave paintings with the

emergence of the human being as it is bound up

with murder and eroticism. It is this aspect of

Batailles work that Blanchot draws upon in his

account of the birth of the work of art. Blanchot

argues that the experience of the work of art

permits the step from pre-human into human

existence; it is only in the context of a discussion

of humanity and a certain inhumanity that the

question concerning the happening of the work

of art can be broached.

Bataille, according to Blanchot,

shows that the paintings of Lascaux are

probably linked to the movement of effer-

vescence, to the explosive generosity of cele-bration when man, interrupting the time of

effort and work thus for the first time

truly man returns to the sources of natural

overabundance [la surabondance] in the

jubilation of a brief interlude [la jubilation

dun bref intermde] to what he was when he

was not yet (Friendship 4; 12; translationamended)

In Lascaux, Bataille sketches the initial alien-

ation of the human being from the immanent

realm of animality that opens when the human

being becomes a creature who works. He explains

how tools, since they have no value in themselves

but only in an anticipated result, allow the posit-

ing of objects. The distinction between ends and

means introduced by the tool permits the defini-tion of what, Bataille writes in the Theory of

Religion, is a sphere of objects, a world, a

plane (30). This positing always uncertain,

precarious and unevenly realised (Theory of

Religion 30) counterposes a subject to these

objects. The tool thus changes nature and so does

the human being at the same time; as Bataille

writes, the tool subjugates nature to man, who

makes it and uses it, but it ties man to a subju-gated nature (Theory of Religion 41). Nature

becomes, in principle, the property of the human

being, but only in so far as it is available as an

object for a subject. As Bataille writes, the grain

of wheat is a unit of agricultural production; the

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cow is a head of livestock, and the one who culti-

vates the wheat is a farmer; the one who raises

the steer is a stock raiser (Theory of Religion

41). But even as the pre-humans who made tools

and were thereby posited as subjects over against

a dimension that would be henceforward closed

to them, they became aware of an essential lack

or a weakness (Friendship 5; 12) that stemmed

from their finitude. There remain certain insecu-

rities in the transcendent plane upon which

subjects and objects stand opposed to one

another since the human being is never just a

subject and nature cannot be objectivised. How

should we think these insecurities?

As Kant argues, there is a distinction between

the intuitus originarius of God, an originalintuition (Anschauung) that creates its own

objects, and the intuitus derivativus of the

human being, who does not create objects but

receives intuitions from them (Critique of Pure

Reason B72). As Heidegger writes of Kant,

finite intuition of the being cannot give the

object from out of itself. It must allow the object

to be given (Kant and the Problem of

Metaphysics 18). The finite human being exists

in the midst of beings that existed before him.

Clearly, the Bataillean subject who opposes

objects did not create them. The creation of

tools, which is the condition of possibility of

laying out a transcendent plane, does not hold

back a certain explosive festivity in which nature

would be revealed in its immanence in its pecu-

liar proximity to the human being. This jubila-

tory interlude to which Blanchot refers exposes

that the humanity of the human being cannot bethought in terms of subjectivity. On this reading,

the finitude of the human being is to be thought

in terms of his openness and receptivity to what

he does not create, i.e., his capacity to be

affected. The finitude of the human being is

simply another way of thinking the insecurity of

the plane of transcendence.

The insecurity to which the human being is

condemned in his finitude can be understood interms of the relationship between prohibition and

transgression as it structures human experience.

As Blanchot writes, Georges Bataille assumes

man used to draw a circle around human possi-

bility from the very beginning (Friendship 5;

13). Prohibitions about death and murder mili-

tate against the experience that threatens to

reveal the inherent instability of the plane of

transcendence. Everything that has been possible

for us on this plane civilisation itself was and

is possible because of these prohibitions. At the

time, however, as they confirm the strength and

force of these prohibitions, Blanchot and Bataille

would point towards certain experiences that fall

outside merely human possibility.

Our ancestors, the ones who are not yet

human, were already enclosed by such prohibi-

tions. However, Blanchot argues with Bataille

that whilst these incipient human beings may be

hard workers, the masters of tools and weapons,

they have yet to step into fully human existencesince they are bound by the prohibitions that

debar their societies from that which cannot be

put to work. They are not yet human, since, as

Blanchot will explain, they are not capable of

knowing the law by sovereign infraction, and it

is only by deliberately defying the prohibitions

they erect around themselves that they can

become human (Friendship 5; 14). It is not

enough to exist within the parameters that are

measured out through prohibitions. There are

two leaps, two essential moments of transgres-

sion that allow pre-human beings to become

human beings (Friendship 6; 14). In the first,

pre-humans transcend the immanence of the

natural world; in the second, they re-cross the

line that demarcates them from the immanence

of the natural realm and, through this transgres-

sion, violate the prohibitions that their ancestors

set against the dimension from which theyemerged, in so doing, revealing these prohibi-

tions in their prohibitive force. This transgres-

sion returns the human being to the immanence

of animality and thence to that from which he

originated. Human beings become human only

by plunging back into the milieu from which pre-

humans emerged. The origination of the human

being depends upon the violation of the taboos

that separate us from immanence. The pre-humans transcendence of nature has to be

transgressed in a return to immanence that

simultaneously contests and confirms the force

of the prohibition. In this return, the prohibi-

tions that guarantee the integrity and closure of

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homogeneity are contested. Homogeneity the

plane of transcendent beings, i.e., subjects and

objects is never homogeneous enough because

it cannot be secured once and for all. It is only

when the impossibility of achieving homogeneity

as such is forcibly exposed in the moment of

transgression that essential lack reveals itself to

be constitutive of human existence.

In the instant of transgression, the essential

lack or weakness that seemed to promise a

homogenisation of nature to pre-humans reveals

itself to be doubly lacking. The movement of

transgression confirms the interdictions that

demarcate the transcendent from the immanent.

This movement is not one possibility among

others, i.e., something that can happen as a resultof work of a plan or a project. It does not

accomplish what the transgressor sets out to

accomplish. Rather, it interrupts the dimension

of the possible, i.e., the world that opens to the

human being as a plane of transcendence. It cuts

across the conscious intentions of the human

beings who would make a work or a project of

transgression. The movement of transgression

cannot be initiated through an act of will. Rather,

it disrupts all such willing, belonging to a dynam-

ics that is dissimulated by the desire to work, in

the very setting apart of means from ends. It is

only in giving this desire its head in letting it

emerge in its difference from what are normally

construed to be desires that transgression can

occur. But this affirmation of a pre-voluntary

desire is not something the human being can be

said to be capable of as a subject who can will or

act. Transgression can only be said to occur onlyin so far as it contests the prohibitions that struc-

ture the subject.

This is why, Blanchot writes, the awareness

that a return to what is variously called anterior

reality, animal reality, and the first immen-

sity is a return that is always more than a

return (Friendship 6; 15). Although this move-

ment may seem to allow the incipient human

being to enter these primeval, prehistoric realmsonce again, he also becomes tumultuously

conscious of this impossible return, becomes

conscious of the limits and the unique force that

allows him to break these limits (Friendship 6;

15). The transgressor cannot simply become

immanent he does not, as Blanchot writes,

simply lose himself in the dream of total exis-

tence; rather, he affirms himself as that which

is added to this existence (Friendship 6; 15). He

is aware, that is to say, that he is a supplement to

existence that the emergence from immanence

has always and already happened and, therefore,

that he is the minute part [la part infime] that,

at a distance and through an ambiguous play, can

become master of everything, can appropriate it

symbolically or communicate with it by making

it be (Friendship 6; 15). To transgress, then, is

only to become aware of what one cannot trans-

gress i.e., a transcendence that it is not in the

power of the human being to reconvert into

immanence. It is in the growing awareness ofthe impossibility of the return to the first immen-

sity which is also the impossibility of ever

definitively overcoming the effort and the work

that is an ineluctable part of human existence

that pre-humans become, at last, human beings.

Thus, neither Blanchot nor Bataille simply

retrace the evolutionary process that would allow

us to designate the origin of the human being.

Blanchots paradoxical thought of the origin

conceives it in terms of the desire on the part of

the incipient human being to enact a transgres-

sion as a transgression. But this origin involves an

instant that Blanchot calls the time of differ-

ence, understood as the point of disjunction

between the desire to complete a transgression

and the prohibitive force that defeats this desire,

rendering the transgression incomplete (that is to

say, there is no absolute transgression)

(Friendship 6; 14).2 This origin has the result ofdemarcating humans from pre-humans but it is,

in itself, always a lacuna it is, Blanchot writes:

as if the origin, instead of showing itself and

expressing itself in what emerges from the

origin, were always veiled and hidden by what

it produces, and perhaps then destroyed or

consumed as origin, pushed back and always

further removed and distant, as originally

deferred. We never observe the source, nor thespringing forth [jaillissement], but only what

is outside the source, the source become real-

ity external to itself and always again without

source or far from the source. (Friendship 10;

1819)

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The origin whether it is the origin of the human

being or the origin of the work of art is never

simply available. Indeed, the withdrawals of both

these origins are intertwined, for the lack of artis-

tic ability on the part of pre-humans is emblem-

atic of their inability to step into a fully human

existence. If what we call art is deemed to be the

expression of the humanity of the human being

as the impossible leap into immanence, then the

origin of art is as opaque as that of the origin of

the human being. Blanchot writes that the first

moments of art, of which Lascaux is an example:

suggest that man has contact with his own

beginning is the initial affirmation of

himself, the expression of his own novelty

only when, by the means and methods of art,he enters into communication with the force,

brilliance, and joyful mastery [avec la force,

lclat et la matrise joyeuse] of a power that

is essentially the power of a beginning, which

is always to say, of a beginning-again [de

recommencement pralable] that is always

prior. (Friendship 10; 19)

The cave paintings are indeed wondrous, but

they are not so because of the ingenuity of their

creators, whose achievement is hollowed out by a

fundamental and constitutive non-achievement

i.e., the impossibility of reclaiming this origin as

such. It is the experience of the withdrawal of the

origin that is constitutive of the step into truly

human existence. In order to become human, to

step over the threshold, it is not enough merely

to be in default the retreat of immanence has

to be experienced in its retreat. But such experi-

ence is never simply at hand it is not ours toclaim for ourselves. Rather, it is art that permits

a communication with what Blanchot calls, in

The Space of Literature, the original experi-

ence i.e., the experience of the origin in its

retreat (20947; 31355).3 Communication does

not refer to the transmission of a message that

would leave sender and receiver, subject and

object, intact; it is this experience of the origin

that pre-dates all beginnings. This experiencecannot be retrospectively appropriated; it cannot

be said to return and reaffirm itself in the work

of art.

The original experience the experience of a

certain repetition of the origin alters our very

conception of artistic achievement, along with

attendant notions of genius, inspiration, creativ-

ity, etc. But it does more than this since, in

revealing the interruption of the originating func-

tion, the work of art shows how any attempt to

work is interrupted how the dimension of possi-

bility can never enclose a certain impossibility,

an experience of the impossible. The artwork

reveals its uncanny capacity to communicate the

interruption of any plan, project or work in so far

as they take place on the plane of transcendence.

Moreover, it reveals the interruption that must

have been at play in any human creation that

appears to be stable and perduring. The

Blanchovian determination of the artwork reveals

a worklessness that always inhabits working.As soon as art begins, the original experi-

ence the experience of the impossible that is, as

I will explain, also the impossibility of recovering

an experience as an experience invades and

contaminates the free mastery of the artist.

Worklessness always inhabits the work; the pre-

voluntary desire for worklessness accompanies

and contests any desire to work. There is never a

simple, undivided experience of origination,

understood as a discreet, pristine beginning that

leads to a work, since there is no stable point

from which birth whether the birth of art or the

birth of humanity can begin. There is no

assignable origin of a process of working that is

not inhabited, in advance, by a dissension of the

creative will.

Preceding the origin, as it were (but only

because it accompanies and interrupts any osten-

sible origin as soon as it originates), there is aninterruption of the origin. As Blanchot writes,

what is first is not beginning, but beginning

over: beginning itself is the attempt to deter-

mine a fundamental stability out of which a

world can emerge (Space of Literature 243; 327).

Whilst particular determinations of the world

qua the plane of transcendence emerge partic-

ular worlds that belong to different societies at

different times it is also true that such deter-minations are always threatened in their being. It

is the fact that the dissension of the origin can

never be left behind once and for all to which

Blanchot points when he writes: being is

precisely the impossibility of being for the first

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time (Space of Literature 243; 327). Any appeal

to the origin must negotiate this pre-originary

dissension, the play of worklessness within work,

of the inhuman within the human and the imma-

nent in the transcendent.

Blanchot would show how the source is always

redoubled, that the desire for homogeneity and

work coexists with the uncanny attraction of

heterogeneity and worklessness. It is the fact that

we, the spectators, are implicated in this attrac-

tion, that we are carried, in advance, towards

what we will not allow ourselves to want, that

allows us to discern a fear in the experience of

wonder itself. I have argued that a disjunction of

time can be said to open between the time of the

project, the time in which plans are made andtools deployed, and the joyous moment in which

human beings are returned to the first immensity

to which they bear an ambiguous relationship. It

is the possibility of such a disjunction one that

we can never have done with which makes us

fear even as we wonder. To wonder is also to be

afraid: it is to discern the retreat of the origin

and, along with it, the retreat of those powers

that are constitutive of fully human existence, the

threat of the return to a time in which no human

being had entered history. The beasts on the cave

wall take us back before the origin to the time

when the human being did not exist. They

confront us with the dreadful abyss of the pre-

historical: of a recurrence of an instant that

cannot be brought under retrospective control.

Our wonder shelters a fear: the fear of what the

artwork would communicate: the terror of an

instant without history.

In the prehistoric cave paintings of this period,

there are few representations of human beings.

The painters bring beasts vividly to life, restoring

them to a joyous and unambiguous presence

one full of an innocent truth without equivoca-

tion (Friendship 11; 20). But when human

beings appear, they are depicted with extremecrudity. In the same cave complex at Lascaux, an

enigmatic tableau can be found hidden at the

bottom of a crevasse. It portrays a stretched out

man with a birds head and an erect penis who

appears to have speared a wounded bison. For

Blanchot, as for Bataille, this peculiar addition to

the cave paintings at Lascaux strangely and

perfectly corresponds to the fundamental

enigma, i.e., the question of the coming into

the world, the advent, of man (Tears of Eros

5253). As Blanchot comments, it is striking

that with the figuration of man, an enigmatic

element enters into this work, a work otherwise

without secret; a scene also enters it as a narra-

tive [rcit], an impure historical dramatisation

(Friendship 11; 20).

This portrayal introduces a dimension previ-

ously absent, since the presence of this intriguing

individual is not of the same unambiguous order

as that of the great beasts. We do not, Blanchot

argues, welcome this image with the same spon-taneous pleasure we do not wonder as we do in

front of the beasts on the cave wall. The naivety

of this depiction surprises us, as does the place of

this figure within the tableau of which he is part.

We may ask whether this individual is asleep or

dead, or enquire as to the sense of the fragmen-

tary narrative of which he seems part, but

Blanchot claims that the meaning of this

obscure drawing is nonetheless clear; it is, he

claims: the first signature of the first painting,

the mark left modestly in a corner, the furtive,

fearful, indelible [furtive, craintive, ineffaable]

trace of man who is for the first time born of his

work, but who also feels seriously threatened

[gravement menac] by this work and perhaps

already struck with death [frapp de mort]

(Friendship 11; 20). Blanchot goes further than

the Bataille of Lascaux in attributing a meaning

to what he calls the signature. In Lascaux,Bataille provides a brief survey of some of the

secondary literature on the enigma of the cave.

Abb Breuil argues that it commemorates a fatal

accident that befell a hunting expedition.

Windels, Brodick, and Lechner follow his inter-

pretation; but, in so doing, they do not take

account of what, for Bataille, is the strangest part

of this scene the birds head. For Kirchner, by

contrast, the tableau does not present a huntingincident; the prostrate man is not dead, but is a

shaman in an ecstatic trance, recalling

Sierozewskis discussion of the sacrifice of a cow

by the Yakuts. The nudity and erect penis of the

medicine man would be part of this ritual, but

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Bataille complains that this view overlooks the

bison and his wound. What, then, are we to

conclude about this scene (Lascaux 140)? Bataille

draws no conclusion in Lascaux, although in The

Tears of Eros, published a few years later,

Bataille follows Blanchot in discovering an

essential and paradoxical accord between

death and eroticism that is signed in the

closed space at the bottom of the crevasse (52).

For Bataille, as for Blanchot, the fear and tenta-

tiveness of this first step into humanity is

revealed in the act that renders Lascaux ambigu-

ous i.e., the signature of the first artist.

The signature bears witness to a transgression

that redoubles the ambiguous origin of the

human being. As the realisation of affirmation,expression and communication, art remained

foreign to the pre-humans. It took the arrival of

the transgressor the one who was no longer

simply himself, whose being was not, in a certain

sense, assured to bestow its possibility. The

first human being is the one who is drawn into a

transgression that contests the power and the

authority of the taboo in his experience of the

work of art. It is by and through the creation of

this work of art that this individual is in turn

born as a human being through an act of sover-

eign infraction.

This signature is ostensibly a way of allowing

the artist to stand back from what he has accom-

plished as the work of art, and proclaim his

mastery. It is his work; he has exhibited power

over the materials at hand in order to render

something beautiful, and he has every right to be

proud of his virtuosity. But, for Blanchot, thesignature attests to a struggle inherent to

artistry to a tension between a bold self-affir-

mation and a certain fearfulness of the painter.

The work of art does not, he claims, emerge

out of the creative activity of the artist qua free

and sovereign human being. In the time of differ-

ence, there is no agent or subject to carry

through the creative process; there is no one qua

I or agent there to realise the work in its realexistence. Instead, there is only the pre-subjecti-

vated space that opens in the extraordinary

experience that the original experience names. To

create an artwork of this kind is to undergo the

experience in which the author is rendered

passive beyond the usual notions of passivity. It

is to be receptive to the original experience to the

extent that artistic creation always involves a

moment that passes into forgetting. The time of

difference, the time of the absence of time, the

paradoxical happening of an instant to which all

of Blanchots writings point, always intervenes

the disjunction between the time of production

and work and the other time in which there is

no one there to remember.

It is this traumatic experience that Blanchot

writes when he claims to discern evidence in the

signature of the work that the artist of this first

painting is seriously threatened by the artwork

and struck with death. The signature is an

attempt on the part of the author to reclaim whatis not his to reaffirm authorial sovereignty over

the happening of the work of art in so far as it

escapes the usual measure of experience and,

therefore, the processes of memorisation, of the

synthesising of the past into a present. The artist

who laboured at Lascaux gives a sign of his trau-

matic memory in his depiction of the recumbent

figure stretched out between a bison and a rhino.

In this signature, Blanchot discerns the fearful

mark of the one who struggled with memory in

his participation in the working of the work. The

one who signs whose identity as an author is

granted by an experience he is not there to

experience does so because he fears an experi-

ence, an excessiveness over the possibility of

memorisation that resists his sovereignty and his

mastery. The artist signs because he is afraid that

his signature is provisional.4

In his reading of Bataille, Blanchot is notendorsing or offering another historiographical

account of the birth of art. The antiquity of

Lascaux, the marvellous chance that preserved

the paintings on the cave walls and the miracle of

its discovery are only figures for the surprise that

the cave walls present the same enigma as any

work of art, ancient or modern. The artists of

Lascaux can be said to be our contemporaries,

because what we call their work of art attests tothe opening up of what will forever remain out of

joint.

In this sense, Lascaux is simply the name of

an inaugural scene that already attests to a

dissension of the origin to a division that turns

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this classical scene of origination against itself.

This dissension opens in any such origin any

time, indeed, that an artwork can be said to orig-

inate dividing the artist from himself and,

thereby, frustrating the historian of art who

would tell us a tale about the origin and devel-

opment of art. This kind of recounting depends

upon an ascription of authorial agency upon a

conception of biography that would retrace the

origin of the work of art to a creator. If my

presentation of Blanchots arguments is correct,

then no such ascription is possible. The origin of

a particular artwork is not the artist; likewise,

the origin of art as such the origin of what we

have only recently learned to call art does not

occur as a conventionally datable occurrence.Despite their significance to a certain historio-

graphical recounting of the origin of art, the cave

paintings at Lascaux are merely an example

an example among other examples.5 But what

does this example exemplify? If there is no

origin of art if there is only a pre-originary

dissension that tears the origin from its originat-

ing function then no particular artwork,

including the one canonically defined as the

first, can be more than an example. By exposing

the interruption of the origin that always and

already disturbs the traditional recounting of the

beginning of art, Blanchot draws attention, in

the most powerful sense, to the inadequacy of

the language of origin and inception, history and

historiography, in so far as it fails to account for

what happens at the canonically defined birth of

art. Lascaux is exemplary for Blanchot only in so

far as the birth of art points towards an experi-ence that outstrips historiographical reckoning.

the wall writings

What is remarkable about Blanchots writing is

that he allows his signature to tremble; he can be

said to write from the trembling his signature

bears. He writes out of fear but he does not fear

his fear; this is why he is able to write of theother of anamnesis, the traumatism that

precedes, founds, and ruins memory. His signa-

ture is the condition of his work, but in allowing

his writing to reveal its trembling, to permit its

ruination by the very excessiveness of its

object, Blanchot gives a sign of a happening

that perturbs all works.

The signature attached to the particular work

of art is but an extrinsic sign of the dynamics of

origination. But its significance and the stakes of

Blanchots discussion of the work of art are

greater. The happening of art exposes the prior

inextrication of working and worklessness and

hence a certain disjuncture of time that deter-

mines any kind of production. I have quoted

Stephen Ungar who explains that, for Bataille,

the work of art is distinguished from the prod-

ucts of other work by a destructive force associ-

ated with transgression and the sacred

(Phantom Lascaux 258). I am not sure I would

agree, since what Blanchot calls the signature,along with the aporia of the origin to which it

attests, is discernible in any work. The artwork

differs from other products only because the

signature is visible in a different sense not

merely obtruding into the space of the artwork

but opening that space itself. Nevertheless, any

work that is the outcome of a process of produc-

tion can be said to exhibit a certain fear and

trembling.

Perhaps we must learn how to read the signa-

tures that are inscribed on the bodies of those

works that we take to be ours; perhaps, too, we

will have to understand how the signature signs

us, each of us that it is written across the

bodies that we take to be ours. On the most

solemn monuments of our age on the institu-

tions of the government and the university, on

the most imposing works of philosophy, of

history, the signature is legible. What do we readthere? In a late essay, Blanchot invokes the

memory of the events: When a number of us

took part in the May 1968 movement, they

hoped to be preserved from any ambition in the

singular (Intellectuals 224; 38). Despite the

differences between the participants that

revealed themselves in incessant disputes,

there was an underlying community between the

participants (Intellectuals 224; 38). In onesense, it was perfectly possible to distinguish

between the young and the old, the famous and

the obscure; in another, all were bound in a rela-

tionship to one another that allowed each person

to recognise themselves in the anonymous

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blanchots signature

words inscribed on the walls and which, in

the end, even when on occasion they were the

result of a collective effort, never declared

themselves the words of an author, being of all

and for all, in their contradictory formulation

(Intellectuals 224; 38). The question concern-

ing the authorship of these words cannot be

resolved by tracing them back to an individual

or a group. What is inscribed on the walls is a

figure for the trembling of signature that signs

itself in any work.

Let us read them in From Paris 68:

Imagination has seized power, Run comrade,

the old world is behind you! (66), We are reas-

sured, two and two no longer make four (68),

The revolution is incredible because it is real(70), Under the paving stones, the beach (72),

Dream is reality (74), The walls have ears.

Your ears have walls (76), Poetry is in the

street (78), Let us ban all applause, the spec-

tacle is everywhere (80), It is forbidden to

forbid (86), My desires are reality (88), To

exaggerate is to begin to invent (90), Speak to

your neighbours (92), To live for the moment

(94), A cop sleeps inside every one of us, we

must kill him (96), Alone, we can do nothing

(104), We are all undesirables (110), Action

must not be a reaction but a creation (112),

Politics is happening in the street, To be free

in 1968 means to take part, The barricade

blocks the street but opens the way (114). It is

not in order to translate such proclamations into

a substantive political programme that Blanchot

writes of the wall writings. Indeed, it would be

better to remember the graffiti that would indi-cate its own provisionality: I have something to

say but I dont know what or, more simply, I

have nothing to say, Im playing, Quick!

(From Paris 6870, 72, 84) slogans that like

specks of foam splash up from the wave that

crashed anonymously, impersonally and collec-

tively through the streets of Paris: specks,

traces, but nothing more. The participants of the

events recognised them as signs of the experi-ence that exposes each of them to worklessness:

a sign of the experience that has no one as its

subject. Like the signature hidden in the

crevasse at Lascaux, the wall writings would be

an extrinsic figure of the movement of trans-

gression that was affirmed, albeit briefly, on the

streets of Paris.

Was it affirmed, then, too, for the society

from which came the ones who realised the

paintings at Lascaux? The signature seems to

attest, in its clandestinity, to an experience that

was mysterious and difficult of access.

Nevertheless, in so far as it is always at play at

every level of production including the work

of the subject to maintain itself as itself over

time the worklessness that divides all works

against themselves can never be preserved as the

object of an esoteric knowledge. What the partic-

ipants recognised in the writings on the walls was

what the incipient human beings witnessed as

they stepped into humanity.What they saw, then and what the spectator

of the work of art would see now is the

evidence of an experience on the part of the

artist that re-echoes in the experience of the ones

who stand before the artwork. The words,

wonder, marvel, amazement, etc. can never

describe this experience, unless it is thought in

so far as it shelters an experience of fear. Fearful,

trembling, the signature is inscribed in the

artwork attesting to an opening of the world

the eruption, the transgression of the prohibi-

tions that permit the laying out of the plane of

transcendence. The wall writings were there for

anyone to see. They are the exoteric counterpart

of the esoteric signature. The enigma of the pit

is brought into daylight: it is discernible, obvi-

ous, but recognisable only to those who partici-

pate in what Blanchot calls the movement of

May 1968.That is why Blanchot writes of the events as a

feast; they open a group of human beings to

an experience that transgresses them in their

subjectivity (Unavowable Community 29; 54).

Does this mean that the events would be a blue-

print for a future revolution: that one would

have merely to imitate such a programme in

order to reveal the play of the signature?

Blanchot reminds us that, although the eventswere exceptional, they provide no solution;

this happening is sufficient unto itself

(Intellectuals 224; 38). Perhaps they could be

said to provide us with an idea of a revolution

that does not need to succeed or achieve a fixed

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goal (Intellectuals 224; 38); but they can do

no more than this. The feast is spontaneous; the

explosive generosity of celebration that interrupts

the time of work re-opens the natural overabun-

dance, the first immensity that floods over the

prohibitions that would hold it at bay.

The festivity of the events echoes the festivity

of those who first celebrated as they crossed the

threshold into humanity. But the events are also

a threshold; what happens there is a transgression

that permits the step into humanity even as it

reveals the impossibility of ever completing this

step once and for all. They repeat what happened

in the very eruption of the human being into the

world just because human existence cannot be

secured once and for all. In the first signature, asin the wall writings of the events of 1968 which

are themselves a kind of signing we discover

the trace of the human being who is born

through the interruption of worklessness onto the

plane of transcendence. In contradistinction to

the threat that the work exerts over the one who

is born of his work and the society of those who

emerge into history when they view it the

events give evidence that what was feared once

need not be an object of fear. It is in an exuber-

ant joy that the events affirm what was once, and

for so many times, feared. The mystery is not

hidden; the enigma is no longer buried in the pit

or left modestly in a corner. In the daylight,

affirmed, is the experience that is figured in the

writings of the wall: the spontaneity of a move-

ment that is not moved by itself. Who are the

raggle-taggle, the chienlit the ones who share

nothing but their festivity, least of all a politicalprogramme recognisable to the men of power

they oppose only through their absence of reac-

tion (Unavowable Community 31; 54). There is

no secret; it is written on the walls, just as it was

written thousands of years ago by the ones who

stepped in joy and fearful trembling into human-

ity. Who were they? who, for that matter, are

we, the ones who know what art is and what it

must be? We are the ones who know without theknowing that the absolute and the substantial

conceal what the wall writings in the events

affirmed. Blanchot would teach us of what we do

not yet know and cannot, disclosing a future that

is also the future of art. Is art dead? Not unless

we, too, are dead. Not unless the plane of tran-

scendence covers over what does not fail to affirm

itself in the explosive generos-

ity of celebration, when we

return to the jubilation of the

interlude when we are once

again what we were when we

were not yet.

notes

I would like to thankAngelakis reviewers.

1 I allude to Malrauxs notion of the imaginary

museum in his Voices of Silence: Man and His Art.

2 See Derridas Demeure. Fiction and Testimony

3343, 7071.

3 As Leslie Hill has argued, The Space of Literature,

of which The Original Experience is a part,

should also be read as an oblique response to

Heideggers recently published essay Der

Ursprung des Kunstwerks (Blanchot Extreme

Contemporary 121). There is no question that

Blanchot is profoundly influenced by Heidegger

and particularly by The Origin of the Work of

Art. Blanchot refers to Heidegger only twice in

The Space of Literature once in a footnote and asa contemporary philosopher who has certain

views on death. Despite Blanchots expressed

reservations about Heideggers death analysis in

Being and Time, Blanchots essay shares several

important formulations with Heidegger among

them the distinction between the work of art and

equipment, and the view that the origin of the

work of art precedes both the work of art and the

artist (Blanchot Extreme Contemporary121). This

is not the place to negotiate the relationshipbetween Blanchot and Heidegger a task that

would have to draw upon The Sacred Word of

Hlderlin in The Work of Fire, the long footnote

appended to The Most Profound Question as

well as Atheism and Writing and Ren Char

and the Thought of the Neutral in The Infinite

Conversation and large sections of The Writing of the

Disaster. Finally, Do Not Forget and Our

Clandestine Companion attest, later in

Blanchots career, to his enduring reservationsabout the German thinker.

4 The motivations behind his act of signing might

well be opaque to the artist, but this troubled

ignorance, the withdrawal of experience from

itself, means that the anteriority of the original

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blanchots signature

experience will reaffirm itself as soon as the

creative process begins again.

5 I will confine myself to one remark on the rela-

tionship between Blanchot and Heidegger. In The

Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger introduces

a famous example, that of a Greek temple. For

Heidegger, the temple grants a certain way ofunderstanding the mysteries of birth and death

and fate the way space and time are experienced

by a people. Indeed, the temple is, in a certain

sense, the arbiter of the divine law: the god whose

figure it contains opens the holy space of the

temple and allows the people it inaugurates to

understand life and even afterlife in the context of

the whole. Heidegger explains that the artwork

enjoys a quasi-transcendental function, rendering

a particular understanding of being possible byopening a world. In exploring the figure of the cave

paintings at Lascaux in Blanchots Friendship, I point

discreetly towards the possibility of giving an

account of the stakes of the Greek temple in The

Origin of the Work of Art in its exemplarity. As

Heidegger writes, The all-governing expanse of

this open relational context is the world of this

historical people. Only from and in this expanse

does the nation first return to itself for the fulfil-

ment of its vocation (The Origin of the Work ofArt 167). World is to be understood in terms of

the way in which beings (including the human being

itself) come into appearance for a particular

people (The Essence of Grounds 112).

Blanchots Lascaux does not perform a similar

role indeed, no artwork is capable, for Blanchot,

of disclosing a people to itself. The artwork is

always the disruption of just such a disclosure. The

happening of the work of art always leads to the

disruption of the formation of a historical people;

it is always transgressive. From a Blanchovian

perspective, the refusal of the work as it divides

itself against itself in the course of its origination is

pacifiedby the emphasis on the world-disclosive

aspect of Heideggers account of the origin of the

work of art.

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Lars Iyer3 Hartington Road

Chorlton-cum-Hardy

Manchester M21 8UZ

UK

E-mail: lars.iyer@chorlton.com

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