On Blanchot's the Outside

I don’t know that much about Blanchot’s work, only the parts I read carefully. Describing the Outside [le dehors] is difficult – and possibly ‘impossible’ because Blanchot questions the very act of defining and positing anything. It’s hard to write rigorously without getting tangled up into layers upon layers of sub-clauses, qualifications and parenthetical remarks. But I, personally, have always found it somewhat helpful to begin by naively introducing the Outside as simply the Outside: that which is ‘radically’ outside of anything and everything – particularly, in the case of Blanchot, outside of Being, of thinking, and of language. Le dehors is, in a sense, language’s ‘other’.

The cool thing is that the Outside is so infinitely exterior that it ‘tunnels to the other side’ and becomes infinitely interior (hence, its so-called rustling intimacy). Being exterior even to exteriority itself, the Outside is, in a sense, neutral with respect to in versus out, here versus beyond, and immanence versus transcendence. We may crudely say that the Outside is what is both outside and at the ‘heart’ of language, what is both within and without. So the spatiality goes haywire here and becomes less rigid or less geometric, at least in the Euclidean sense.

Moreover, this non-relation, this absolute separation from everything, makes the relation with the Outside an infinite relation, the most ‘authentic’ of relations. The event of this relation might be worthy of being called an Event or even, in some cases, a Catastrophe or a Disaster.

Another crude way to introduce the Outside is by comparing it to the ‘primal Khaos’ of the ancient Greeks: the original disorder or background noise from which everything bubbles forth or ‘froths’ out.

“Events are the foam of things, but what I am interested in is the sea,” writes Paul Valery. And we could say that almost every philosopher –I am over-generalizing, I know – has devised his/her own vocabulary to help speak of this first ‘sea’: negativity in the dialectic (for Hegel); Dionysian energy (for Nietzsche); Sein & then Earth (for Heidegger); God (for those who believe); the Unconscious & the Id (Sigmund); il y a & the Other (Levinas); the Dao (Daoists); Dan (certain Asian philosophies); transgression (Bataille); vitality & the virtual (Deleuze); ur-noise (Serres); turbulent nonlinearity (chaos theorists); the generic set (Badiou); bla bla bla.

Blanchot uses other terms as well, like ‘the Other Night’, ‘the Obscure’, ‘the Unknown’ and ‘the Neutral’. He came to talk a lot about the Outside in an earlier book, ‘The Space of Literature’. The most famous secondary literature on this topic is Foucault’s ‘Maurice Blanchot & the Thought from the Outside’. There’s also the second section to Deleuze’s book on Foucault, which is, in a way, Deleuze’s rather idiosyncratic reading of Foucault’s rather idiosyncratic reading of Blanchot.