If, in the face of a looming global catastrophe, preventive action or a radical transformation of the conditions that have brought about the current situation appear to be more urgent than ever, at the same time it is unlikely that negotiations between nations, states and territories, on the one hand, and social, political and legal reformism, on the other, will suffice to implement change. Real change, a change that affects the world as a whole and its both disparate and fundamentally similar relations of production can be only a revolutionary one. Yet once a totality has actually come into existence, any change that may affect it must be a change that this totality can contain, or that occurs within it. Otherwise the totality would not be a totality, an interconnectedness that arises from within its single moments, elements, characters or figures and that is not violently imposed upon them. Each time change turns out to be real or revolutionary, the totality reveals itself to be a false, torn or negative totality, a totality with an outside. Hence real or revolutionary change can only be change that generates a totality. It happens because the totality still awaits its own coming into existence, its realisation. And just as a totality can be changed only radically or not at all, by ceasing to be a negative totality, or the mere idea of a totality, and becoming a positive totality, a totality that in its very existence has overcome all disrupting and disjointing antagonisms, there is no revolutionary event, or even impetus, that does not concern the totality, no matter how local and specific, or how vague and weak.
In his essay “The Apocalypse Is Disappointing”, which dates from the mid-nineteen-sixties of the past century, writer, philosopher and literary critic Maurice Blanchot reviews a bulky book on the looming catastrophe of a nuclear war that Karl Jaspers had published less than ten years earlier and that had been recently translated into French. The possibility of humanity annihilating itself on a global scale, a possibility disclosed historically by science and technology, denotes, according to Blanchot, a “problematic”Maurice Blanchot, “The Apocalypse Is Disappointing”, in: Friendship, trans. E. Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1997, p. 105. and “ambiguous”Ibid., p. 104. event, an event that exceeds any attempt to define its meaning and significance. For it keeps hovering over the abyss of an absolute emptiness, between an experiment induced by a will to truth that makes humans aware of the infinite power of negation inherent in their equally infinite incompleteness, and the visualisation of an idea that appears on the horizon of the human species for the first time, as if it were a sun impossible to recognise, a sun whose rising, when glimpsed, could also be regarded as a setting. It is the idea of totality. To be sure, the totality at stake here is itself split, since it harbours a power of mere destruction that must also become a power capable of constituting a hitherto unknown and all-encompassing community, one that is communist “in the full sense”Ibid., p. 107., as Blanchot puts it. This adds to the difficulty of determining what kind of event a self-induced catastrophe actually is as soon as this catastrophe threatens the world as a whole.
Note that Blanchot keeps referring to consciousness and awareness, to seeing something or not seeing anything, to discovering something new, original and unexpected, or else remaining blind in view of a possible total extinction, compelled to the repetition of banalities such as “humans must not die”. One wonders whether such emphasis placed on consciousness and awareness, on sight and blindness where a self-made total catastrophe looms, may not itself prevent a “new way of thinking”Ibid., p. 104. from developing, a “new way” that Blanchot advocates against Jaspers, whose reflections on the atomic terror are said to be but a “pretense”Ibid., a consolidation of “old predicaments”Ibid.. For can consciousness and awareness bring about the kind of radical, real, revolutionary change without which a positive totality, communism, can never detach itself from a negative totality, from capitalism that reproduces itself through domination and exploitation, accumulation and expansion, integrative exclusion?
Toward the end of his essay, Blanchot detects an awakening that once again leads to an awareness. The more the “destructive totality”Ibid. p. 107. of capitalist power forces itself disruptively upon humans and other species, or the more the idea of a totality manifests itself, albeit in a disjunctive and divisive form, or the more the totality of destruction threatens humanity, the more humanity “risks being awakened to the idea of the whole and pressed, as it were, to become conscious of it by giving the whole form, that is, by organising and uniting itself.”Ibid. Here, awakening and attaining consciousness do not come before radical, real, revolutionary change but somehow coincide with it. For the moment of awakening, dawn, is supposed to be a moment when the “idea of the whole”Ibid. withdraws from contemplation, from its own apparition on the horizon, and begins to exert pressure, a pressure that triggers the constitution of awareness or consciousness. Awareness or consciousness, however, coincide from the start with a practical commitment and engagement, with a formation of the whole that amounts to its unifying organisation and organising unification, as if the destructive totality and the negative power that inheres in such totality would turn straight away against themselves. Not only can a totality not be changed but when its idea appears in the most distorted manner, it seems to have shed its ideality and also its negativity, the negativity of a totality that does not exist as yet. Everything hinges on the enlivening moment that is undecidably a moment of both recognition and action, not a sequence in which a moment of “consciousness-raising criticism”Jürgen Habermas, “Bewußtmachende oder rettende Kritik – die Aktualität Walter Benjamins”, in: Zur Aktualität Walter Benjamins, ed. S. Unseld, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1972, p. 212. (English translation: Jürgen Habermas, “Consciousness-raising or Redemptive Criticism – The Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin”, trans. Ph. Brewster and C.-H. Buchner, in: New German Critique, Spring 1979, p. 54.) precedes a transformative “political practice”, to employ Habermasian distinctions, even though the enlivening moment still depends on what Blanchot calls a “risk”. There is an element of chance here, since neither a necessity nor an “immanent relation”Ibid. binds “consciousness-raising criticism” and “political practice”. What Blanchot does, then, is not so much to analyse the conditions created by a looming catastrophe. Rather, he relates to this catastrophe – the self-annihilation of humanity in a nuclear war with worldwide effects – as a chance for something absolutely new to come into existence, something that announces and hence precedes itself in the most unlikely of all guises, namely communism.
Is pointing to a chance not a manner of gaining time, especially when the chance for revolutionary change, for the generation of a totality that defies scaling and measuring because it must remain without precedent, is enmeshed in its ostensible opposite, a catastrophe of a magnitude beyond all measure? The event can swing both ways. It can cause total destruction and it can also create a totality. It cannot do one thing without signalling the other. Ultimately, Blanchot seems to intimate that the event – a global nuclear war, the coming into existence of communism – must be forever “problematic” or “ambiguous”, and that the event’s irresolvable ambiguity is traversed by an irreducible asymmetry since the totality of destruction cannot be haunted by the totality of creation in the fashion in which the totality of creation continues to be haunted by the totality of destruction. Under these circumstances, seeking to gain time is perhaps the only aim worth pursuing, assuming that destruction can be delayed and that creation can be furthered by such delay. This assumption is itself “problematic” or “ambiguous” to the extent that the time of destruction and the time of creation must each prove immeasurable and intractable, recalcitrant to calculus.
How, exactly, does Blanchot seek to gain time in “The Apocalypse Is Disappointing”? Precisely by not choosing the “theme”Blanchot, “The Apocalypse Is Disappointing”, loc. cit., p. 104. of radical change, as Jaspers does and so many others along with him, especially today, when the looming catastrophe is a double one, the catastrophe of a nuclear self-annihilation of humanity – a consequence of warfare between East and West – and the catastrophe of a climatic self-annihilation of the human species – a consequence of the anthropocene. To put it in a nutshell, Blanchot sides with understanding, the agent of separation and dissociation, of fissure and analysis, of unflinching negativity, which he sees at work in the scientific and technological advancements that have prepared the invention of the atom bomb. Blanchot maintains that comprehending the world, experimenting with truth, not only implies exposing oneself to death but is always tantamount to providing oneself with the technological means of destroying what one believes to have understood. Any attempt to curtail the activity of understanding on which comprehension and destruction depend, is an attempt to eliminate the human being before the question of its self-annihilation can even be posed. In the text, the elaboration of this argument comes after the assessment of the difficulty that steeps the destructive event, nuclear warfare, in a maddening ambiguity. It is introduced by an “on the one hand”Ibid., p. 104. that does not elicit a concomitant “on the other hand”, as if there were nothing disgraceful about science and technology reaching a limit at which the invention of the atom bomb allows humanity to destroy itself, or as if the destructive event were not so ambiguous after all. Blanchot also maintains that the coldness and fearlessness attributed to understanding should not be underestimated. Rather than preventing understanding from grasping the importance of the atomic threat, they enable it to analyse this threat, to examine the problems it poses for military strategy, and to explore the ways in which it can be reconciled with a manageable existence. Understanding endorses reformism instead of revolutionary upheaval and yet reveals itself to be highly valuable for thought because its own incapacity to conceive of the world in terms of reason, of ideas such as the idea of totality, has an enlightening effect that demystifies apocalypse and produces some kind of wisdom. It denounces the false alternative of an all-or-nothing when this alternative is instrumentalised by nations and states keen on dissimulating the weakness of their alleged power. The atom bomb is not an alchemist’s invention, Blanchot stresses.
At the same time, he insists on the need for reason, or thought, to elevate itself above understanding. If understanding, as it works out how the world functions, gives us knowledge, knowledge of the catastrophe with which humanity and the world it inhabits come to an end, reason gives us the chance of a revolutionary change that generates a totality in the first place, the positive totality of communism. Just as understanding tears everything apart by submitting it to the violent power of analysis, revolutionary change does not exclude violence. In this respect at least, reason partakes in the totality as a totality of destruction, detachment, disintegration. Understanding paves the way for reason. They meet at the juncture where the “unreasonable” event of a total destruction of humanity, to which the activity of understanding has led, touches upon the constitution of a totality, which is the task of reason, of a thought that turns practical in the instant that its activity supersedes the activity of understanding. However, as understanding and reason meet, as reason leaps out of understanding, as understanding suddenly mutates into reason and is confronted with an “avatar of totality”Ibid., p. 108. that is no longer negative, reason can still contribute to an unleashing of the looming catastrophe. Is this why Blanchot claims that reason continues to await itself and that, in so doing, it even postpones its coming into existence, the constitution of a positive totality? Is this why he claims that reason is paralysed by the anticipation of its own leap, filled with the affective impact of fear that both misleads and warns, and that remains utterly alien to understanding? Is this why reason is not merely something we should hope for but also something we should fear? Reason that must wait for itself and that cannot but fear its own longed-for arrival, “humbles”Ibid. or “humiliates” itself before the activity of understanding, and this humbling or humiliation makes it somehow frightening. Does reason warn against itself, against the misleading of the faculty of understanding that it may prompt? Blanchot suggests that reason tries to “gain time”Ibid. – trans. mod, AGD., passing on to understanding the task it cannot as yet accomplish.
The incestuous and ambiguous couple formed by understanding and reason, and the incestuous and ambiguous couple formed by the splitting of the event, by the destruction and the creation of totality, mirror themselves in each other. When Blanchot shows how ambiguity works, how the couple formed by understanding and reason mirrors itself in the couple formed by the splitting of the event, he points to the risky business of seizing a chance – not because of some insight, of consciousness raised and cognition achieved, but because of a tension that reaches its highest intensity at this moment. As it remains suspended and defers the practical formation and organisation of the communist totality in which it actually consists, reason increases this tension. However, delegating a task out of fear of failure and seizing a chance in the wake of an overwhelming impetus to place a decisive bet are quite different modes of gaining time.
Go for it violently, as if you had nothing to lose or as if everything were lost already. Intimidation will be the rule, not the exception. Gain time, delay destruction and further creation although you may be doing the contrary. Or just don’t. There is no scale on which you can rely. Within the totality of communism human beings, no matter how they are defined, may end up deciding collectively and in mutual solidarity that the time for self-annihilation has come.