Shattered existence
“A being does not want to be recognized, it wants to be contested: in order to exist it goes towards the other, which contests and at times negates it, so as to start being only in that privation that makes it conscious (here lies the origin of its consciousness) of the impossibility of being itself, of subsisting as its ipse or, if you will, as itself as a separate individual: this way it will perhaps ex-ist, experiencing itself as an always prior exteriority, or as an existence shattered through and through, composing itself only as it decomposes itself constantly, violently and in silence.”
—Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, p. 6.
Comments (3)
Tags: Miscellaneous
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Do you think that contestation, rather than recognition, is what beings, or, more specifically, humans, want, in our being-toward-otherness? I agree that there is a grasping-toward-otherness and toward exteriority embedded within existence, at least within human existence, but I’m wondering if the most inclusive way to articulate this movement is through the desire for contestation RATHER than for recognition. Can these two things be opposed in such a stark way? I understand that humans need opposition to another to be able to recognize themselves precisely as distinct individuals, but It seems as though we need both descriptions to grasp what’s going on within the entire process of identity formation—in other words, it also seems true that humans extend out toward the other for some fundamental sense of affirmation. I’m not calling for an elision of the two modes, but rather, for a dialectical treatment…I think.
I haven’t read Blanchot but I’ve heard some feminists don’t like him. Who even knows.
Hi Brian! I read your blog regularly but finally felt like commenting today!
I write here, not to be recognized but to contest your point. And haven’t I already been shattered, my identity constituted apart from me, in violent exteriority, in this remark and in yours? And was not this what I already foretold, or what Brian said in my name—Brian, who was displaced from me, and yet forged me again, as I became once more myself, Blanchot, remaining however in the infinite otherness of the grave? A distance bridgeable by nothing, mediated by everything: identity as non-identity.
Moouahahahaa.
Hey man.
I didn’t say contestation didn’t exist.
I affirm and recognize and love Brian and Maurice Blanchot with all my heart. There.