Philosophy of Play (5): Blanchot's Desobra

Blanchot opens The Unavowable by naming the ground. He returns to a text by Jean Luc Nancy in order to take up again a reflection on the communist exigency and on the relation between that demand and the possibility or impossibility of a community in a time that seems to have lost even the comprehension of the word. He adds that perhaps community stands outside understanding. He adds that the very words communism and community carry a defect of language, as if they include more than any distribution that could be common to those who would belong to a whole or a group or a collective. 

Blanchot will not write about institutions first. He will write about a demand that has not stopped and about words that fail the demand even as they are needed. He will do this in a language that distrusts mastery. He will do it as someone who thinks that a community worthy of the name may have to accept its own absence as the only true form of presence. 

The first section bears the simple heading communism and community. He cites a witness who speaks in the first person. Edgar Morin says that communism is the most important question and the principal experience of his life. He says that he has never ceased to recognise himself in the aspirations it expresses and that he always believes in the possibility of another society and another humanity. Blanchot does not mock this. He calls it a straightforward affirmation. He takes it as a sign of what cannot be dodged. He asks why. He asks what happens to a possibility that is always inscribed in its impossibility. 

He then states the conceptual risk. Communism says that equality is its foundation and that there is no community so long as the needs of all are not equally satisfied. He grants this as a minimal demand. He then notes the premise on which this usually rests in modern times. It supposes not a perfect society but an inmanence of man to man. The human becomes the absolutely immanent being who is or should become entirely work. He is his own work. He is the worker on all that exists. There must be nothing that is not formed by him. From humanity to nature and even to God. In the end there would remain no remainder. He calls this the apparently healthy origin of the most unhealthy totalitarianism. 

He adds that the reciprocity of communism and individualism follows here. The individual with his inalienable rights confirms his refusal to have any origin other than himself and becomes indifferent to any dependence on another who is not an individual like him, that is to say himself repeated indefinitely. In the past or in the future. Mortal and immortal. Mortal because of the chance to perpetuate himself without alienating himself. Immortal because his individuality as immanent life knows no end in itself. Hence the irrefutability of Stirner or Sade, reduced to some of their principles. These sentences map a trap. 

Equality is stated as an aim. Immanence is smuggled in as a method. The result is either a total work that leaves no remainder or an individualism that universalises the self as the only lawful measure. Blanchot wants the reader to see why both poles can mirror one another and why neither gives a place for what escapes work. He lays out these moves as a chain and names Stirner and Sade as the extreme poles that expose the logic. This is not decoration. It is the ethical point. A community that makes itself by work alone will devour what cannot be made into work. A person who claims to belong only to himself will devour any other who claims a claim. The words communism and community come to us over a background of ruin. They are dishonoured or betrayed. They need an improper abandonment to be of use again. Blanchot proposes this abandonment as a method. 

If we now bring Bataille’s terms into view the first section becomes sharper. Restricted economy wants a closed circuit in which everything is accounted for. General economy knows that excess will not disappear. It must be spent. A politics that wants inmanence as work will deny the need to spend. It will make play into a crime or into a trivial leisure. It will try to eliminate the feast and the vigil. It will clean the city of its informal rites. It will do this for the sake of a clarity that calls itself equality. The price is that excess returns as harm. For Bataille play is not a luxury. It is the set of forms by which a group spends what cannot be assimilated and thereby keeps cruelty at bay. Blanchot’s unease with total inmanence fits this. 

His worry is ethical before it is metaphysical. A community that admits no remainder cannot treat the other as other. It cannot welcome secrecy. It cannot accept death as the common that cannot be owned. So his first section tells the reader to suspect any community that promises harmony as a product. He urges a different thought in which the need for a bond is affirmed and the impossibility of producing it is also affirmed. This is not contradiction for the sake of irony. It is method. It asks that the bond be sought in a form that refuses to become property. That refusal is the first mark of play.The second section bears the heading the communal exigency and names Georges Bataille. 

This is where the method gains flesh. Blanchot writes that the reciprocity he has just traced must itself be judged. If the relation of man to man ceases to be the relation of the Same to the Same by introducing the Other as irreducible - making thus his equality always an asymmetry with respect to the one who considers him, then a different kind of relation is required and a different form of society is imposed that one will hardly dare to call community. Or one will accept the word while asking what is at stake in the thought of a community and whether it does not always end by posing the absence of community. Blanchot then turns to a life he knows well. He says that this is precisely what happened to Bataille. For more than a decade he attempted in thought and in reality to fulfil the communal exigency. He did not find himself simply alone. He found himself exposed to a community of absence, always ready to become an absence of community. 

He  condenses the paradox. Perfect derangement, the abandonment to the absence of limits, is the rule of an absence of community. He sharpens the shock. No one is permitted not to belong to my absence of community. He pauses over the possessive. How could the absence of community remain mine unless it were not mine, as my death insists on being mine even as it ruins every belonging and any appropriation? These lines tie the demand for community to a shared exposure where property fails. They treat the other as the one who takes me to the limit where my pronoun breaks. They treat community as the shared space where death is not denied or hidden as a private thing. 

Blanchot presents these as coming from Nancy’s reading of Bataille as the one who went furthest in the crucial experience of the modern fate of community. They show that community appears where beings are separated by what is most intimate and yet remain exposed together to that separation. They show why confession will not name it. To confess is to appropriate the secret as a possession. To avow is to bring into a luminous space that which only has force in the very limit where light gives way to a common dark.

This is the point where Bataille’s notion of play becomes not an analogy but a measure. For him the sacred is what appears when expenditure is lucid and consented to. A feast releases surplus under a rule. A vigil holds bodies near death in a posture that harms no one. An erotic scene crosses taboo in a way that binds rather than destroys. None of these can be owned. None can be kept. None can be confessed without losing their tone. They must be repeated as rites rather than accumulated as works. This is what Blanchot recognises in the formula absence of community. He does not deny the circle where friends attempt a bond. He denies only the hope that the bond can be counted or stored. The sentence no one is permitted not to belong to my absence of community is severe. It says that the fact of our exposure to the limit is not optional. It says that the circle is defined by a lack that no one can repair. It says that a we exists only as the shared ordeal of this lack. 

Seen this way play is the right name for the forms that honour this ordeal without lying. Play uses rules to let a group cross a limit briefly. Play leaves no product. Play grants a memory in bodies rather than a doctrine. Play therefore answers the demand for a community that would not be a work and would not be a property. It answers Blanchot’s scruple about the word itself. It refuses to carry the word into the field of production. It keeps the bond in the field of event.

The third section asks why community. It asks why this call of or to community. Blanchot gives a very concrete answer. He lists the elements of a shared history. Groups of many kinds. The surrealist group as a beloved or detested prototype. Assemblies gathered around ideas that do not yet exist and around dominant persons who exist too much. The memory of the soviets. The early sense of fascism, whose meaning and future escaped available concepts, which placed thought under an obligation either to reduce it to what is low and miserable or to indicate that there was something important and surprising there that, not being well thought, ran the risk of being badly fought. 

Finally, he names the sociological works that fascinated Bataille and gave him from the beginning a knowledge and a quickly repressed nostalgia for communal modes of being that must never be reproduced.  The call to community came from real nights and rooms. It came from the way groups form around hopes and then hurt one another. It came from the way a crowd can turn into a mob. It came from the way old examples of cohesion tempt us even as they must be refused. Blanchot writes without contempt. He writes as one who was there. He writes as one who knows that doctrine can hide this history. He writes to keep the demand honest. 

This catalogue is where play enters again as a criterion. The surrealist group invented games that bound a circle without founding a doctrine. These games are the harmless form of sovereignty. They are how a group practises risk and ends. They prevent the drift into cruelty by offering lucid scenes where taboo is crossed and nothing is kept. The memory of soviets marks another face of the demand. The desire for equality and immediate presence is noble but dangerous. It can become the inmanence of work that Blanchot fears. It can become a transparency that tries to abolish secrecy. It can also splinter into parties that worship the Same. 

Here again play would act as a limit. It would allow the group to spend its hunger for presence without tyrannising itself. The early sense of fascism is the negative proof. Fascism exploits expenditure without lucidity. It makes spectacle into a weapon. It makes the rite into a tool. It offers a community that avows itself as a product. It abolishes the secret by force and keeps only a core of secrecy for its own crime. Blanchot remembers that the concepts in use failed to meet this and that the danger was either to underestimate it or to grant it a dark admiration. A culture that has learned how to play would be less vulnerable to such seduction. It would already know what a rite is. It would not mistake the chant in a stadium for a truth. It would have other nights in which to spend its courage.

The word community is needed and ruined. A short history of groups shows that our need to gather is intense and fragile. The thinker who pursued it to the end found only its absence where property fails and death claims each one. The bond must therefore be sought as an event that does not become a work. It must be allowed to appear and vanish. It must be protected from confession. It must keep the other as other. It must not deny the secret. It must carry the knowledge of death without delirium. This is the point where Bataille’s language of play becomes more than a footnote. His terms continuity and discontinuity name the passage Blanchot wants. Discontinuous beings come together in a scene that grants a taste of continuity. The scene is safe because it is held by a rule. 

The crossing is real because a taboo is in place. There is embarrassment. There is shame that does not humiliate. There is laughter that does not mock. There is a common silence that does not lead to a collective lie. When the rule releases the circle the scene ends. Nothing is kept but a change in posture. That is how an unavowable community lives.To see how exact Blanchot’s caution is one can stay with two of his smaller points. He writes that the very defect in our words comes from the sense that they carry something distinct from what could be common to those who would belong to a group. 

The defect is not accidental. It is a sign that the community he seeks is not a sum or a set. It is an exposure to the other that cannot be included as a property. This is why he refuses to let community become a confession. To confess is to claim ownership. To avow is to set the seal on a belonging. He wants a bond that hides from such seals. This is not coyness. It is protection. It keeps the space where a we can appear without forcing it to stay where it would spoil. The Spanish pages where he sets this tone are explicit that the words are under suspicion from the first sentence and that the effort is to use them while abandoning their ordinary claim. 

He also insists on the asymmetry that enters with the other. Equality is affirmed and yet relation is never a relation of the Same to the Same. Even love appears as a dismeasure rather than a balance. This asymmetry is what destroys the fantasy of reciprocity as a stable law. It is also what opens the group to the true work of care. A bond that accepts asymmetry will not try to level every difference. It will let help be one way when it must. It will not demand confession as a price for aid. It will not insist on transparency when a secret is a form of respect. This is why Blanchot speaks of a community of absence. Absence here is the refusal to replace the asymmetry of the living with a contract of mirrors. It is the refusal to pretend that any one can be present to another without remainder. It is an ethics as much as a metaphysic. It is the climate in which play becomes possible. For play fails under tyranny. It also fails under sentimental fusion. It requires a rule and a border and the courage to leave. 

If a reader wants an image to carry this, a vigil at the bedside of the dying is exact. No one can take the place of the one who is dying. No one can own the fact of the end. The circle can only keep watch and speak gently and fall silent. The scene binds and then ends. No document can carry it. No confession is fitting. Yet everyone who shared it belongs to a we that will never be named. This is the community of absence. It is not a metaphor in Blanchot.  

A reading group offers a gentler image. People gather around a book that none of them wrote. They consent to a rule. They listen. They speak. They accept embarrassment. They let silence work. They stand up. They leave the room. Nothing has been accomplished in the economic sense. A bond has been added to the city because for an hour bodies sat near one another and gave up the right to possess the word. Blanchot knows this scene from the inside. He connects community and writing later in the chapter and names the literary community as a bond that lives only as a shared exposure to the outside of mastery. The table of contents in the Spanish edition places community and writing on the same list as sacrifice, abandonment, the sharing of the secret. The arrangement is not accidental. It says that literature is not a club. It is a practice that trains the nerves for bonds that do not have owners. 

A street assembly gives a third image. People gather for a cause. They chant. They stand in the rain. They refuse violence. They scatter. The rite binds and ends. The secret at its heart is that not one of them knows the others. The bond is real and nameless. This is the fragile, exact form that Blanchot respects when he remembers the soviets and the fascist rallies. He knows that the same energy that binds can be turned toward harm. This is why he writes of impossibility without despair. It is why he chooses a diction that keeps modesty intact. He does not write as a founder. He writes as a witness who wants to leave the bond unspoiled.Bringing Bataille to each of these scenes now feels natural. The bedside is a sovereign expenditure because it spends time and tears without return. The reading group is a small feast that spends attention and silence without product. The street assembly is a rite that spends courage without violence. 

Each scene keeps a taboo and crosses it with consent. Each scene turns a group of discontinuous beings into a brief continuity. Each scene ends without property and leaves a memory in the body rather than a law. This is why I call such scenes play. The name points to rule and risk and ending. It refuses both the lie of uselessness and the lie of utility. It answers Blanchot’s demand for a community that cannot be made into a work. It gives a form to the absence that he treats as the only honest ground for a we.I close by returning to the first three sections and stating their content once more for readers who value clarity. Blanchot starts from Nancy and takes up again the demand for community where our words are damaged. He shows that when community becomes inmanence as work it slides into totality. 

He shows that when equality becomes the measure of an absolutely immanent individual it repeats the same error on a smaller scale. He names Stirner and Sade as limits that expose the trap. He then turns to Bataille and says that the bond appears as a shared exposure to an absence no one can own. He cites the severe sentence that asserts that no one may refuse to belong to my absence of community and makes the paradox of the possessive the place where ethics begins. He asks why this call recurs and answers with a list of groups and nights and dangers. He recalls the surrealist circle. He recalls the soviets. He recalls the first sense of fascism. He recalls the study of old bonds that tempt because they bind and must be refused because they would bind by harm if repeated. 

He sets the measure. A true community will avoid the lie of production. It will accept impossibility as its only way to be possible. It will respect secrecy. It will live as event. This is the field where Bataille’s play belongs. It is not the frivolity of an afternoon. It is the method by which a city that has lost its myths still binds itself without cruelty. It is the way a culture spends its surplus in rites that end. It is the only honest hospitality for the other and for death. It is the name I keep so that the argument does not float. It is the practice by which an unavowable community appears and vanishes and remains true.

He restates the question. Why community? He answers by citing a claim he ascribes to Bataille. At the base of every being there is a principle of insufficiency. He insists that this is a principle. Not a feeling and not a defect that calls for repair. A principle orders the very possibility of being. The result is decisive. Lack as principle does not go with a need for completion. The insufficient being does not seek association with another to form a full substance. The consciousness of insufficiency comes from a questioning that cannot be carried out by the self alone. That questioning requires the other. Or at least something that is other. If the self remains alone it closes. It falls asleep. It rests in false peace. When another appears the substance of each one is challenged by every other without rest. Even the look of love or admiration binds itself to me as a doubt that affects all of reality. What I think is no longer what I have thought alone. 

The being seeks not recognition but contestation. To exist it goes toward what challenges it. Sometimes that other denies it in order to prevent a closed identity from beginning to be. It experiences itself as exteriority that is always prior. It composes itself in a line that feels like a constant silent unmaking. From this Blanchot draws a civic consequence. The existence of each being calls for the other or for a plurality of others. He uses the image of a chain reaction that needs a certain number of elements to occur. If the number were not limited it would be lost in the infinite. So he says that what is required is a community that is finite. The finitude of the community must answer to the finitude of the beings who form it. 

The point is not head count. The point is a degree of tension that finitude alone can sustain. A small circle may be necessary. A monastery or a study group or a circle of lovers. But he warns that each of these forms tends to think itself as communion or even fusion. That tendency is a risk. Fusion would only produce a super individual that repeats the same objection as the closed solitary individual. The passage concludes by returning to the key word. Insufficiency is not a lack measured against a model of sufficiency. It does not seek an end to lack. It seeks the excess of lack. A lack that deepens as it tries to fill itself. It seeks the contestation that alone can put me at stake. It needs exposure to another as a structural condition. 

Self critique will not do. Self critique can be a refusal of the critique of the other and so a secret form of self sufficiency. The note at the foot of the page is blunt. The one who orders the principle of insufficiency is commended to excess. The human being is an insufficient being with the excessive as horizon. Excess is not the too full. Excess is the demand that lack never satisfies in human insufficiency. These lines align exactly with Bataille’s general economy. The life of beings is not a closed loop that tends to balance. It is a circuit in which energy exceeds any possible use and must be spent. 

When the principle that governs me is insufficiency rather than completion my horizon is not balance. It is the lucid handling of excess. That is why play is the right name here. Play refuses completion as a goal. It stages rules that let a circle cross limits without claiming to become whole. It treats lack as a generative motor and excess as a destiny to be met lucidly rather than denied or governed by coercion. The text of this section states each of these steps in the vocabulary of insufficiency and exposure and cites the need for finitude and contestation. The final stress on exposure to the other as the only way to keep questioning alive marks the ethical core of the passage. 

Next, Blanchot collects examples that tempt groups to think themselves as fused. He notes the collective suicide in Guyana. He notes the figure analysed by Sartre as group in fusion in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. He mentions the simple opposition Sartre draws between seriality, in which the individual is a number, and fusion, in which a consciousness of liberties emerges only by losing itself in a moving whole. He brings the military and the fascist group to the list. In such a group each member entrusts his liberty or even his conscience to a head that incarnates the whole. 

He underlines what makes this image seductive and sinister. The head cannot be cut off. It is by definition out of reach. At this point he makes a corrective that is central to his reading of Bataille. He says it is striking that Bataille, whose name for many distant readers still suggests an ecstatic mysticism or a secular quest for ecstasy, excludes fusion. He says that for Bataille it is not the state of rapture in which one forgets everything and oneself that counts. What counts is an exacting path that asserts itself through a putting at play and a stepping outside the self of insufficient existence. This path cannot renounce insufficiency. It ruins both immanence and the familiar forms of transcendence. 

From the same premises Blanchot draws a practical rule. The community need not be ecstatic. It need not dissolve its elements into a super unity. The community is not a simple putting in common of a shared will to be many. Not even if the aim is to do nothing except keep sharing something. That something is never available as a share. He names it as speech and silence. Here play offers a clean measure. It demands form. It allows intensity. It refuses fusion. It keeps the rule and breaks the taboo under the rule. It protects the difference that lets speech and silence circulate rather than harden into a command. It answers the temptation to ecstasy by offering a scene of risk that ends. It saves the group from the head by distributing the right to begin and end in each member. 

The sixth section bears the heading the death of the neighbour. The tone changes. Blanchot asks what is it that calls me most radically into question. He answers that it is not my relation to myself as finite or as a consciousness in danger of death. It is my presence at the side of the neighbour as the neighbour withdraws by dying. He pauses over the French word autrui. He notes that Spanish cannot translate it well. Autrui admits neither article nor gender nor plural. It is always in the dative. It cannot be a subject or direct object. It names not another person in general and not the other as a category. It names the position of an alterity that remains out of reach for me. We can render it as neighbour in the precise sense of proximity that resists identification. 

The precision matters. Blanchot is not writing about a general duty to humanity. He is writing about a scene in which I am beside someone who is dying. He calls this the only death that concerns me. He explains why. The presence that I keep near the dying person is what puts me outside myself. It is what opens me in impossibility to the open space of a community. He quotes a sentence from Bataille that brings the point to its nerve. If he sees his fellow human die a living person can only subsist outside himself. He gives a very simple description of the vigil. The conversation is mute. I hold the hand of the one who is dying. I go on with him. I do not go on to help him die. I go on to share the solitude of an event whose most proper possibility seems to be its unshareable possession. I fall silent. I lose speech with him. I let him die in my place and receive a gift from beyond both of us. 

At the end he cites a small exchange from his 'Le pas au delà'. In the illusion that makes you live when I die. In the illusion that makes you die when I die. This is not theatrical. It is an attempt to register the way the limit appears in experience. The bedside is not a metaphor here. It is the place where the rule of play is most binding. There is nothing to produce. There is nothing to confess. There is only the courage to be present without owning what is happening. The community appears as an event that binds and ends. The words in the margin of the page make the grammar of autrui bear the weight of the scene. My presence in the neighbour does not mean that I stand over him or that I stand in his place. It means that my presence is held by his dying so that my I becomes a me at the exact instant he withdraws. The analysis stays this close to the grammar because Blanchot wants the reader to see that the bond cannot be said as property. It can only be lived as an exposure in which the very pronouns of speech lose their ordinary use. 

If we keep Bataille’s vocabulary in hand the three sections line up with great clarity. The principle of insufficiency states the metaphysics of general economy. Being is not a unit that seeks balance. The human being is ordered by a lack that deepens as it tries to complete itself. The horizon of such a being is excess. The ethical result is that exposure to another is structural rather than optional. The method of such exposure is play. Play gives form to a crossing. It refuses the lies of completion and of fusion. It works in finitude. It needs a small circle. It maintains a degree of tension that finitude permits. It binds by challenging each singular being rather than by dissolving them into a head. These are the formal marks of what Blanchot is willing to call community while also calling it unavowable. The bedside scene gives the content. The community appears where the unshareable is shared as event. Not as common property. Not as a confession. Not as a doctrine. It appears where the neighbour’s death places me outside myself in a way that I cannot master. 

The only words that do not betray the event are words that stay near the grammar of autrui and near the silence of a vigil. If a reader who is new to both writers wants a single sentence to carry this lesson it could be this. Play is the art by which a circle spends the need for presence that death brings without pretending to own what it touches. The text makes this lesson accessible by keeping each step literal and by making its examples familiar: a small circle rather than a mass. A conversation that has to be silent. A rule that names speech and silence as shares that are never available for division.The practical consequences are not hidden. 

A group that understands the principle of insufficiency would not measure itself by the unity it can display. It would measure itself by the exactness with which it holds a rule that allows exposure to others without homogenising them. This is true of a reading group. It is true of a house of mourning. It is true of a clinic. It is true of any classroom that treats attention as a common expenditure rather than as a competition for mastery. The rule would be visible as a set of forms that begin and end. The rite would be brief. The elements would not fuse. The speech would lean on silence. The leader would not be a head outside reach. The memory would be kept in bodies rather than in a doctrine. This is a political matter in the largest sense. These forms are what save a city from the seductions of fusion. 

The Jim Jones Guyana tragedy shows the danger in its most terrible form. A head that cannot be cut off offers a lethal counterfeit of community. The answer is not to abandon the demand for a bond. The answer is to learn rites that bind and end. The pages in question are careful to mark this choice. They refuse the romantic or theological impulse to call play ecstatic. They refuse the managerial impulse to call community a product. They stick to the modest confidence that a circle can be formed by a rule and that what binds most strongly is a shared exposure to what no one can possess.

He uses the word finite without apology. He calls for communities that are small because the beings who form them are finite. This is not elitism. It is an ethics of tension. Too large a number produces a false unity or a bureaucracy. A small circle sustains the degree of challenge that keeps each one from falling asleep. He also gives a clear place to resistance. The other is not there to confirm me. The other impugns me. The other denies me at times in order to keep me from beginning to be as a closed ipse. This is the courteous version of Bataille’s scandal. 

The scene of play is not therapeutic in a soft sense. It risks embarrassment. It invites shame that does not humiliate. It makes room for laughter that does not mock. It allows tears that do not call for an explanation. It holds a form so that these energies can be spent. It ends without claiming to have solved anything. This is the exact opposite of fusion. It is also the opposite of confession. To confess is to own the secret. To avow is to place a seal. These pages are written to keep the secret intact as a shared exposure rather than a private property. The bedside example does all the work needed. No one who has kept a vigil would want a doctrine in its place. 

So, the principle of incompletion tells us why there is a demand for community and why that demand cannot be satisfied by completion. The question of communion tells us why fusion is a temptation and why it must be refused if a bond is to be honest. The death of the neighbour tells us where the bond appears and what rule protects it. Bataille’s play provides names and practices. Expenditure rather than production. Rule rather than a head. Finitude rather than mania. Speech and silence as the elements that circulate without ownership. 

The result is not a programme. It is a measure for local forms of life. Form a circle that can bear tension. Use rules that let you cross a limit without fusing. Accept the embarrassment that goes with exposure. Keep the secret as a shared outside rather than as a possession. End the rite. Return to work without believing that work is all. This is how these sections can guide readers new to Blanchot and give them a way to make sense of an unavowable community in daily terms. It is also how they let Bataille’s lens do its work without rhetoric. The play that his vocabulary names is not fun in a casual mood. It is the civic art of handling the excess that insufficiency makes inevitable. It is the patience to keep a vigil. It is the courage to refuse fusion. It is the intelligence to stay finite. 

The scene is simple. I stand beside someone who is dying. The event is the most personal there is. Yet it is also the only death that concerns me. It concerns me because my presence beside the neighbour is what calls me out of myself in the most binding way. It is not my meditation on my own finitude that matters here. It is this proximity that cannot be owned. Blanchot makes the argument with care. He says that community is founded here. He says there would be no community if the first and last events that undo every one in each one were not in some way common. He names birth and death. He then asks what community wants when it keeps only relations of asymmetry between you and me and suspends the easy second person. He asks why the relation of transcendence that community introduces displaces authority and unity and interiority. He says that it does so by exposing them to the demand of the outside which is the non leading region of community. He then lets the bedside speak. 

He repeats the small wisdom that one does not die alone and that if one dies alone that too is an offence to others. He says that the obligation is to be present to the end. He says that such a presence is a speech that gives up speech. It is a mute conversation. It is a hand held. It is the consent to keep company precisely where no one can take the place of the one who is dying. These statements fix the structure: the founding scene of community is a common exposure to an event that can never become property or production. The title of the section holds the focus on the neighbour rather than on a category. It insists that the neighbour is not a specimen. The neighbour is the position of an alterity that resists my capture. My presence in the neighbour is not my standing over the neighbour. It is my being held in the neighbour at the instant the neighbour withdraws. The scene keeps me outside myself. The community begins here as a common movement out of ourselves that no one commands.  

From that ground Blanchot draws consequences. He says that the community that keeps faith with this founding event cannot be thought as a set of members. The word member returns to a sufficient unit. It suggests an individual that would associate by contract or by needs. It suggests a blood tie or a race or an ethnic line. The bedside cannot be thought like this. It has nothing to do with membership. The bedside is the prohibition of the vocabulary of property in the first person. It is a space where my pronoun is displaced. The section turns that prohibition into form. It sketches a rule for any community that would remain faithful to the bedside. 

It names two marks. First, the community renounces communion as fusion. It does not melt singular beings into a super subject. It accepts the asymmetry that the neighbour’s death makes absolute. Second, the community forbids itself to make work. It has no productive aim. It does not transfigure its dead into any substance or subject such as a nation or a mystical body. When one asks what it is for one must answer that it is for nothing. If anything one says that it makes present the service to the neighbour even in death. One says that it prevents solitary loss by providing substitution. 

Blanchot says mortal substitution replaces communion. The bedside is the practice of that substitution. I do not take the place of the one who dies. I accept for an hour a non place that is mine only in the act of being taken from me. That is how the neighbour is not lost alone. The page gives these formulations and places them in sequence so that a non specialist can trace the line from the bedside to a rule for the group. The emphasis on service to the neighbour is as concrete as it sounds. The insistence that the community is for nothing is also concrete. It guards the event from being turned into a value. It keeps the rite as play. It makes room for embarrassment and for tears in a way that does not demand a confession from anyone.

A Bataillean reader will recognise the grammar. There is taboo and there is transgression. There is a rule and there is a crossing. There is a limit that must not be abolished and that must be crossed under consent. There is expenditure without return. There is a sovereign time inside work time. Blanchot’s bedside is a sovereign time. The word sovereign here has nothing to do with command. It names the useless and necessary expenditure of attention and of tears and of silence. It names the consent to a limit that cannot be used. Bataille calls such consent the summit of life. 

It is the space where a human being assents to life up to the point of death. The bedside is the most honest version of that summit because every other attractor falls away. There is no myth. There is no nation. There is no doctrine. There is the neighbour. There is the small circle. There is the leave taking. There is the unavowable bond that appears and disappears. In Bataille’s terms this is play at its highest pitch. It is lucid and it ends. Its value lies in the way it binds without theft. It binds the living to a truth that saves them from delirium and from cruelty. It saves them from the impulse to keep by force what can only be received and let go.

Blanchot names the corruption that follows when a culture refuses this rule. He writes that the community does not head to death as one heads to a work. He says that it does not operate the transfiguration of its dead into any class of subject. He lists patriotism and native soil and nation. He adds absolute utopian future and mystical body. He then fixes the decisive claim. If community is revealed by the death of the neighbour it is because death itself is the true community of mortal beings. He calls it their impossible communion. 

The community occupies the singular site where it assumes the impossibility of its own immanence. It assumes the impossibility of a communal being as subject. It thus assumes its unworking- "desobra" in Spanish. The community is what exposes itself by exposing itself. It includes the exteriority of being that excludes it. It includes that exteriority precisely so that it is not mastered. The result is an ethic and an aesthetics of inoperativity. What remains must not be turned into a monument. What appears must not be nailed into a concept. 

Blanchot then gives an aside on Sade. It says that Sade provides a contrary model. He seeks excessive enjoyment and does not take death as a limit. He gives and receives death in order to perfect enjoyment. He realises a false sovereignty by enclosing the subject in itself. Blanchot puts this on the page to show the fork in the road. One can try to make death into a means for the intensification of a self. One thereby abolishes the neighbour. One abolishes the bedside as a rule. One repeats the head that cannot be cut off. Or one refuses that project. One accepts the impossibility that binds. One assumes unworking. One guards the exteriority that unseats me. These are the terms of the section. They give the negative rule that protects the bedside from nationalist or mystical theft. 

Placed under Bataille’s lens the logic becomes a map of general economy. Desobra is the name of the community’s refusal to become work. It is the refusal to turn expenditure into accumulation. It is the refusal to turn the dead into capital. It is the refusal to turn mourning into identity. The sovereign time of mourning would otherwise become the tool of the state. It would become the ritual by which a nation feeds on its dead. Bataille calls this the worst misdirection of surplus. It is the moment when the city remains hungry after a feast and must therefore find victims. The only cure is to make rites that really end. The only cure is to keep the unworking of the rite intact. 

That is why Blanchot insists that the community assumes the impossibility of its own immanence. It does not convert into a subject. It does not install a head. It does not transfigure the body of the dead into a figure of command. It keeps the loss as loss. It keeps the speech of the vigil as unshared speech. It keeps the gift as a pure loss that may never be received by the one for whom it is intended. 

Blanchot announces that the community gives speech as a gift in pure loss. They add that such a gift cannot be sure of ever being received by the other. They then add that the neighbour is the only one who makes possible this speaking or at least the plea to speak that carries the risk of rejection or loss or non reception. The risk is the very air of the rite. A safe exchange would spoil the event. Pure reciprocity would cancel the asymmetry that makes the bedside binding. The printed lines confirm this reading word for word. 

The third section under view takes the name community and writing. The transition is natural. If community is unworking one must ask what form of speech can belong to it. Blanchot begins with a flat denial. Community is not the place of sovereignty. It is what exposes itself by exposing itself. He repeats the key term. It includes the exteriority of being that excludes it. He lists three names for that exteriority. He lists death. He lists relation with the neighbour. He lists speech where speech does not fold back into speaking modes and thus allows no relation with itself. The clause is elegant and exact. The community is the place where language does not revert to the self assurance of expression. It is the place where language is exposed to a limit that holds it open. Blanchot then gives a decisive image. He says that the community gives the gift of speech as pure loss. He says that this gift cannot guarantee its reception. He adds that the only one who makes possible this speaking or at least the plea to speak is the neighbour. 

He names the risks. The plea might be rejected. It might be lost. It might not be received. He says that this is why the community fails in speech and that the failure is the very condition of a multiplicity that cannot develop into words. He says that the community is always already lost. He says that it is without use and without work. He says that it does not magnify itself in loss. The phrases collect the marks we have seen already. Asymmetry. Exteriority. Gift without return. Failure that keeps the door open. Inoperativity that saves the rite from capture. 

Literature is not brought in for decoration. It is brought in because it is the practice in which speech is most visibly exposed to loss. The writer gives and cannot control reception. The reader receives and cannot command the gift. The book passes between them as an event without owner. The community that forms around a work of writing is therefore a model for the unavowable bond. It has rules. It has limits. It ends. It leaves a memory in bodies rather than a law. Blanchot gives these lines in a compressed page and they line up with the earlier claims with no extra burden placed on the reader. 

At this point it is useful to gather the three sections under the same Bataillean word. Play. The bedside is play in the strict sense. There is a rule. There is a crossing. There is risk. There is embarrassment. There is a circle. There is an end. The refusal of communion as fusion is the refusal of a counterfeit play in which the rule disappears and a head appears. The embrace of desobra is the protection of play from becoming production. The insistence on exteriority in language is the insistence that play must be kept open by a limit that thought cannot appropriate. Writing is the discipline that practises this openness. It creates a rite that spends attention and silence and leaves nothing behind that can be turned into a banner. 

A reading group is such a rite. An editorial circle is such a rite. A classroom kept honest is such a rite. These are the living forms of community and writing that the page hints toward with its quiet stress on speech as gift in pure loss. The civil importance is obvious. A city that knows how to play in this sense has less need to turn its dead into tools. It has less need to turn its writers into heads. It has less need to turn its speech into a command. It moves surplus into harmless rites. It gives presence without theft. It holds vigils. It ends them.

Blanchot’s brief contrast with Sade helps to keep the edge sharp. Sade names the path in which enjoyment becomes a project and death becomes a means. The neighbour disappears. The bedside is replaced by an apparatus. Sovereignty becomes the enclosure of a subject in itself. The group becomes the theatre of domination. The limit is abolished. The rite no longer ends. The surplus is spent in cruelty. The book says this without noise. It does so to show that the refusal of communion is not a timid retreat. It is the refusal of a counterfeit intensity that would force the door of the limit. 

Bataille’s terms fit perfectly. Sovereignty is not a subject that commands. Sovereignty is the time of uselessness that the subject risks and cannot master. That time cannot be forced without becoming its opposite. Only a circle that can end can be sovereign. Only a speech that risks non reception can be a gift. Only a vigil that refuses to become a work can bind without harm. The page makes these judgments in a tone that newcomers can trust.

The relation between desobra and writing can now be sketched in a little detail. Writing is a labour. It belongs to work time. Yet its truth in Blanchot’s vocabulary is outside work. It approaches the outside where language loses mastery and becomes a call. The call is addressed to no one in particular. It does not summon a subject. It summons a neighbour who cannot be identified in advance. The book therefore occupies the same singular site as community. It assumes the impossibility of its immanence. It assumes the impossibility of turning a we into a subject. It assumes that any circle that forms around it must fail to keep itself as a property. This failure is its strength. It protects the book from being a head. It protects the circle from becoming an organ. It keeps the passage from being turned into a programme. They must not be believed. This is the discipline of desobra. It is a discipline of restraint at the point of greatest intensity.

A reader may ask what all of this looks like outside such elevated scenes. The answer is simple. It looks like modest rites that refuse to keep more than they can bear. It looks like a weekly meal that remembers the dead by name and ends. It looks like a community that does not enlist its dead in any cause. It looks like a small circle that reads and does not seek to found a school. It looks like a classroom that allows silence to stand and embarrassment to be shared. It looks like a hospital ward that trains nurses to treat vigils as work of a higher order than any report. It looks like a practice of speech that does not demand confession and that refuses to capitalise secrets. It looks like a refusal to let the word member decide anything. Each of these scenes is play in the strongest sense. Each is a rule held and crossed. Each ends. Each leaves endurance rather than doctrine. This is what Blanchot writes for when he joins community to writing and refuses both communion and work.

It is also worth returning to the small word neighbour because the three sections turn on its exact use. The grammar of autrui is not ornament. It guards the asymmetry that saves the bedside from sentimentality. The neighbour is neither a subject that I can replace nor an object that I can grasp. The neighbour is the one in whose withdrawal my presence is held. In English the word neighbour still carries the right physical weight. It names one who is near without naming any identity. It is enough for the ethical burden. It is why one does not die alone. It is why one must refuse to found a community on identity. It is why the gift of speech must risk loss. It is why the book must not be turned into a banner. The pages we have in view repeat this without fuss and give it the dignity of a rule.

The interplay of finitude and number returns here with a renewed precision. Blanchot wrote earlier that a community must be finite because the beings that compose it are finite. The bedside makes this necessity feel. There is a number that allows tension to be held. There is a number that destroys tension. There is a number that reverts to bureaucracy. The vigil is a form for a few. A reading group is a form for a few. A public square has other forms. The first sections warn against fusion for precisely this reason. The three under review tell us where to look for forms that can bear the weight of asymmetry and of exteriority without breaking. 

Once again Bataille’s language helps. Every rite has a pitch. Every circle has a size that lets it spend surplus without collapse. A culture learns this by practice. It learns it by making and ending scenes of play. It keeps itself from harm by keeping those scenes from becoming work.If we gather the three sections one last time the structure is clean. Community is founded in the bedside where the neighbour’s death places me outside myself. The group that remains faithful to that foundation will refuse communion as fusion. It will refuse work as its aim. It will accept desobra as its ongoing law. It will keep itself exposed to exteriority and will not try to master it by names. It will use language as a gift that risks loss rather than as a tool for command. It will call writing to its side because writing is the most exact practice of such a gift. It will accept failure in speech as the very condition of an honest multiplicity. It will allow memory to live in bodies rather than in monuments. It will avoid Sade’s counterfeit of sovereignty. It will accept the small and the finite as the space of true binding. It will treat embarrassment as a sign of truth. It will make room for a silence that does not humiliate. It will learn to end.

The fit with Bataille’s word play remains exact. Play protects the neighbour by refusing appropriation. Play protects the group by refusing fusion. Play protects the dead by refusing transfiguration into a subject. Play protects speech by keeping gifts in the space of risk. Play protects literature by refusing to turn its circles into a church. Play protects sovereignty by keeping it in the time of uselessness. The text itself provides the anchors. The bedside is named and described. The rule against communion and work is stated. The refusal to transfigure the dead is listed with examples. Sade is named as a contrary. Exteriority and desobra and the gift of speech in pure loss are all play. 

I close by returning once more to the neighbour of the dying. Nothing in these sections asks for heroism. Everything asks for a clear rule and a steady hand. To keep company to the end is a simple phrase. It is the form of life that saves community from lies. It gives a content to Blanchot’s word unavowable. One cannot avow such a bond without spoiling it. One can only keep making it appear and vanish. One can only keep learning to write as if the book were a vigil. One can only keep learning to play as if the city could still spend what must be spent without cruelty. 

This is what Bataille’s vocabulary brings to the page. It gives a name to the useless bravery that the bedside demands and that every honest circle rehearses. It gives a way to measure our forms. It tells us when we are making a head. It tells us when we are turning the dead into a tool. It tells us when we are mistaking a chant for a truth. It gives us a way to keep the rule visible and the end clean. It lets the neighbour remain a neighbour. It lets the community remain a passage. It lets writing remain a gift. It lets desobra remain our protection against ourselves.

Blanchot turns first to sacrifice. He has already said that the community comes to itself in the vigil beside the dying. He now asks what kind of offering belongs to such a bond. He rejects from the outset the model of productive sacrifice. There is no exchange to be balanced. There is no higher gain to be earned. The sacrifice that matches the bedside is a renunciation that refuses spectacle and refuses compensation. He writes as if the page were a hand put gently on a hand. 

There is an ancient sense in which sacrifice kills a victim to reconcile a group. He will not keep that model. It turns the limit into an instrument. It makes the dead into a means. The community that remains faithful to the neighbour will not allow this. It will not allow death to be transfigured into capital for any collective subject. It will keep the loss as loss. It will offer only what cannot be reclaimed. He calls this abandonment to the impossibility of owning what binds us. 

Sacrifice in this key is not a heroic act. It is the modest willingness to give time and attention and speech and silence without any certainty of reception. The vigils of a city become its true sacrifices. They do not appease a god. They do not feed a state. They do not produce unity as a product. They spend surplus in a way that binds without theft.

Bataille’s terms fix the structure. Restricted economy wants sacrifice to buy a return. General economy knows that real sacrifice must waste. The feast burns food and time and song. The rite spends without profit. Sovereignty names the uselessness that is higher than use. Blanchot aligns with this without rhetoric. The community that sacrifices in truth accepts the useless. It refuses to convert the useless into work after the fact. He warns against the beautiful economy by which a nation gathers around a monument and uses its dead to lubricate its future. 

He sees in that economy the seed of cruelty. The modern city is rich in such ceremonies. They function. They build identity. They also teach the nerves to treat the neighbour as a means. The other model is harder and truer. The bedside does not build identity. It undoes the owner. It undoes the collective subject. It keeps the relation in the register of exposure. It lets loss remain unredeemed so that the bond will not become a tool.

He deepens this by returning to the word outside. The outside is not a region we can enter and leave at will. It is the pressure that undoes any claim to mastery. Sacrifice in the old sense tries to master the outside by ritualising it as an exchange with gods. Sacrifice in the new sense recognises that the outside cannot be mastered. It can only be honoured by play that accepts its law. This is why he repeatedly couples sacrifice with a refusal. Refusal of communion as fusion. Refusal of work as aim. Refusal of the head that cannot be cut off. The negative form is deliberate. It protects the rite from capture. It keeps the scene light enough to end and strong enough to bind. It gives the city a way to spend what must be spent without creating enemies to consume.

He then shifts to abandonment. The word carries an old fear. To be abandoned is to be left without support. He writes the other meaning. Abandonment is the act by which a subject lets go of its claim to itself in order to remain faithful to the neighbour. I abandon myself not to the other person as possession. I abandon myself to the relation that no one commands. This is not passivity. It is a decision against mastery. It is a practised weakness. It is the opposite of cruelty. 

Cruelty is the strength that uses another as a means. Abandonment is the strength that refuses that use even when it would be easiest to resort to it. He is not proposing a mystic flight. He is describing the small renunciations by which a circle becomes possible. The refusal to claim precedence. The willingness to be interrupted. The consent to let a silence stand. The habit of not explaining the tears of another. The choice not to close a conversation by a summary that would return ownership of the event to the speaker. These are not rules of etiquette. They are the forms of abandonment that keep the outside present. They prevent the rite from hardening into a project.

Bataille’s language makes the stakes clear. Abandonment is a name for the movement toward continuity that eroticism displays in the body. The person surrenders the posture of mastery. The person consents to be altered. The person plays under a rule that protects both parties. The person returns to discontinuity with a memory that does not translate into a plan. Blanchot draws on this grammar while keeping the bedside in view. 

Abandonment is not an ecstasy. It is the patience by which I remain present where speech fails. It is the choice not to fill the failure with noise. It is the art by which I let the neighbour make a claim on my time without proof that my time will be well used. He quietly notes that the failure of speech is the very condition of a plurality that cannot be developed in words. He means that the circle keeps room for differences that cannot be said without harm. He means that confession would spoil the bond. He means that the secret must not be forced into the light of ownership.

He risks a short example to keep things concrete. Lovers are a community. If they try to own the bond by confession they lose it. They must learn the discipline of abandonment. They must learn to keep a secret even from themselves. They must learn the rule by which words are given and refused. They must learn to end a scene before it becomes work. He does not moralise. He is offering a method. The method is play. 

The lovers spend surplus under a rule. They accept embarrassment. They refuse fusion. They protect the other from appropriation. They return to the day with a memory that steadies them. To name this play is not to trivialise it. It is to recognise that its power lies in its uselessness. It is to recognise that the same method sustains circles that are not lovers. The small community of friends. The reading group. The bedside vigil. Each is kept alive by abandonment rather than by management.

He then addresses the secret. The community is unavowable. The reason is not mystical. It is ethical. Avowal would be appropriation. The secret is not content to be disclosed. It is the form of a relation that must not be owned. The word secret can be abused. It can hide exploitation. He is not interested in that abuse. He is interested in the secret that protects the outside. The secret is the limit that keeps the circle from turning itself into a subject. It is the barrier that prevents the lovers from becoming a State. It is the interval that keeps the neighbour beyond my grasp even while I hold his hand. 

He writes of sharing the secret. The phrase seems contradictory. It is exact. The secret can be shared because it is not information. It is shared as silence. It is shared as embarrassment. It is shared as refusal to demand an account. It is shared as the decision to let an event stand against the will to clarity. It is shared by agreeing to end. Play is again the right name. A game is only a game when the line that separates it from ordinary time is kept. The secret is the line. It is the border that holds the rite in its pitch. It guards the modesty of the event. It protects the dignity of those present. It prevents the city from consuming the event as content.

He notices a modern temptation. The will to transparency has become a public virtue. It has its place in institutions. It is a danger in love and in community. When everything must be said the other is destroyed. When everything must be shared the secret becomes guilt. The rite loses its pitch. The circle converts into the worst of small tyrannies. He suggests a correction. 

The right to opacity must be restored. The ability to keep a secret without shame is a civic skill. The ability to accept the secret of another without resentment is a civic cure. The bedside trains this. The reading group trains this. The house that mourns trains this. The lovers who refuse to make their love a brand train this. The city that makes room for these forms will waste less excess on cruelty. It will need fewer enemies. It will be able to face death without turning to spectacle.

He observes that writing is the clearest school for the secret. A book is a gift in pure loss. The writer does not know who will receive. The reader does not owe a response. The work circulates as something that no one can own completely. Its secret is not the author’s private life. Its secret is the outside it keeps open. The community that forms around the work keeps that secret by refusing to become a party. It avoids programmes. It avoids doctrine. It avoids founding a school that would turn reading into a badge. It uses the text as a rule that protects differences. It accepts failure of speech as a condition. It ends each sitting. It leaves with nothing but a change in posture. This is the modest truth behind the phrase literary community. It is not a club. It is a rite of play that honours the secret. It is a practice of abandonment that keeps the outside at work.

He returns once more to the death of the neighbour to confirm that these three strands belong together. Sacrifice without return. Abandonment without mastery. The secret without shame. The bedside unites them. Presence here is a sacrifice. There is no product. There is no measurable outcome. Presence here is abandonment. The self that wants to help by control must be left aside. Presence here is the keeping of a secret. The event cannot be made public without violation. The group that knows how to keep vigil will know how to read. It will know how to love. It will know how to share a table. It will know how to end meetings. It will know how to speak without command. It will know how to listen without prying. It will know that unworking is a grace rather than a lack.

Bataille’s theory of eroticism confirms the same unity. Eroticism is assent to life up to the point of death. It is the moment when the self abandons mastery. It is a sacrifice of utility. It is a sharing of a secret that cannot be confessed without being ruined. It is play that risks embarrassment and that ends. When Blanchot thinks community under the sign of lovers he is not importing romance into philosophy. He is naming the practice that most persons already know as the discipline of abandonment. He wants that discipline to be visible as a civic art. He wants it to shape how we gather. He wants it to protect us from the attractive lies that fusion and transparency sell.

He allows a brief look at forms that parody this art. The group that declares itself a community of truth and requires avowals. The therapy circle that forces speech under the banner of healing. The political cell that elevates critique over patience. The social platform that confuses contact with presence. Each form exploits the need for a bond. Each form replaces play with production. Each form destroys the secret. Each form keeps the subject intact. Each form produces heads. Each form creates enemies to feed on. The cure is not withdrawal. The cure is the creation and defence of forms in which play can take place. The cure is the training of abandonment as an ordinary virtue. The cure is the recognition that vigils and readings and meals are not leisure. They are the expenditure without which the city becomes lethal.

He uses the word finite again. The scale of these forms matters. The secret depends on finitude. A small circle can keep a silence. A mass cannot. A small circle can endure the embarrassment of not knowing what to say. A mass must speak or it will break. A small circle can end without triumph. A mass must produce a sign. He is not deriding crowds. He is drawing a map of strengths. The bedside cannot be scaled. The reading group cannot be scaled. The lovers cannot be scaled. The lesson is practical. Seek the small forms that can bear the weight of the outside. Defend them. Do not sell them for visibility. Do not turn them into content. Do not package their secrets. Let them waste time. Let them be inefficient. They are the exact answer to the excess that would otherwise seek targets.

He ties this to the earlier refusal of the head. The head cannot be cut off in a certain form of group. That is the sign that the form has betrayed the bedside. The true circle distributes initiative. Anyone may begin a silence. Anyone may end a reading. Anyone may call a halt to a vigil. Anyone may say I do not know. The head that feels indispensable is already a danger. The head that claims to speak the secret for all is already a tyrant in small. The right form for a city of neighbours is the form that makes heads unnecessary. This does not deny leaders. It denies the theology of leadership. It teaches leaders to leave. It teaches them to let the rite end.

At this point the relation between austerity and joy becomes clear. The pages are austere. They forbid many things. They forbid fusion. They forbid product. They forbid avowal. They forbid use of the dead. The aim is joy. The aim is the sovereign lightness that comes when a circle has kept the rule of play and can disperse without resentment. The bedside is heavy. The reading is light. Both share the same grace. No one owns what happened. No one is entitled to it. No one can make a banner from it. All can carry its memory. That memory protects them. It limits their need for power. It makes them capable of being abandoned. It makes them gentle to secrets. It makes them wary of confession. It makes them good citizens of a city that will always be short of myths.

So. Sacrifice in these pages means expenditure without return. Abandonment means the refusal of mastery in favour of presence. The secret means a limit that protects the relation from being owned. Each term is anchored in the bedside. Each term scales to lovers and to readers and to friends. Each term supports the refusal of communion as fusion. Each term secures idleness as the ongoing law of a community that will not become a subject. Each term calls for play as the only honest method by which finite beings can bind themselves without harm.

The consequences are immediate. If you teach. Keep a rule of speech and silence. Allow embarrassment. Do not force avowals. End on time. If you govern. Protect the small forms where secrets can be kept without shame. Do not turn mourning into spectacle. Do not make heads that cannot be cut off. If you love. Practise abandonment. Share a secret by refusing to own it. Do not demand transparency. If you write. Give the work as pure loss. Refuse parties. If you read. Gather in small numbers. Accept failure. Defend the right to end. These are not moral tips. They are the ways a city learns to host the outside with courtesy rather than with force.

The play that Bataille names gives these ways a common grammar. Rule. Limit. Risk. Expenditure. Ending. Memory in bodies rather than doctrine. Blanchot’s pages read like notes for a manual written to train those habits. He avoids slogans. He avoids the head. He returns to the same scenes until the form is familiar. He trusts that readers who recognise the bedside will recognise the rest. He trusts that anyone who has known a vigil will understand why the secret must be kept. He trusts that anyone who has loved will understand why confession fails. He trusts that anyone who has taken part in a good reading will know what it means to leave with nothing and to be richer. He trusts that play remains the most exact name for the art by which such scenes are made.

The result is a chain of small truths. Community appears where no one owns what binds. Sacrifice is true when it wastes. Abandonment is strong when it refuses mastery. Secrets are just when they guard the outside. Writing is faithful when it offers itself to loss. Reading is good when it ends. Lovers are wise when they keep the limit. Friends are real when they let the circle fail into a smile. These truths are not spectacular. They are enough. They give a modern city a way to spend its surplus without cruelty. They offer a discipline for those who would rather not turn to enemies in order to feel alive. They tell us that the bedside is the school. They tell us that everything else is a lesson drawn from that school. They tell us that play is not the opposite of seriousness. It is the only serious art we have for making a we that will not destroy the you or the I.

Blanchot now turns to the lovers. He has already let the vigil beside the dying give community its ground. He now asks whether there is another scene in which the same unworking becomes visible in the living. He answers with the pair who love without turning their bond into a work. The risk is obvious. Love tempts us to property. Love tempts us to confession. Love tempts us to fusion. Blanchot refuses these temptations one by one. The lovers do not become a subject. They do not form a third that would be a super individual. They do not complete one another. They suspend the wish to complete. They remain asymmetrical and exposed. They remain near the outside. 

He folds this into a grammar of speech. Lovers speak. They also keep silent. Their speech is a gift that risks loss. Their silence is a secret that protects the outside from becoming content. Avowal is dangerous. To avow is to make the bond a property. To avow is to make love available to a third as information. The unavowable is not shame. It is care for a relation that must not be owned. It is fidelity to a bond that appears only in the instant that no one commands.

He keeps the bedside as a reference point. Lovers know that they will lose each other. They consent to spend time in which this knowledge can be borne without doctrine. This is why the lovers’ community cannot be a programme. It is a practice made of moments. It makes moments whose rule is precise. Limits are kept. Limits are crossed under consent. There is embarrassment. There is laughter. There is a right to opacity. There is an end. The day returns. Work resumes. The bond subsists in a memory that has no legal form. The lovers refuse the badge and the banner. They refuse to become a party. They refuse to speak in the name of their relation. 

They let the relation speak them. This is the point at which Blanchot’s language of desobra becomes concrete again. The community of lovers is inoperative. It is not a productive unit. It does not add to the general product. It keeps the exteriority of being in sight. It lets the outside work within language. It is the region where names fail without leading to silence as defeat. It is a shared patience in the presence of what cannot be appropriated.

Bataille’s eroticism is assent to life up to the point of death. The lover abandons mastery. The lover consents to the outside. The lover plays under a rule. The lover returns. There is sovereignty in this because the time is useless and therefore higher than use. But Blanchot cleans the scene of triumph. Sovereignty is not possession. Sovereignty is exposure carried without lie. It is the refusal to cover the experience with edification. It is the refusal to transfigure the other into an ideal. It is the courage to meet the other as other and to remain finite. The lovers become a school for community because they rehearse these refusals and these courtesies. 

They learn to speak gifts that may not be received. They learn to guard secrets without shame. They learn to end. They learn that a bond is not a property and not a product. They learn to avoid the head that cannot be cut off. In courts of love the head was a leader who decided words. In the unavowable community there is no such head. Initiative circulates. Responsibility circulates. The lovers practise an equality that is not a symmetry. They practise an inequality that is not a command. This is not mysticism. It is accuracy about what keeps a relation alive.

Blanchot then turns to a darker configuration. He names it the plot. He does not mean a storyline. He means a small clandestine association. A group formed by a common refusal and a common risk. It has secrecy. It has codes. It has the exhilaration of the forbidden. He does not condemn it out of hand. He recalls historical nights in which such plots were the only form of resistance left to those who refused a regime. He also knows how quickly the plot corrupts its own truth. The clandestine circle can turn its secret into power. It can turn its refusal into identity. It can turn risk into a currency. It can turn the head into a command that cannot be cut off. 

He asks whether there is a way to hold the plot open to the outside. He answers by returning to the bedside and to the lovers. The only justifiable plot is one that remains faithful to the unworking of community. The secrecy must be of the protective kind. It must guard the outside rather than conceal a project of domination. The risk must be of the generous kind. It must waste courage rather than invest it. The refusal must be of the humble kind. It must refuse the will to make itself a subject. Otherwise the plot becomes a mimicry of the very force it opposes. It becomes a community of avowal that will demand confession and will punish opacity. It will turn the names of friendship and care into narrow tests. It will recruit the dead. It will use mourning as a rally. Blanchot’s pages cauterise this drift by repeating the principle of desobra. The community exposes itself by exposing itself. It does not operate. It cannot be captured by a project. The only plot worthy of the word community is a shared readiness to spend without product. It is a conspiracy for uselessness. It is a vow not to turn the neighbour into capital.

This may sound abstract. He keeps it plain by staying with speech. In a plot that respects the unavowable, speech is given and withheld without ledger. There is no record that can compel a confession. There is no doctrine that can be trotted out as proof of belonging. There is only the test of presence. There is only the habit of ending before work begins. There is an attention to finitude. There is a refusal of scale. When a circle grows to a size that requires representative speech it is already off the line. He is not naive. He knows that any city demands speech at scale. 

He is writing to protect the narrow channel in which community stays honest. The plot is the place in which honesty is easiest to lose. The rush of secrecy and danger can intoxicate. The group can become enamoured of its own exclusion. The members can begin to own the bond as a mark of rank. The cure is to keep the bedside as the measure. The cure is to remember the lovers. The cure is to refuse to make the secret a badge. The cure is to hold meetings as rites of play that end with nothing kept but a change in posture.

Bataille’s general economy again gives the grammar. The plot spends the surplus of courage. If it tries to reinvest it, it corrupts itself. The plot spends the lust for intensity. If it tries to store it, it will make victims. The plot wastes time that could be used to advance in the world. If it tries to make that waste repay, it will recruit the dead. The plot is sovereign when it is useless. It is criminal when it makes itself useful. These are hard lines. Blanchot uses them because he saw how quickly clandestine groups become what they hate. He saw how quickly language in such groups degrades into slogans and inquisitions. He saw how rapidly the head becomes indispensable. He saw how often the group made a work of the bond. He lets the bedside and the lovers keep the bar high enough to save the word community from that fate.

He moves then to writing as the practice in which all these measures are most visible. He has already said that the community and writing belong together because speech that is true to the outside is speech given as pure loss. He now shows how writing is also the school in which sacrifice, abandonment, and the secret are learned without pathos. Writing is a sacrifice because the writer gives the work to readers whom she will not know. 

The book is released into a time that will change it. The writer cannot reclaim the gift. The writer releases the work without any guarantee that it will be received. Abandonment is part of this release. The writer abandons mastery. The writer abandons the hope of controlling response. The writer abandons the wish to be understood in her own terms. The writer becomes the neighbour of her own work. The secret is preserved in the way the work keeps the outside at work. The writing that suits community is not writing that reveals everything. It is writing that holds the page open.

Blanchot insists on finitude here as well. The literary community is not a party. It is not a school. It is not a movement. It is a finite circle that gathers around a work to be exposed. It is a rite. It has a rule. It ends. It leaves a memory in bodies rather than a platform. It keeps the gift nature of speech alive. It keeps the risk of non reception visible. It trains readers in the refusal of appropriation. It trains writers in the refusal of mastery. It shows in slow motion what the bedside shows in a harsh instant. It shows what lovers practice in intense minutes. Writing and reading thus form a patient bridge between the two extremes. They let a city rehearse the courtesies by which it will avoid the lies of communion and the crimes of the plot gone bad.

Blanchot illustrates this with images. A reading group that accepts silence rather than filling the gap with summaries. A circle of correspondents who refuse to turn their letters into a manifesto. A magazine that does not become a party. An editorial collective that will not create a head. A classroom where literary study is not the mastery of content but the practice of shared exposure to a work that will not be owned. Each example is modest. Each is severe in its discipline. Each shows the same rule at work. There is a border between the rite and the day. There is a consent to risk and embarrassment. There is a refusal to demand confession. There is a limit to size and duration. There is a ban on turning the event into work. There is a habit of ending.

The link back to the lovers is worth making once more. Lovers who speak in the tone of writing keep their bond alive. They write to one another as if they could not own the reply. They read one another as if the reply could fail. They practise the patience of the unreceived gift. They consent to the outside. They leave margins. They refuse to explain one another. They keep the secret as space rather than as content. They are not being coy. They are protecting the ground on which their bond breathes. They are protecting the place in which the outside can act without being absorbed by property or programme. This courtesy looks like shyness. It is courage. It is the same courage that sits by a bed at night and does not convert the vigil into a virtue.

Bataille’s notion of play now settles over the whole field with no remainder. The lovers play without lying. They play without keeping score. They play under a rule that prevents harm. They end. They return to the day. The plot that stays honest plays at risk without converting it into capital. It refuses to collect secret as a hoard. It refuses to own the dead. It ends. It returns to the day with fewer enemies. 

Writing is play that puts language at risk without consuming it. It exposes speech to loss and refuses to demand return. It ends in the book. It begins again in a reader who can say nothing if nothing is ready to be said. The bedside is play at the edge of the day where nothing is kept except the fact that we did not let the neighbour die alone. This is the common grammar of scenes that bind without harm. This is the art that Blanchot thinks when he calls community unavowable.

He adds one more pressure. He knows that institutions will demand avowal and product. He knows that the city cannot live on rites alone. He is not counselling withdrawal. He is counselling the defence of forms without which institutions will devour what they claim to protect. He is asking readers to defend the useless with care. He is asking them to keep the scale small in the places where scale destroys the right pitch. He is asking them to mistrust the head. He is asking them to cherish the secret as a civic right. He is asking them to practice abandonment as a skill and not as a weakness. He is asking them to make time for vigils and readings and meals and walks that cannot be posted. He is asking them to let writing be given without programme. He is asking them to play as if a city could still spend its surplus without cruelty.

To summarise. The lovers show how community appears as a bond that cannot be owned. They practise secrecy without shame. They practise speech as gift. They refuse confession. They refuse fusion. The plot shows how quickly a bond can become a counterfeit of itself. It shows how secrecy and risk can turn into capital and command. It shows why the bedside and the lovers must be the measure by which such circles are kept honest. Writing shows how speech can be kept open to the outside. It shows how sacrifice, abandonment and the secret are kept in play without harm. It shows how small circles can bind a city without becoming parties. It shows how rites end. These three movements refine the same rule. Keep the exteriority of being present. Refuse to transfigure the dead. Refuse to produce a subject. Refuse to demand avowal. Accept finitude. Accept failure. Accept embarrassment. End.

Blanchot is often called austere. In these pages the austerity protects joy. It is the joy of a bond that breathes because no one tries to hold it. It is the joy of a secret that is not shame. It is the joy of a vigil that ends without being turned into a story. It is the joy of a letter that is given without demand. It is the joy of a small circle that can be gathered again because no one tried to keep it between gatherings. 

It is the joy that Bataille calls sovereignty. He means a time in which the human being is not a tool. He means a time that cannot be made to pay. He means a time in which the sacred appears without myth. Blanchot gives this time its civic forms. He asks that we keep them. He asks that we play. He asks that we treat play as the only serious art by which a we can exist without destroying the you or the I.

Blanchot shifts from the impersonal ground of the neighbour and the civic tones of the clandestine circle to a text by Marguerite Duras. The shift is deliberate. The theory of community would risk abstraction if it did not submit itself to a scene where speech is fragile and where desire is the only grammar at hand. Duras gives such a scene. A woman lies with a man who pays her to remain with him at night. The contract is stated plainly. The money is not a metaphor. The nights have a number. The rule is time. The man is commanded by the woman to remain awake. The light must remain on. Tenderness is forbidden as a word. Love is refused as a declaration. The second person becomes an instrument of distance. The pronoun you is used as an impersonal tool. The reader is folded into the scene by this use of you. The effect is to replace psychology with rule. Duras takes away the common relief of motive and of confession. She gives a set of constraints under which two bodies spend time. Blanchot chooses this work because it tests everything he has claimed. The bond appears and vanishes. The secret is kept as absence. The rite is play in its hard key. The vigil beside the living takes the place of the vigil beside the dying. The night is long. The end is clean. Nothing is kept except a change that cannot be owned.

The first movement in his reading therefore concerns the contract. He does not treat money as a stain. He treats it as a guardrail. The payment keeps love out of reach as an avowable aim. The money forbids reciprocal pledges. The money forbids the vocabulary of belonging. The money protects the time from ownership. It keeps the rite useless. It keeps the night from becoming a work. The lovers in this fiction are lovers only by the rule that says they may not say so. They are bound by a pact that resists confession. The rule preserves the outside. The woman’s command that the man remain awake becomes the mark of this preservation. Wakefulness is the minimum that resists fusion. Sleep would be a fall into immanence. The light is the visible sign of this vigilance. The lamp writes the limit into the room. 

The command establishes a game. The game does not ask the man to reveal himself. It asks for a sacrifice of comfort. It demands expenditure with no return. The man pays twice. He pays with money. He pays with wakefulness. The woman pays with her time. She pays with her refusal to declare love. Both remain within a rule that keeps the event unproductive. Blanchot reads this as a laboratory for the unavowable. He finds in the word contract a strictly modern honesty. There is no myth. There is no theology of the couple. There is a rule that makes a brief community possible by holding words at a distance.

Bataille’s terms bring the structure into sharp relief. The contract is a taboo that allows transgression. The money is the visible sign of restriction. It prevents the rite from disguising itself as marriage or as destiny. The wakefulness is the transgression. It carries the bodies past fatigue into a zone where they are no longer owners of themselves. The command to stay awake creates a small sovereignty in which useless time burns. 

The prohibition of tenderness as a declaration saves the scene from the lie of reciprocity. Tenderness may occur. The word is banned. The ban is not cruelty. It is tact. It is the way the secret is kept as a form rather than as a hoard of content. The pair do not confess. They spend. They end. In this sense Duras gives an eroticism that is play in the strict sense. Not diversion. Rule. Risk. Exposure. Ending. Blanchot reads her with this severity and praises her for the precision of a form that leaves nothing to be kept except a memory in bodies.

The second movement concerns the man’s incapacity to love. Duras writes him as one who is asked to confront this incapacity without complaint. He is told by the woman that he does not love. He is asked to see this as a fact rather than as a lack to be remedied by vows. He is asked to remain in the light with this knowledge. Blanchot sees in this the heart of the unavowable as an ethics. A community formed by lovers must be able to shelter incapacity without forcing the name of love as a shield. If a bond depends on the declaration then the declaration becomes a rite of property. If a bond depends on presence then presence can become true even where love cannot be said. 

The man remains. He pays. He watches. He listens. He is silent. He is tested in patience rather than in speech. This exacts a price. There is shame. There is embarrassment. There is the risk of humiliation. The rule protects against cruelty by keeping initiative with the woman. She speaks. She forbids tenderness as a form of speech that would entrap the event. She returns the man to watchfulness when he looks away. She tells him what he is not. He is not in love. He is not the owner of this event. He is not ready to leave the immobility of his own self love. Blanchot sees that Duras is not humiliating him for the sake of injury. She is writing a court in which the right to speak belongs to the one who can command exposure without demanding possession.

Bataille allows us to see the generosity in this humiliation. To be told that one does not love can break a subject into either rage or lucidity. The rite gives a form strong enough to carry the blow. The wakefulness becomes purification in the only sense that matters here. It is not moral improvement. It is the removal of habits that would replace exposure with a lie. The man is stripped of sentimental refuge. He is kept from the safety of sleep. He is refused fusion. He is forced to meet a limit that he cannot pass by words. In this space his embarrassment becomes the sign that something true is happening. 

Duras uses embarrassment as a lever that opens the room to the outside. Blanchot recognises in that lever the same element that makes a feast sacred without doctrine. A group must be able to be embarrassed together without harm. There is no other proof that a taboo has been held and crossed. The lovers supply the smallest circle in which the rehearsal can occur. The city either creates larger forms that keep embarrassment from turning to cruelty or it becomes hungry for victims. Duras does not make this political point. Blanchot’s method draws it from the form itself and gives it civic weight.

The third movement concerns the woman’s neutrality. Duras writes her as impersonal. She is not a character with psychology to be mined. She is an authority who regulates the rule of the nights. She is also a body whose presence carries the secret. Her love is not avowed. Her judgement is unsentimental. She says that the man does not love. She commands that he do nothing to hide this. She sets the time. She accepts the money. She keeps the secret. The neutrality is not coldness. It is the form that protects the rite. It is the way the unavowable is kept unspoiled. 

Blanchot reads this neutrality as a model for the impersonal voice that community must learn if it will not become a head. The neutral is not a bureaucratic tone. It is the tone of a law without a legislator. It is the voice that says stay awake and says nothing about what the staying awake is for. It is the voice that refuses to transfigure the event into a meaning. It is the voice that protects the limit. The woman is the guardian of this neutrality. Her acceptance of money forbids the man to turn the event into an exchange of sentiments. Her refusal of tenderness as a declaration protects the secret. Her rule that the lamp remain on protects the rite from fusion. 

Blanchot’s praise of this tone is precise. He does not praise cruelty. He praises restraint. He praises the refusal to save the man by a lie. He praises the ban on confession as the one thing that allows the room to breathe.From this trio of moves he draws the first of three consequences. Desire is a demand for the outside that cannot be answered by property. The money does not buy the outside. The you does not appropriate the other. The command to remain awake is the only answer desire can bear. 

Desire is therefore allied to play. It wants a rule. It wants risk. It wants an end. It does not want possession. It cannot survive the lie of reciprocity that declares union where there is only exposure. The lovers who can remain in desire will be those who can maintain a rule against avowal. They will be those who can suffer embarrassment without seeking relief in a banner. They will be those who can accept the end without resentment. In Bataille’s vocabulary this is eroticism treated as a civic art rather than as a private indulgence. The lovers become citizens of the night. They keep the city from ruin by burning surplus time in harmless ways. They teach themselves not to require victims.

The second consequence concerns language. Duras writes as if language had to purge itself of the temptation to reveal. The repetitions, the commands, the white spaces in the text, the use of you without a face, all act as a training in speech that refuses mastery. Blanchot reads this as a model for community and writing. Literature is the scene in which the neutrality of the voice is learned without the authority of a person. The page speaks in a tone that no speaker can own. 

The book holds the secret as a form rather than as content. It allows the reader to experience exposure without being forced to confess. It allows the writer to abandon mastery without being compelled to avow. The literary community that forms around such a work is therefore the closest civic analogue to the lovers’ room. It is finite. It accepts rules. It accepts embarrassment. It ends. It leaves nothing but a change in bearing. The risk of non reception is real. The gift is given as pure loss. These are the elements of desœuvrement seen from within language itself.

The third consequence concerns failure. Duras writes the failure to love as the strict condition of the scene. The man fails. The woman knows this from the first line. The failure is not corrected. It is made visible and borne. The nights pass. The number is reached. The relation ends. Nothing is converted into a work. The failure remains as truth rather than as a lesson. Blanchot honours this as ethical. Community would be a lie if it demanded success. Community must be able to live with impossible demands without disguising them. The unavowable protects this by refusing to turn everything into a product. The bedside taught the same lesson. The vigil keeps company with a failure that no one can repair. 

The lovers rehearse the same lesson without death to justify the tears. They learn to carry what cannot be done as a bond. The city that learns from them will be calmer. It will be less inclined to rescue itself by myths of unity. It will be less eager to punish those who fail to love as the programme dictates. It will permit opacity as a right.Blanchot then leaves Duras for a moment and turns to the way names circulate in any circle that claims to be a community. He notes the danger of the proper name. A name becomes a head. 

A head becomes indispensable. The circle begins to speak as if it had a subject. Speech hardens. The rite fails. He suggests a correction. Names must be treated as masks. The neutral voice must be cultivated. Writing is again the school. The impersonal tone is a guard against appropriation. The you that Duras uses becomes a model. A circle can speak with precision without appointing a head. The use of you in a rule can bind without founding a subject. The lovers’ room shows that a command need not become a lawgiver. The sentence stay awake is enough. The bedside shows that the right to say nothing is a rule in itself. The clandestine plot that does not betray itself is the one that keeps speech minimal and refuses titles. 

These moves are ethical. They keep the secret and the outside active. They keep the community from becoming a work.Bataille’s notion of sovereignty helps to state the positive aim behind these refusals. Sovereignty is the time when a person is not a tool. Sovereignty is the expenditure that cannot be made to pay. In the lovers’ room sovereignty is the hour spent without aim. In the reading circle sovereignty is the attention that no one can command. In the bedside sovereignty is the vigil that no ledger can justify. 

These are small sovereignties. They are enough. They keep the larger polity from dissolving into work. They give courage. They teach the taste for limits. They make transgression safe by keeping taboo intact. They protect the city from the inflations that lead to cruelty. Blanchot’s selection of Duras is therefore not literary taste. It is method. He wants the reader to see a rite that embodies his claims with a clarity that an abstract chapter would never achieve.

He finally returns to the woman’s last judgment. The man will not love. He may one day love. He may never love. He does not love now. The sentence is cruel as a cure. It protects the unavowable. It keeps the present from being consumed by a future. It forbids the consolation of promise. It preserves the pure loss of the nights as their truth. It prevents the conversion of failure into a plot point. It forces the pair to accept that the only common thing is time that passes and a rule obeyed. 

It honours the small community that existed because the rule was kept. Blanchot admires this exactness. He sees in it the civic virtue that protects the bedside, the reading group, the clandestine circle from hypocrisy. He sees that the habit of saying what is so, without programme, is the only way to keep a community from turning into a tribunal. He sees that the restraint that refuses avowal is the only way to keep love from becoming an instrument.

Thus. The contract and the money are not stains. They are limits. They keep the room from becoming an ideology. They make play possible. The command to stay awake is the rule that creates a small sovereignty. It replaces confession with presence. It refuses fusion. The neutrality of the woman is the tone community must learn. It prevents the rise of a head. It keeps the outside active. The failure to love is the condition rather than the fault. It is borne rather than repaired. It keeps the event from becoming a work. The use of you as an impersonal pronoun teaches a civic speech that binds without owning. The risk of non reception is embraced. Gifts are given as pure loss. The scene ends. The city gains a small deposit of courage and of tact.

Through the lens of Bataille this entire cluster of pages becomes a manual for sovereign play. Rule. Limit. Risk. Exposure. Ending. Excess spent without return. Shame carried without humiliation. Secrecy guarded without shame. Speech given without claim. Names treated as masks. Heads refused. Circles kept finite. Nothing owned. Much remembered. In this light Duras’s room is the narrow bridge between the bedside and the street. It is where living bodies learn the postures that let them keep the neighbour company and then walk out into a square and refuse a tyranny without becoming a mirror of it. It is where a voice is trained that can say stay awake to a city at the hour when it most wants to sleep.

This is why Blanchot stays with such delicate detail. He knows that the smallest alteration in rule turns play into production. He knows that the smallest yield to avowal turns the secret into content and kills it. He knows that the slightest rise of a head renders the circle dependent and fearful. He knows that a promise can smuggle property into the room. He knows that only the exactness of a lamp left on and of a number of nights kept and of a payment counted without shame will protect the uselessness on which community depends. He knows that a culture learns such exactness by imitation. He offers this reading as a model. He leaves theology aside. He leaves ideology aside. He leaves psychology aside. He keeps only the forms that can be repeated by finite beings with limited courage and with a hunger for presence that will not disappear.

The argument thus remains simple. Community appears where a rule allows exposure without ownership. It is unavowable because avowal would appropriate what binds. It is inoperative because work would dissolve the bond into a product. It remains faithful to the outside by keeping failure visible and by refusing the lie of unity. Lovers and readers learn these postures in rooms. The bedside reveals their seriousness. The clandestine circle reveals their dangers. 

Bataille names the grammar that holds these postures together. Expenditure without return. The sacred without myth. Sovereignty as useless time. Play as the only art by which a we can exist without destroying the you or the I. Duras gives the experiment its clearest living form. Blanchot gives the reading that turns the experiment into a measure anyone can carry into the day.

Blanchot prolongs the reading of desire under a rule. He lets the room that Duras constructs become a school for speech and for time. He wants the reader to feel how a single constraint can carry an entire ethics. The constraint is simple. Stay awake. Keep the light on. Do not avow love. Do not seek fusion. Do not turn the night into work. A form like this stands in for the larger civic forms he is after. He insists on this substitution because it allows him to show how a law without a legislator can bind. 

The waking night is a law. No one wrote it. No police enforces it. The pair consent and the consent holds. The tone here is not mystical. It is ordinary and stern. The sternness rescues ordinariness from banality. The night becomes sovereign because it is useless and kept. Sovereignty in this strict sense is not command. It is time that cannot be made to pay. Bataille says this with the high word summit. Blanchot keeps the word outside and lets the lamp draw the line.

He takes time itself as an object. The nights have a number. The number will be reached. The end is visible from the beginning. He will not let the form dissolve into habit. He knows that an open series seduces because it flatters hope. He instead insists on finitude. The body bears the number. The room changes because everyone knows that the count moves. The knowledge alters speech. It alters silence. It purges them of promise. The relation is kept in the present. The future does not enter as a claim. 

The end is not a catastrophe. The end is the cleanness that protects the scene from becoming a work. Rooms like this gift the wider city a habit of ending. The habit checks the hunger that wants to capture every surplus. The habit instructs institutions to stop. The habit teaches circles to disband before heads form. The habit keeps vigils from becoming tribunes. The habit saves reading from founding a party. The habit lets lovers return to the day without a myth to defend. Blanchot does not preach this as a code. He makes the lamp do the preaching and lets the number do the rest.

He then turns to attention as expenditure. Wakefulness spends nerves. It spends self possession. It spends the instinct to close the eyes in defence of the self. Duras writes this without pity and without cruelty. Never sleep. Look at me. Do not hide. The command is harsh. The harshness is the only safe dose. It hurts and it heals. It heals because it replaces the imaginary theatre of avowal with the real theatre of sight. 

To look without owning. To be looked at without becoming property. The exchange is impossible in everyday time. Everyday time is organised by utility and by projects. The room suspends that order. The room becomes a precinct in which attention is the coin to burn. Bataille’s word here is sacrifice. He empties it of exchange and leaves only the loss. No counter gift is demanded. No counter story is told. The sacrifice is not to appease a god. It is to restore a measure of uselessness inside a life that otherwise would be all use. The lovers become citizens of useless attention. Blanchot does not need to say that a city that has forgotten how to pay attention without profit is a cruel city. The pages imply it and correct it in the same gesture.

Speech is returned to. He has already named speech as a gift in pure loss. He now shows how repetition, prohibition and neutral address serve that loss. Repetition is not a device to seduce. It is a device to exhaust the will to reveal. Commands repeated drain away the theatre of confession. Prohibitions protect the secret from being treated as content. The neutral you protects the bond from the head that proper names tend to produce. 

Literature is a school in all three. It repeats to empty. It forbids to keep form intact. It speaks in a tone that no person owns. Does Blanchot subtract life from writing? The opposite is true. He subtracts personality so that life can be present without being appropriated. That is why the unavowable finds its home in literature. Literature is the practice that keeps the outside open by stripping speech of ownership. The literary community is not the group that loves books. It is the group that accepts this stripping as a rule. It is the group that gathers and accepts failure. It is the group that honours embarrassment. It is the group that goes home on time. It is the group that leaves with nothing except an altered way of standing beside others.

The next pressure is shame. Shame appears as soon as the will to avow is checked. The man who cannot love is ashamed. The one who loves and is forbidden to say so is ashamed. The one who keeps command over another’s wakefulness risks shame. The shame is not humiliation. The shame is the body’s knowledge that it is exposed. It is a good sign if a circle can bear shame without turning it into accusation. The bedside teaches this. The shame of not knowing what to do is eased by presence that refuses to pretend mastery. The reading group teaches this. The shame of not having anything to say is eased by a rule that permits silence. The lovers’ room teaches this. The shame of desire does not recruit a myth to hide behind. 

These rehearsals are not psychology. They are civic technique. The city that knows how to be ashamed without cruelty is protected from many lies. It will need fewer scapegoats. It will not demand that private rooms turn themselves inside out in the name of transparency. It will distinguish between secrets that protect the outside and secrets that hide exploitation. It will save attention for those who need it most and not for those who demand it most loudly.

Blanchot then advances a claim about ethics that a new reader can carry without complication. Ethics is not an applied code. Ethics is the practice of forms that bind without harm. The bedside is such a form. The lovers’ room is such a form. The reading circle is such a form. The clandestine circle when it refuses to become a party is such a form. Each has a rule. Each risks embarrassment. Each keeps a secret as a form rather than as a hoard of content. 

Each ends. The bond is kept by exposure to an outside that no one commands. There is no doctrine behind this. There is the conviction that finite beings need rituals in which they can spend surplus without victims. Bataille gives that conviction a theoretic architecture. Blanchot gives it civic flesh. They converge in the word play. Play is the technical name for a rite that crosses a limit without breaking it. Play wastes. Play breathes. Play ends. Play leaves memory in bodies rather than platforms.

He isolates the temptation that destroys such forms. The temptation is to make the bond a work. The sign is easy to read. A head appears. A programme appears. A ledger of confessions appears. A time beyond ending appears. A myth appears. The dead are enrolled. Mourning becomes an engine. The secret becomes guilt or becomes capital. Language hardens. Those outside the circle are treated as means. 

The cure is equally simple and difficult. Keep the ritual small. Keep the count. Keep the lamp on. Keep the ban on avowal where avowal would turn the room into property. Keep the right to silence. Keep the neutral voice. Keep the end. These disciplines seem modest. They are the only guard against cruelty available to beings who cannot live without bonds and who cannot avoid institutions.

The section now pivots to friendship. Blanchot has been careful not to name friendship as a sentiment. He now names it as the civic word for the discipline of exposure. Friendship here is not intimacy. It is the right nearness to another. It is the habit of keeping company without claiming. It is the custom of giving speech as a gift that may not be received. It is the courtesy of allowing opacity. It is the courage of saying what is so without claims on the future. It is the pact to end without resentment. This kind of friendship is a form that any city can encourage without creating factions. 

It is the opposite of the alliance that becomes a head. It is the opposite of the fraternity that becomes a State. It is a practice of sovereignty in the smallest doses a life can bear. There are readers who suspect that such a cool description drains warmth from the word. They may test the definition at a bedside. They will find that friendship in this sense is the only thing that does not lie. They may test it in a reading circle. They will find that it is the only thing that keeps the work from becoming a product. They may test it in a lovers’ room. They will find that it is the only thing that saves desire from theatricality.

The grammar of friendship returns us to the neutral. Friendship speaks without the first person taking the centre. The friend is addressed in a tone that refrains from appropriation. The neutral is the voice that lets friendship be a form and not a claim. This is why Blanchot keeps the impersonal you in view. It trains the mouth to say you without enclosing the other in a figure ready for confession or for praise. It keeps the friend near as neighbour and not as property. It protects the interval where the outside acts. 

Bataille’s writing on inner experience comes back as a resource here. He speaks of the communication that occurs without content being transmitted. Blanchot gives that communication its civic bearing. He asks readers to value it as a common good. He asks them to defend it as a right. He asks them to learn its measures as one learns a craft. The defence is not against censors. It is against the urge to produce.

He makes a short list of practices that nourish friendship in this sense. Walking without aim. Meals that end without speeches. Letters that do not seek to settle. Reading together with a right to be silent. Vigils that are for nothing. These are rites that a culture may neglect because they pay in no coin recognisable to an economy of work. They are the rites that prevent the economy from devouring what it exists to serve. The list is not nostalgic. It is strategic. It is a humane austerity that keeps the city from starving where it looks richest. The friend is the one with whom such rites can be kept without drama. The friend is the one who will not ruin the rite by insistence on clarity. The friend is the one who will leave when the hour arrives. The friend is the one who can carry insults that are true and refusals that are necessary. The friend is the one who can speak in the neutral. The friend is the one who does not become a head.

Blanchot moves once more through death and returns friendship to that ground. Friendship is what keeps the dead from being recruited. Friendship is what refuses to let mourning become a work. Friendship is what keeps names as masks and not as banners. Friendship is what keeps memory in bodies rather than in monuments that solicit power. Friendship is what keeps the secret of the dead as a form rather than as a content to be distributed. The bedside is again the school. If we cannot keep company there without claims, we will not keep company anywhere without lies. If we can keep company there, the other rooms will learn and the streets will become kinder.

He closes the movement by restating the rule in his own way. Community exposes itself by exposing itself. It is unavowable because avowal would appropriate what binds. It is inoperative because work would dissolve the bond. Literature is its school because literature is where language learns to give itself without mastery. Lovers and friends are its laboratories because they are where finite beings test limits under rules that end. The clandestine circle is its danger and its resource because it shows how quickly refusal can become command and how necessary refusal remains when States turn violent. Bataille knows excess must be spent. The only humane way to spend it is by rites that waste without victims. Those rites are play. They admit shame. They protect the secret. They end.

From all this. Keep the lamp on. Keep the count. Keep silence as a right. Keep names as masks. Keep speech as a gift that may not be received. Keep avowal out when it would become property. Keep the end visible. Keep the circle small. Keep the neutral voice. Keep the dead out of your projects. Keep attention for what is useless. Keep embarrassment without turning it into accusation. Keep friendship as a way of standing near rather than as a claim. 

These are the forms by which a city can be held open to the outside without cruelty. These are the postures by which finite beings become capable of being together without becoming a subject. These are the measures by which play does its quiet sovereign work. They are simple to state. They are hard to keep. The difficulty is the sign that they matter.

Blanchot turns to the problem of responsibility. He has already insisted that avowal ruins the bond. He has already treated confession as a theft of the secret. The question now is how one speaks responsibly without seizing the relation. He frames the problem in a quiet scene. Something has been done. Injury has occurred. A demand for speech arises. He refuses the tribunal. He refuses the formula that would turn responsibility into an identity. 

He proposes a smaller form. Testimony rather than confession. Testimony is speech that bears witness to an event while refusing to possess it. The witness says what has happened. The witness does not transform the event into an asset. The witness does not claim to close the matter by speaking. Testimony accepts failure as part of its truth. The words may not heal. The neighbour may not accept them. The circle may not find relief. The speech remains a gift in pure loss. 

This is responsibility under the rule of the unavowable. The one who harmed speaks without making himself the centre. The one harmed remains the measure. Silence is protected as a right. Forgiveness is neither demanded nor excluded. The relation is left open. The event is not converted into a work.

Bataille’s terms help. Responsibility under a general economy must spend the surplus of guilt without seeking a profitable reconciliation. Confession is profitable. It produces a new identity. It relieves the speaker at the cost of the other’s secret. Testimony wastes. It places the surplus on the table and lets it burn. The community protects the burn rather than using it to forge a new bond of debt. A small rite answers. A short statement. A moment of shared silence. A meal that follows without speech. An ending. 

This is not evasion. It is tact. It keeps the outside active. It prevents the rise of a head that would manage suffering. It keeps justice from becoming an instrument by which a group declares itself pure. The bedside remains the measure. The room where one kept vigil teaches that the true answer to an injury is presence rather than an avowal that erases the other’s distance.He then considers hospitality. The neighbour is not only the one who is dying. The neighbour is also the one who arrives unannounced. He or she stands at the door without a name that I can use as a passport. Hospitality is a test of the unavowable because it exposes the circle to intrusion. 

He rejects two extremes. The first is the refusal that protects purity. The second is the embrace that dissolves the circle into a festival without limits. He proposes a rule. A door that really opens. A threshold that is kept. A welcome that accepts opacity. A time that is finite. A departure that is not dramatic. A small number at a time. This is hospitality as play. There is a line. There is a crossing. There is a risk. There is an end. The circle is not a fortress. The circle is not a marketplace. It is a finite host. It honours the stranger by refusing to convert the arrival into content. The guest is not asked to avow. The guest is given the right to speak or to keep silence. The secret remains a form. The outside remains at work.

Bataille saw in hospitality the same economy he saw in the feast. A people that never hosts becomes cruel. A people that hosts without a rule destroys itself. The cure is expense that ends. Bread is broken. Wine is poured. Conversation is allowed to fail. Laughter is permitted. Tears are not turned into a spectacle. The visit ends on time. The door closes without resentment. Memory remains in bodies rather than in slogans. Blanchot writes this as if noting household customs. He is writing civil architecture. The small house of hospitality is the model by which a city can welcome refugees, dissenters, the poor, the mad, the foreign, without converting any into a theme or into enemies. 

The line between the rite and the day must be kept. The number must be kept. The secret must be protected. The end must occur. Only then does the city remain open without dissolving.He brings law into view again through this door. A law that respects hospitality will be one that recognises the right to opacity. It will not force avowals as conditions of entry. It will not erase names. It will not manufacture purity through tests and disclosures. It will require only what the rite itself requires. A name sufficient to greet. A time. A place. A limit. 

He knows this sounds naive against the machinery of a State. He trusts the small form. He asks that circles make hospitality real and modest where the State cannot. He asks that they defend the right to smallness. He asks that they treat the scale of the form as its ethics. He asks that they keep the head out of the doorway. The host does not become a sovereign. The guest does not become a subject. Both become neighbours for a finite time. The room does not produce a subject called we. The room exposes singular beings to an outside that no one commands.

The next movement concerns work and the day. He has used desœuvrement or idleness to name unworking as the law of community. He now needs to show how a life can move between the day of labour and the useless time of the rite without bad faith. He refuses the false choice. The life of work is not an enemy of play. The life of work becomes an enemy when it tries to produce in the place where production is forbidden. 

He describes a rhythm. Prepare. Work. Stop. Play. End. Return. This is not a schedule written in a calendar. It is a posture written in nerves. It is a courtesy written in habits. The worker who refuses to work in the bedside is not a hero. The worker who will not leave the vigil when the circle must end is not a saint. The teacher who turns every seminar into a community is a danger to both literature and to students. The friend who requires availability at all hours ruins friendship. The activist who recruits the dead commits an offence against the dead. The writer who converts every page into a statement destroys the language. 

The cure is rhythm. Work has its time. Sovereignty has its time. Each must keep to its measure. The one who tries to carry sovereignty into the day as a claim becomes cruel. The one who tries to abolish sovereignty in the name of the day becomes a manager of souls.

Bataille’s general economy clarifies the stakes. Surplus must go somewhere. If it cannot go into rites that waste without victims, it will go into violence. The city that works without play will produce cruelty. The city that plays without work will eat itself. The individual who cannot end rites will become melodramatic. The individual who cannot begin rites will become hard. Blanchot is sober. He wants a people who know how to end. He wants a people who can return to work without contempt and return to play without self importance. He wants a people who take literature seriously enough to leave the book closed when the hour is done. He wants a people who can keep vigil without feeling moral. He wants a people who can forgive without turning forgiveness into a political brand.

He pauses over forgiveness because it is the most tempting commodity a community can produce. Forgiveness gives a group the thrill of grace and the thrill of judgment in one gesture. He will not allow it to be product. He will not make it a rite. He limits it to private rooms. He leaves it in the hands of neighbours. He honours it as an event that cannot be legislated and cannot be forced. He keeps it out of the circle as a theme. He obliges circles to hold space where forgiveness is neither demanded nor excluded. He lets failure remain as truth. He lets injury remain as injury. He denies the catharsis of absolution as a group event. This austerity protects the injured from a second injury. It protects the witness from vanity. It protects the rite from capture. It protects the city from improvised sacraments that produce more shame than they heal.

He turns again to speech as promise. He has refused avowal. He now asks how to promise without claiming the future. He suggests a small word. I will come again. Not the oath of love. Not the contract of confession. A modest pledge that binds only the body. A date. An hour. A place. If broken, there is apology as testimony. If kept, there is a next rite. The circle does not become a project. The promise does not seize the other’s time in advance. 

Promises that bind bodies are good. Promises that bind souls are theft. The difference is visible to anyone who has kept vigil and anyone who has read in company. The good promise keeps the end in view. The theft promises forever. The good promise respects failure. The theft makes failure a crime. The good promise protects the secret. The theft uses the secret as collateral. Blanchot’s sentences carry this with no noise. They read like rules in a kitchen. They save lives.

He inserts a short meditation on names and memory. The names of the dead live in bodies that knew them. The city that cares for play will make room for this modest memory. It will not impose monuments as substitutes. It will not demand a public language for private grief. It will not confect unity by engraving names into stone. It will allow small circles to remember in the rooms where the names meant a face and a voice. It will permit public rites that end. It will use stone when the scale obliges and will do so without false grandeur. It will know that the dead do not wish to be used. It will know that living with the dead is the work of neighbours. It will write law that protects small rooms. It will write law that limits the will to display. It will make space and time available. It will refuse to manage grief. It will limit its own avowals. It will go quiet when appropriate. These lines are not programme. They are manners. They add up to a polity.

He returns to the clandestine circle once more. He knows that some refusals must be plotted. He knows that secrecy can be a shelter for courage. He repeats the rule. Do not let secrecy become capital. Do not let it become a badge. Do not turn refusal into identity. Do not make a head. Do not lengthen meetings beyond their pitch. Do not collect confessions. Do not publish secrets. Do not use the dead. Do not recruit tears. Keep the lamp on. Keep the line. Keep the end. 

This is not purity. It is hygiene. It prevents the circle from becoming a small State. It keeps the outside inside. It keeps the taste of sovereignty in the room without giving anyone the right to command it. It is the only way to refuse injustice without reproducing it.

He then takes one of his most delicate steps. He compares the child’s game to the most serious forms he has described. He does not sentimentalise. He observes that children know how to begin and end. They know how to keep a rule inside a fiction. They know how to distribute roles without creating a head who cannot be cut off. They know how to say again and then to leave. They know how to refuse confession. They know how to keep a secret as form rather than as content. They know how to be embarrassed without humiliation. They know how to mourn a broken toy and then to make a new rule. 

He suggests that the city could study the playground with humility. He suggests that the bedside and the lovers’ room and the reading circle and the kitchen table of hospitality are grown versions of this competence. He suggests that play in the strong sense returns us to childhood without regression. It returns us to the only school where finite beings learn to handle the outside without breaking it or themselves.

Bataille’s account of play and laughter underwrites this step. Laughter frees without doctrine. Play spends without theft. Laughter and play cut the head from idols without building new ones. Laughter and play keep the secret alive by refusing to give it content. Laughter and play create a sovereign poverty. They make us equal where equality has content only as humility and courtesy. They allow shame to be shared. They return a scale and a time to beings who would otherwise be consumed by work and by projects. 

Blanchot’s restraint is an adult version of this. He will not make a new myth out of play. He will not tell stories about the people as child. He brings play into rooms where it can be learned again in small rites that do not lie.He revisits literature under this light. The scene of the book is a game with severe rules. The writer must abandon mastery. The reader must risk failure. Both must protect the neutral voice. Both must keep silence as a right. Both must accept time as finite. Both must end. 

The residue is not a product. It is a change in posture. It is a new modesty. It is a taste for the secret as form. It is a distrust of heads. It is a slowness that can carry embarrassment without converting it into accusation. These are political effects precisely because they are not programmes. They alter the way a city handles surplus. They change the way a city uses names. They keep vigils human. They keep courts modest. They keep schools patient. They keep kitchens open.He returns to love with one last instruction. The lovers who endure are those who can let the room be a room. They are those who can keep the contract finite. They are those who can resist the superstition that words can save the relation. They are those who can burn the surplus of desire without promising what they cannot know. They are those who can accept failure without contempt. They are those who can end. 

He does not deny ecstasy. He denies the use of ecstasy as a claim. He denies the conversion of ecstasy into a property. He denies the head that ecstasy wants to produce. He asks for no heroism. He prescribes a rule. Keep the lamp on. Keep the end in view. Keep the door open and then closed. Keep avowal away from the place where presence is enough.

A reader who wants a small bundle of sentences can keep these. Responsibility without avowal is testimony. Hospitality without fusion is a door that opens and closes. Work without cruelty is rhythm. Forgiveness without spectacle belongs to neighbours. Promises that bind bodies are safe. Promises that bind souls are theft. Memory in bodies is truer than monuments. Secrecy that guards the outside is a right. 

Secrecy that hides exploitation is a crime. Circles that refuse heads remain humane. Childlike competence in rules and endings is a civic skill. Literature is the school in which these habits are trained without injury. Play names the common grammar. It preserves the outside. It wastes surplus. It ends. It leaves nothing but a way of standing beside others.

The usefulness of these pages lies in their scale. They do not ask for world transformation. They ask for rooms. They do not seek to solve death. They teach vigils. They do not cure desire. They teach a rule. They do not abolish law. They teach opacity. They do not end work. They teach rhythm. They do not purify speech. They teach the neutral. They do not erase shame. They teach how to carry it without harm. They do not prevent plots. They teach how to keep refusal from becoming command. 

They do not remove enemies. They lessen the need for them by spending excess in harmless rites. The word community becomes practical. It means the capacity to make and to end such scenes. The word unavowable becomes a protection. It keeps these scenes from being owned.Bataille’s vocabulary holds the argument in a single line. Expenditure without return is the only honest foundation for bonds among finite beings. 

If we refuse to spend in play, we will spend in cruelty. If we spend in cruelty, we will need myths to justify ourselves. If we need myths, we will recruit the dead. If we recruit the dead, we will lose the neighbour. If we lose the neighbour, we will lose ourselves. The cure is modest. Make rooms. Keep rules. Accept failure. End. Return to work with patience. Return to play without pride. Speak without owning. Be silent without shame. Keep the lamp on when it is time. Turn it off when the time is done.

Blanchot turns to Tristan and Isolde. He does not cite them to celebrate romance. He takes their legend as a laboratory of desire that picks the wrong goal. The potion binds the lovers to an absolute that wants no day after. It craves continuity without return to the separate. It wants union that abolishes time. It seeks a night without end. The tale is extreme in order to be exact. The lovers cannot submit their bond to the tests of finitude. They cannot accept a number of nights. They cannot keep a room with a lamp and a rule. 

They want what Bataille calls continuity. They want it without the lucid movements of taboo and transgression that keep human beings from destroying themselves. The lovers become a figure for the error that haunts every bond. The error is to mistake the sovereign moment for a right. The error is to make ecstasy into a destiny.Blanchot reads the legend as an allegory of avowal. The love that must be declared becomes a command. The declaration demands proof. The proof must be repeated. The repeat raises the pitch until the only adequate sign of truth seems to be death. The leap into death is prepared by the logic of avowal itself. If love is a property then the only guarantee of ownership is the destruction of every rival claim. Work returns here in its most tragic form. The bond becomes a task to be confirmed. The lovers can no longer consent to failure. They can no longer consent to embarrassment. They can no longer accept intervals of indifference. They can no longer accept the neutrality that protects the secret. They must become pure. They must become one. This conversion of desire into project is what the legend makes visible. The potion only hardens a choice that began earlier. The lovers said forever and thereby destroyed the forms that allow love to breathe.

Bataille’s excess must be spent. If it is not spent in rites that end it will demand expenditure in the one rite that cannot return us to the day. The legend chooses the worst economy. It pays everything into a final account. It refuses the sovereign lightness of useless time by insisting on the absolute. It demands the sacred without taboo. It chooses continuity without allowing discontinuous beings to survive. 

Blanchot wants the reader to see that the legend not only teaches a private lesson. It teaches a civic one. The city that mistakes avowal for truth will make martyrs of lovers. The city that makes permanence the only sign of value will teach citizens to despise endings. It will breed heads that cannot be cut off. It will recruit the dead. The cure is not to mock passion. The cure is to give passion forms that waste and end.He returns to the bedside as measure. Tristan and Isolde are not scorned for wanting the summit. They are corrected by the vigil. The bedside shows how to keep company with the absolute without trying to make it a work. The bedside shows how to accept the end without spite. The bedside shows that love’s truth is presence rather than avowal. 

Death is the real absolute here. Death does not need our help. The only human art that does not betray the absolute is to keep watch without claiming it. Lovers who learn this will not demand forever. They will demand a room with a rule. They will count. They will end. They will refuse to own what can only appear as a gift in pure loss. The legend becomes a caution for small rooms. The potion is the symbol of slogans that carry too much promise. The correction is a lamp and a number and a neutral voice that guards desire from destroying itself.

The second movement takes up the death-defying leap. In the legend this is the final gesture that crowns excess with glory. In Blanchot’s analysis it is the temptation that shadows every play of transgression. To cross a limit is intoxicating. The body feels the cut of taboo as an edge. The leap puts the whole subject at stake and that risk tastes like liberation. Bataille names that taste and does not shame it. He also refuses to turn it into a programme. 

Transgression only communicates truth when it preserves taboo. If the leap becomes a rule it abolishes the condition of its own sense. It becomes an addiction. It becomes a head. It becomes a court that judges degrees of purity by the height of jumps. The legend is the story of a leap that tries to abolish the law rather than to pass through it lucidly and return. The more modest rites that Blanchot has defended show the other way. Cross and come back. Spend and end. Bear shame. Refuse fusion. Refuse avowal. Keep the secret as form rather than content.

He makes the leap civic. Revolt is a leap. It is sometimes required. It often corrupts itself by loving the state of exception. The clandestine group believes it will return to day. It discovers it wants to live only by night. The mask becomes a face. The secret becomes capital. The refusal becomes a doctrine. The leap keeps leaping and soon needs a spectacle to justify itself. Blanchot has seen this. 

He answers with desœuvrement. Unworking is the law that brings a circle back from the edge. A leap is legitimate only as play. It is an hour of uselessness. It cannot be a regime. The proof that a leap was sovereign is that it ended. The proof that a leap was counterfeit is that it demanded continuation. If a group cannot stop it has already become a head. The antidote is to bind the leap to small forms. The bedside does not become a method for living. The lovers’ room does not become a church. The reading group does not become a party. Each leap ends. The memory remains in bodies. No platform is founded.

Bataille offers a picture that helps. The acrobat who flies and returns. The crowd holds breath and then exhales. The art lies in the return. The true feat is to come back to the same small platform. The true lesson is to bow and leave. The false acrobat wants to remain suspended. He will fall. The false crowd wants a miracle. It will demand new victims when gravity corrects desire. 

Blanchot therefore drills the habit of ending into every page. It is not a moral scruple. It is a structural necessity if human beings are to keep transgression from eating their lives. He will allow a leap when it keeps the taboo alive. He will allow a leap when the head does not grow. He will allow a leap when the city is protected rather than intoxicated.

He then places the leap beside eroticism again. Eroticism is a leap only when it remains under a rule. Bodies approach the limit of loss of self. They do not abolish difference. They do not abolish speech. They do not abolish the right to opacity. They do not abolish the end. The leap is held by courtesy. This is why shame is an ally. Where there is no shame there is no taboo. Where there is no taboo there is no eroticism. There is only violence or boredom. The rule and the blush preserve the pitch. 

Tristan and Isolde take the leap and abolish the stage. They abolish the curtain. They abolish the audience and the day. Blanchot’s lovers learn to play within the limits that save them. Duras’s room becomes the example. Stay awake. Keep the light. Do not avow. End. The leap into the long night happens in miniature. It happens safely. It leaves life intact.The third movement draws a line between traditional community and elective community. Blanchot sketches the inherited forms that modern critics have often praised or derided. The village. The parish. The clan. The household extended across generations. These forms bind by birth and place. They carry rites that spend surplus. They conserve limits. They keep secrets by custom. They also fix identities. They also produce heads. They also transfigure the dead into banners. They also turn avowal into coercion. 

He refuses nostalgia. He refuses contempt. He asks what can be learned and what must be refused. The lesson to keep is the art of ending. The village knows how to end a feast. The household knows how to end a vigil. The parish knows when the bell is silent. The lesson to refuse is the theology of belonging. The clan demands avowal as essence. The parish demands confession as identity. The household asks the dead to be a law. These uses destroy the neighbour and recruit the secret into power.

Elective community is the modern answer. Choose your circle. Choose your creed. Choose your school. Choose your movement. Choice frees the self from birth. Choice risks a worse head. The elective group often turns decision into purity. It must enforce avowals to preserve its border. It must produce work to justify itself. It must build a platform and a calendar. It must create a dead to name. It quickly loses the modest skills of the village. It does not know how to end. It does not know how to keep silence. It does not know how to refuse heads. It treats secrets as currency. It treats shame as a weapon. It treats hospitality as recruitment. It treats reading as doctrine. It treats vigils as rallies. 

Blanchot is not surprised. He is not resigned. He proposes a graft. Keep what the traditional form knew about finitude and about limits. Refuse its theology of belonging. Keep what the elective form knows about freedom from birth. Refuse its hunger for avowal and for product. The graft is fragile. It takes the humble forms we have been tracing. Small rites. Clear rules. Ends. Secrets as forms. Names as masks. Speech as a gift that may not be received. Refusal of heads. Refusal of work in the rite. Refusal to recruit the dead. A law of hospitality that opens and closes. A rhythm between day and sovereign time. A right to opacity.

Bataille’s economy ties the graft together. Traditional forms spent surplus. They often spent it on victims. Elective forms often deny surplus and then spend it in cruelty. The graft spends surplus in play. It saves the city from both defects. It wastes time on what is useless but necessary. It keeps neighbours near. It lowers the temperature of politics without making politics timid. It gives revolt forms that end rather than addictions that seek miracles. It allows literature and friendship to nourish the day without founding churches. It lets eroticism school citizens in tact rather than in tragedy.

Blanchot brings law once more into the frame to make the civic implications plain. Law that learns from traditional community will honour local rites and the right to smallness. Law that learns from elective community will protect freedom of movement and association. Law that learns from the unavowable will avoid forcing avowal as a ticket to belonging. It will cultivate opacity as a right in ritual spaces. It will protect the rooms in which neighbours keep vigil and read and love and eat. It will limit monuments. It will limit spectacle. It will keep officials from becoming heads in places where heads have no honour to claim. This is not utopian. It is administrative modesty. It is prudence armed with a theory of excess.

He returns to names and memory to show the difference between the two regimes of community. Traditional forms often carry the names of the dead with piety. They also freeze them into law. Elective forms often invent pantheons. They also consume them. The unavowable asks for names to remain in bodies and in letters. It invites public rites that end and that refuse rhetoric. It invites private rites that work without supervision. It asks that the dead remain neighbours and not officers. It asks that mourning remain unproductive. It asks that speech be testimony rather than confession. It asks that the secret be the form of love and of friendship. These requests are not romantic. They are the costs of keeping the outside alive in a city that would otherwise become all work.

He closes the comparison by bringing the child’s rule back. Traditional community knows games. Elective community pretends to know only projects. The graft is the recovery of games under conditions of freedom. We do not return to the village. We rebuild the capacity to begin and to end. We retain the right to choose our circles. We deny ourselves the right to own them. We remember that the only proof that a community is not a head is that anyone can leave and that the rite ends on time. We remember that friendship is an art rather than a confession. We remember that literature keeps the mouth honest by refusing to let the voice become a person. We remember that desire needs a lamp and not a vow. We remember that rebellion needs a bedtime.

Through the lens of Bataille the three sections condense into one counsel. Do not turn the summit into a State. Do not turn the leap into a regime. Do not turn community into property. Spend. Risk. End. Honour the taboo that keeps you human. Cross it with tact. Refuse fusion. Refuse avowal that would make a truth into a programme. Choose circles with humility. Graft freedom to small forms. Keep the neighbour near as neighbour and not as a pretext. Keep the dead outside the office. Keep the head out of the room. Keep the secret alive as a form. Keep speech as a gift. Keep silence as a right. Keep play as the art that wastes excess without victims.

A reader who wants a small bundle of sentences may keep these. Tristan and Isolde show what happens when love becomes a work. The leap shows what happens when transgression abolishes taboo. Traditional and elective communities show what happens when belonging is either enforced by birth or enforced by avowal. The corrections are the same. Rites that end. Laws of hospitality that open and close. Secrets that protect the outside. Reading as a school for speech in pure loss. Lovers who refuse to avow. Friends who stand near without owning. Revolts that burn bright and stop. Names that are kept as masks and not as flags. These are the forms by which a city of finite beings handles the absolute without injuring itself. These are the postures by which desire is saved from tragedy and politics is saved from cruelty. These are the games we must learn again if we want to keep living as neighbours rather than as subjects of a head that cannot be cut off.

Blanchot turns to the destruction of society and to apathy. He observes a drift. Work expands. Spectacle multiplies. Surveillance spreads. Speech becomes programme. Rites that spend without return atrophy. The city fills its time with messages that insist on avowal and with tasks that insist on product. When surplus cannot be wasted in harmless forms it turns inward. People protect themselves by dulling attention. They become indifferent. They prefer the glow of screens to the risk of presence. They confuse contact with company. They learn to speak as if speech must always explain. They learn to keep a face ready for performance. They forget how to end. This is apathy in the strict sense. Not a feeling. A civic failure to maintain forms that allow exposure without harm.He refuses nostalgia. He does not want a return to an organic society. He sees the old forms clearly. They are bound by myth. They are bound by blood. They are often bound by creating enemies. What they did possess was a craft for ending. A feast ended. A vigil ended. A day ended and a holy time began. Then a holy time ended and work resumed. The present loses endings and loses beginnings. It replaces them with flows. Work flows. Media flows. Outrage flows. Nothing stops. When nothing stops, play is impossible. There is no line to cross. There is no risk to consent to. There is only the churn of stimulation. The nervous system tries to survive. It chooses apathy. The body goes cold to avoid burning. The city appears busy. It is starving.

Blanchot’s correction is small and exact. Desœuvrement is not apathy. Unworking is not paralysis. Unworking is the legal form of uselessness. It is the rule that carves out time which cannot be made to pay. Apathy is the collapse of attention. Unworking is the concentration of attention under a rule that refuses product. The difference appears in rooms. Apathy turns toward screens and dreams. Unworking turns toward neighbours. Apathy overheats with information and freezes in feeling. Unworking wastes time on presence and accepts embarrassment. 

Apathy fears endings because endings feel like loss. Unworking loves endings because endings protect the rite. He urges the reader to test the difference at a bedside. There, apathy is cruelty. There, unworking is the only honour. The same test holds in a reading circle and in a lovers’ room and in a kitchen that hosts strangers. Where apathy wins, people chatter or flee. Where unworking wins, people keep silence when nothing can be helped and remain.

Bataille’s general economy turns this into a single law. Surplus must be spent. If it is not spent in play it will be spent cruelly or it will rot into apathy. The destruction of society is a phrase for this rot. It is the moment when the city forgets how to waste. It forgets how to celebrate without recruitment. It forgets how to mourn without programme. It forgets how to read without doctrine. It forgets how to love without a brand. It forgets how to revolt without a permanent emergency. It forgets how to give hospitality that opens and closes. It forgets how to allow opacity. It forgets how to protect secrets that guard the outside. The remedy is not a revolution of noise. The remedy is the modest revival of forms that waste well. He insists on this humility. It is not strategy. It is anatomy. Only small organs can oxygenate a large body.

He names the signs by which apathy can be mistaken for peace. Tranquillity without embarrassment. Consensus without failure. Speech without risk. Public rites that do not end. Private scenes converted into content. Mourning that recruits the dead. Care that demands confession. Communities that announce themselves with manifestos. Leaders who present themselves as heads that cannot be cut off. In each case the outside is absent. In each case the secret is stolen. In each case surplus is banked and then spent against the weak. The correction is to restore the art of the interval. The line between work and play. The line between speech and silence. The line between welcome and departure. The line between name and mask. The line between confidence and confession. The line between revolt and regime. Cities that keep lines can spend without victims. Cities that lose lines must either become cruel or fall asleep.

From social drift and civic hygiene Blanchot turns to the absolutely feminine. The title is risky. He knows it. He writes to keep a figure from becoming a myth. The feminine here is not a biology. It is not a list of roles. It is a name for the neutral that protects the outside. He asks the reader to remember the impersonal you that Duras keeps in the room. He asks the reader to remember the woman who commands wakefulness without claiming love. He asks the reader to remember the neutral voice he has praised as the civic tone that refuses to become a head. 

The absolutely feminine is his figure for that neutral. It is a way to write the power that protects exposure without owning it. It is not a subject. It is a function. It is the guard who forbids confession where confession would become property. It is the host who opens and closes. It is the lover who refuses to turn desire into a programme. It is the friend who will say what is so without drinking from the well of avowal. It is the writer’s voice when writing abandons mastery and offers speech as a gift.He knows that such a figure has been abused. 

Philosophers have often made the feminine carry the burden of otherness. They have split a world into active and passive and then placed passivity on a woman. Blanchot does not repeat this libel. He detaches the neutral from a person. He lets a practice carry the name. He shows that neutrality is an act. To refrain from avowal is an act. To guard a limit is an act. To accept failure is an act. To keep silence as a right is an act. To refuse to recruit the dead is an act. To hold a vigil without speech is an act. 

None of these are passivity. They are restraints that protect truth. They require strength. They require taste. They require forms. The absolutely feminine is thus the posture that saves rooms from becoming courts. It is the tone that saves love from itself. It is the manner that saves writing from becoming doctrine.

Bataille’s eroticism is assent to life up to the point of death. The companion of such assent is not domination. It is tact. The correct term for tact in these pages is the neutral. The neutral is the rule that keeps eroticism from becoming violence. It is the hand that removes avowal. It is the mouth that withholds more than it gives. It is the eye that watches without owning. It is the body that accepts the limit. The feminine is a name for this tact because a long history has seen women practise it under pain. 

He draws two consequences. First, the neutral is the courage to disappoint by refusing the spectacle of truth. Lovers who refuse to avow appear cold. Writers who refuse to reveal appear hermetic. Hosts who end the feast appear stingy. Friends who protect secrets appear aloof. The neutral chooses the appearance of cold to save the substance of care. 

Second, the neutral is the grammar of equality when equality is not a claim but a manner. The neutral allows those present to be together without hierarchy because no one owns the scene. The neutral prohibits heads. It distributes initiative. It refuses to produce a subject that would stand for all. It keeps the room small enough for attention. It keeps asymmetry from becoming command. It keeps symmetry from becoming sameness. It binds and it frees.

From this figure Blanchot passes into the finale. The unavowable community. The pages do not spring a surprise. They collect a practice. Community is unavowable because avowal would appropriate what binds. Community is inoperative because work would dissolve the bond into a product. Community is finite because beings are finite. Community includes the exteriority that excludes it because only exposure to an outside can prevent fusion. Community keeps the secret as a form because content would become capital. Community is kept by speech given in pure loss because reciprocity would become a ledger. Community ends because permanence would corrupt the rite. 

He lets four rooms speak once more. The bedside says: do not let me die alone. Say little. Keep company. Do not use me. Do not gather a party in my name. The lovers’ room says: keep the lamp on. Do not avow. Count. End. Do not make a church. The reading circle says: let the text be a rule. Speak if you must. Fail with dignity. End on time. Do not found a school. The clandestine circle says: refuse to become a regime. Refuse to collect confessions. Refuse heads. Spend courage. Stop. Each room instructs the city in a small language. Keep doors that open and close. Write a law that protects opacity. Honour names as masks. Limit monuments. Limit spectacle. Prevent officials from becoming heads in rooms where heads have no honour to claim. Defend scale. Defend endings. Defend silence as a right. Defend speech as a gift.

Bataille knows excess presses on every life. Without play it breaks systems. With play it brightens everything. Play is the technical word for rites that waste well. It is the cure for cruelty. It is the cure for apathy. It is the cure for the politics of permanent emergency. It is the cure for the economy of permanent productivity. It is the cure for art when art becomes content. It is the cure for love when love becomes brand. It is the cure for mourning when mourning becomes fuel. Play is the way to let the sacred appear without myth. The sacred here names nothing supernatural. It names those moments when a life is not a tool. A city that cannot sustain such moments will trespass against its own.

Blanchot ends by returning to friendship and writing so that no reader will mistake the tone for a withdrawal. Friendship is what we can do. Writing is what many of us can share. Friendship is the habit of standing near without owning. Writing is the habit of giving speech without mastery. Together they train the neutral. Together they train endings. Together they resist apathy. Together they spend the surplus of attention without victims. Together they protect the secret as a form. Together they train the tongue not to demand avowal. Together they make rooms where the outside acts without spectacle. Together they allow revolt to remain humane when revolt is required. Together they keep the city from freezing.I gather the argument as a conclusion. 

I keep the word play so that the claims remain practical. Play is the name for lucid expenditure under a rule. It is how finite beings taste continuity without lying. It is the form of uselessness that keeps a city alive. In Blanchot’s pages play is the grammar of the unavowable community. The bedside is play at the edge of the day. Lovers are play that protects desire from becoming programme. Reading is play that protects language from becoming command. Hospitality is play that protects borders from becoming prisons and from becoming advertising. Clandestine refusal is play that prevents revolt from becoming regime. Work is made humane by rhythm and by endings learned in play. 

Law is made modest by learning to protect opacity. Names are made gentle by being kept as masks. Memory is kept clean by refusing to recruit the dead. Forgiveness is kept honest by staying out of public rites. Secrets are kept safe by being treated as forms rather than as contents. The neutral is honoured as the absolutely feminine in the precise sense that it is the courage to protect exposure from appropriation. Apathy is recognised as the rot that begins when play dies. The destruction of society is seen as the outcome of that rot. The correction is modest. Make rooms. Keep rules. End.

It's kind of easy. If someone is dying: be there. Say little. Stay until others relieve you. End. If you love: agree a rule. Keep a lamp. Refuse avowal. Count nights. End. If you read: pick a work. Sit for an hour. Accept silence. Accept failure. End. If you host: open the door. Provide bread. Keep the right to opacity. Say good night. End. If you resist: meet in a small number. Refuse heads. Spend courage. Publish less than you can. Stop. If you rule: protect the rooms. Protect opacity. Protect the right to end. Limit monuments. Limit spectacle. Keep officials out of rites. If you teach: defend silence. Defend failure. Guard the neutral voice. End on time. These are not pieties. They are the minimal forms by which a city spends its necessary surplus without cruelty.

The last word belongs to Bataille because it names the risk that makes these forms more than politeness. Sovereignty is the time in which a human being is not a tool. It appears whenever a rule makes uselessness possible without harm. It appears in laughter that does not mock. It appears in tears that do not recruit. It appears in meals where no one sells a story. It appears in letters that do not demand reply. It appears in bedsides where nothing is explained. It appears in lovers’ rooms where no one promises what no one can promise. It appears in reading circles that leave with nothing in their hands and with much that steadies them. It appears in small refusals that keep large powers from becoming heads. 

Blanchot’s unavowable community is the civic art of making such times appear often enough to keep a people human. Play is the right name. Keep it near. Use it as a test. If a bond cannot be played it will become a project. If a project cannot end it will become a head. If a head cannot be cut off it will demand victims. If victims are found the city will devour itself. The cure is simple and exact. Spend. Guard the line. Cross. Blush. End. Return to the day. Repeat when needed.