Faraday, Blanchot and Gorz: the day the centre gave way

Michael Faraday was born on 22 September 1791 at Newington Butts, south of the Thames, the son of a blacksmith who had come down from the north of England and belonged to a small dissenting congregation called the Sandemanians. He was apprenticed to a bookbinder at fourteen and read the books he bound. His mathematics never reached trigonometry. He is the reason the word "field" means what it means in physics, and the reason that, by the end of the century, the question "what is a thing?" had a new and unsettling answer.

One hundred and sixteen years later, on 22 September 1907, Maurice Blanchot was born at Quain, a hamlet in the commune of Devrouze in Saône-et-Loire. He prefaced his books, for half a century, with a single sentence in place of a biography: "Maurice Blanchot, novelist and critic, was born in 1907. His life is wholly devoted to literature and to the silence unique to it." He gave no interviews, avoided the camera for the rest of his life, and was seen in public, by most accounts, once after the war, in the streets of Paris in May 1968. The photograph at the head of this piece is from an identity document of 1927. There are very few others.

And on 22 September 2007, at Vosnon in the Aube, André Gorz and his wife Dorine, who had been together for fifty-eight years, ended their lives by lethal injection, side by side, at their own decision. They were found two days later. Gorz was eighty-four. Dorine had lived for years with adhesive arachnoiditis, a progressive and untreatable condition of the spinal membranes that Finn Bowring, in his obituary for Radical Philosophy, traces to lipiodol, an oil-based contrast agent injected into her spine for an X-ray decades before. Gorz's last book, published the previous year, was a seventy-five-page letter to her.

The three do not belong to one school and would not have read one another. What they share is a manoeuvre. Each removed a centre that everyone had assumed a thing needed in order to be a thing: the hard particle at the heart of matter, the author at the heart of the work, the self-sufficient individual at the heart of a life. Two lesser figures born on the day, Paolo Ruffini in 1765 and Oleksander Potebnia in 1835, did the same to the algebraic formula and to the word. The date is a coincidence; the pattern is worth a piece, because in every case the centre, once removed, turned out to have been doing less work than its defenders feared and more than its abolishers admitted.

Faraday's nucleus vanishes#

Faraday's discoveries are on every syllabus: electromagnetic rotation in 1821, induction in 1831, the laws of electrolysis, the magneto-optical effect and diamagnetism in 1845. What matters for philosophy is not the list but the picture he was driven to by experiments he could not otherwise explain. Newton's successors had modelled electricity and magnetism as forces acting instantaneously across empty space between point centres, a mathematical scheme that worked. Faraday, tracing iron filings and the behaviour of induced currents, came to believe that the "lines of force" running through the space between bodies were the physical reality, and the bodies at their ends a secondary matter.

He said so most plainly in a paper the Philosophical Magazine printed in 1844, "A speculation touching Electric Conduction and the Nature of Matter", which took up Roger Boscovich's eighteenth-century proposal that atoms are not extended lumps but mere centres of power. Faraday's own gloss is the sentence to keep: "To my mind, therefore, the a or nucleus vanishes, and the substance consists of the powers." Matter, on this view, is everywhere its forces reach, which is everywhere.

Maxwell, who turned this into equations in the 1850s and 1860s, was careful to say what he had done. In the preface to the Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism of 1873 he wrote that Faraday's "method of conceiving the phenomena was also a mathematical one, though not exhibited in the conventional form of mathematical symbols", and then the sentence that has been quoted at every Faraday anniversary since: "Faraday, in his mind's eye, saw lines of force traversing all space where the mathematicians saw centres of force attracting at a distance: Faraday saw a medium where they saw nothing but distance." The medium, the luminiferous aether, did not survive 1905. The field did, and it is now the basic furniture of physics, with particles reinterpreted as its excitations. Whether that vindicates a metaphysics of relations over substances, as the structural realists argue, or merely shows that physics is indifferent to the question, is still fought over; and Faraday himself, a devout man, thought he was describing God's handiwork rather than dissolving it. The line from his 1844 speculation to the return of Schelling's nature-philosophy in recent metaphysics is not straight, but it exists: the Romantic philosophers of nature had been talking about polarity and force as the ground of matter for a generation before Faraday found the experiments that made the talk respectable.

He gave the Royal Institution's Christmas Lectures nineteen times between 1827 and 1860, declined a knighthood, and, when asked to advise on chemical weapons for the Crimean War, declined that too.

Blanchot removes the author, and keeps a past#

Blanchot's dissolution was of a different centre. He went to Strasbourg in 1926 to read philosophy and there met Emmanuel Levinas, a friendship that ran for the rest of both lives and through which, in the late 1920s, he came to Heidegger's Being and Time before most of France had heard of it. The 1930s are the difficulty. He wrote for the nationalist and far-right press, for Combat and L'Insurgé in 1936 and 1937, and edited the foreign-affairs pages of the Journal des débats; the articles were violently anti-German and, on the standard reading, anti-parliamentary, and some carried the anti-Semitic idiom of that milieu. Blanchot broke with all of it during the Occupation, was very nearly shot by a German firing squad in June 1944, an episode he described fifty years later in L'Instant de ma mort, and after the war moved in the other direction entirely: he was a principal author of the Manifesto of the 121 in 1960, defending the right of French conscripts to refuse service in Algeria, and in 1968 wrote unsigned tracts for the students' and writers' action committee calling for "a communism without communism".

The books that made him were written in between, largely from the village of Èze above the Mediterranean, where he lived in near-total seclusion from 1947 for a decade: L'Espace littéraire (1955), Le Livre à venir (1959), L'Entretien infini (1969), L'Écriture du désastre (1980), with the récits, Thomas l'Obscur (1941) and L'Arrêt de mort (1948), as their laboratory. The claim running through all of them is that to write is to lose the power to say "I". The writer does not express a self; the work, once it exists, is what Blanchot called the neutral, a murmur belonging to no one, and the author is the person the work has already dismissed. Death, in his account, is not the heroic possibility of Heidegger's Being-towards-death but an impersonal dying one cannot own: "I do not die, I have fallen from the power to die." Levinas's il y a, the anonymous rumble of being when all beings have been subtracted, is the philosophical cousin of this, and the two men borrowed from each other for sixty years.

This is where the day's thread enters French thought. Foucault's essay "La pensée du dehors", printed in June 1966 in the number of Critique devoted to Blanchot, took from him the formula that the being of language appears only where the subject disappears; that is the outside of the title. Barthes's "The Death of the Author" followed in 1967, Derrida wrote Parages around Blanchot's récits, and Jean-Luc Nancy's La Communauté désœuvrée provoked La Communauté inavouable (1983), Blanchot's late attempt, in dialogue with Bataille, to say what a community without a common essence could be. Our piece on Derrida, the trace and machine writing carries the argument forward; Bataille's side of the friendship is in the entry for 10 September.

The friction is obvious and Blanchot's critics have pressed it hard. A writer who theorised the disappearance of the author had an author's past, dated and signed, and the 1930s articles did not vanish into the neutral. His defenders reply that the theory was in part a way of living with that fact, and that the political engagements after 1958 were the acts of a man who knew precisely who he was. Both can be true. What cannot be said is that removing the author from the work removes the man from history.

Gorz: the self that was never sufficient#

Gorz was born Gerhart Hirsch in Vienna in February 1923, the son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, was sent to school in Switzerland after the Anschluss, and stayed. He met Sartre in Lausanne in 1946 and Dorine Keir, an Englishwoman working as an au pair, at a poker game there in September 1947. They married in 1949. In Paris he wrote for Paris-Presse and L'Express as Michel Bosquet, took the surname Gorz from a town on the Italian-Slovene border, joined the editorial committee of Les Temps modernes in 1961, and in 1964 was among the founders of Le Nouvel Observateur, from which he retired in 1983.

The books fall into three phases, as Bowring lays them out. The first is Sartrean: Le Traître (1958), an autobiographical essay with a preface by Sartre. The second is strategic, aimed at trade unionists: Stratégie ouvrière et néocapitalisme (1964), which gave the European left the phrase non-reformist reform. The third, and the one for which he is read now, begins with Écologie et liberté (1977) and Adieux au prolétariat (1980), which told the left that the industrial working class was no longer the subject of history and that the point was to reduce work, not to glorify it; it runs through Métamorphoses du travail (1988) and Capitalisme, socialisme, écologie (1991). Gorz argued for a guaranteed income and a managed reduction of working time, and, drawing on Marcuse and Ivan Illich, for a norm of sufficiency: the capacity to say "enough" as the basis of an autonomous life rather than a sacrifice made for the planet. The degrowth movement claims him, with some justice. The dispute about what recognition at work is owed, which Axel Honneth has carried on in a different idiom, is his dispute too.

Lettre à D. Histoire d'un amour (2006) is where the day's thread reaches him. Le Traître had presented Dorine as a supporting figure in the formation of a self its author regarded as his own project. The letter, written when she was eighty-two and he eighty-three, says that this was false; that everything he had made had been made with her and could not be accounted for by a story about him alone. Bowring's judgement is severe and, I think, right: Gorz's compulsion to turn lived experience into written form had always put a distance between him and what he loved, and the letter, however beautiful, was one more instance of the malady. "In their joint death," Bowring writes, "this incurable malady of the writer was finally put to rest." One passage has been quoted more than any other: "Neither of us wants to outlive the other." They did not.

Ruffini's impossibility, Potebnia's inner form#

Paolo Ruffini was born on 22 September 1765 at Valentano in the Papal States and spent his life in Modena as a physician and professor of mathematics. In 1799 he published a book with a title that is also its thesis: a general theory of equations in which it is shown that the algebraic solution of the general equation of degree greater than four is impossible. He was saying that the centre everyone had been looking for since Cardano, a formula for the quintic, was not there, and to prove it he invented, without the word, the elements of group theory. He sent the work to Lagrange twice and got no answer. Only Cauchy, in a letter of 1821, told him it proved the impossibility "completely", and Abel, who supplied the missing step, is the name on the theorem. Ruffini, a conservative Catholic, had refused the oath to the French-backed republic in 1798 and lost his chair for it, practised medicine through the interval and returned as rector after Napoleon's fall. His philosophical writing is thin and pious: a defence of the immateriality of the soul against Erasmus Darwin in 1806 and, in 1821, a book of critical reflections on Laplace's Essai philosophique sur les probabilités, objecting to the reduction of moral certainty to a calculus of chances. The objection has been made again since by people who never read him.

Oleksander Potebnia was born on the same day in 1835 on a family farm near Havrylivka in the Poltava region and spent his career at Kharkiv, where he died in December 1891. Thought and Language (1862) took Humboldt's idea that language is an activity rather than a finished product and gave it a structure: every word has an external form, a meaning and an inner form, the image or perception through which the meaning was first grasped and which the word retains whether or not its speakers notice. The consequence is that no speaker owns a word's meaning; through the inner form, as Potebnia put it, the objective world is subjectivised, and the subject does the same to itself. Vygotsky drew on him directly, the Kharkiv school of literary theory was built on him, the Russian Symbolists treated him as a founder, and Shklovsky's Art as Device opens by attacking him, which is a form of tribute. He belongs on this page because his account of the word, like Blanchot's of the work, locates meaning in something that passes through the speaker rather than issuing from a centre in the speaker's head.

Also on the day#

The Philosophicum Lech opens today in the Vorarlberg and runs to 27 September under the title "Betreutes Denken", supervised thinking; its Tractatus essay prize goes on Friday to Maria-Sibylla Lotter. The autumn conference diary is here; the last instalment of this series is here.