Social Intersections 07 (an example)

At the center of his short ‘story’, The Madness of the Day, Maurice Blanchot describes a minor occurrence:

Outdoors, I had a brief vision: a few steps away from me, just at the corner of the street I was about to leave, a woman with a baby carriage had stopped, I could not see her very well, she was manoeuvering the carriage to get it through the door. At that moment a man who I had not seen approaching went in through that door. He had already stepped across the sill when he moved backward and came out again. While he stood next to the door, the baby carriage, passing in front of him, lifted slightly to cross the sill, and the young woman, after raising her head to look at him, also disappeared inside.¹

This very ordinary event prompts a profound moment of realisation:

This brief scene excited me to the point of delirium. I was undoubtedly not able to explain it to myself fully and yet I was sure of it, that I had seized the moment when the day, having stumbled against a real event, would begin hurrying towards its end. Here it comes, I said to myself, the end is coming; something is happening, the end is beginning. I was seized by joy.²

The scene and its interpretation take shape as a kind of Zen koan, a conceptual puzzle that pushes beyond the limits of rational explanation – somehow both asserting the revelatory potential of the everyday and acknowledging the absurdity of revelatory investment in ordinary happenings. Notably, there is no effort to properly account for the event’s perceived significance. The narrator himself cannot adequately explain the association. In this manner, the passage establishes a curious tension between a sense of poetic possibility and a sense of radical incommensurability – indeed the two become entwined and mutually imbricated.