Date: Sat, 30 Sep 1995 16:28:07 -0400
Subject: Re: MB: Les yeux sans regard des statues...


Reply to message from destanley-AT-teaser.fr of Fri, 29 Sep
>
>Unfortunately, I do not have access to this american edition "The Gaze of
>Orpheus". It just would not exist in France and "L'espace litteraire" does
>have a chapter with this title only its about ten pages long. Hardly enough
>to make a book. (Who decided to give that name to the book? What, did they
>think "gaze" would make it sound all the more american-academic, hip,
>post-structuralist, blah, blah?)
>
>But there is a section that does interest me in L'espace literaire that I
>believe is in this "Gaze..." edition and on which I've already posted a
>comment. It was on the question of the cadavre. This certainly involves the
>"gaze" and is located both at the begining p.28-32 and in the annex on
>pages 341-355 (french editions).
>
>It is a difficult text, and certainly one in which the question of the
>image vs. text is discussed in a interesting way. For one, we have a
>largely textual reading of the image, in which it is the body of a cadavre
>lying before us, however neither someone, nor something, and yet neither
>not-someone, nor not-something. A quote (I'm sorry - again I have no access
>to english texts):
>
>"Quelque chose est la devant nous, qui n'est ni le vivant en personne, ni
>une realite quelconque, ni le meme que celui qui etait en vie, ni un autre,
>ni autre chose. Ce qui est la, dans le calme absolu de ce qui a trouve son
>lieu, ne realise pourtant pas la verite d'etre pleinement ici. La mort
>suspend la relation avec le lieu, bien que le mort s'y appuie pesamment
>comme a la seule base qui lui reste. Justement, cette base manque, le lieu
>est en defaut, le cadavre n'est pas a sa place. Ou est-il? Il n'est pas ici
>et pourtant il n'est pas ailleurs; nulle part? mais c'est qu'alors nulle
>part est ici. La presence cadaverique etablit un rapport entre ici et nulle
>part."
>
>It is this last line that interests me. "The cadaveresque presence
>establishes a relation between here and nowhere" - which seems to me to say
>much about the novel "L'arret de mort" which is again a relation between
>the "arrestation" of death (stopping it up - laying a cadavre there on the
>page - keeping death from doing its work) and death sentence. Or
>disappearance if you will. This is of course lost in translation but you
>all know that. The cadavre however is not. It is itself this (dis)appearing
>loss, like the image. Something is there that in its presentation is
>disapearing in this Orpheus gaze. All the much more there, then.
>
>The image, then, like the text, would be somehow common in this work of
>(dis)appearance. Compare with Thomas' regard in Chapters I and II in Thomas
>l'obscur.
>
>But elsewhere, as in L'entretien infini, "Parler ce n'est pas voir". Alors,
>what is going on here? Of course Blanchot cannot make the image the same
>work of the text, and even in L'espace litteraire he says as much.
>=46ascination is not necessarily the absolute solitude of the text. "La
>parole et l'erreur sont en familiarité..." and the following page,
>"....comme si nous etions detournes du visible, sans etre retournes vers
>l'invisible. Je ne sais si ce que je dis la dit quelque chose. Mais c'est
>simple cependant. Parler, ce n'est pas voir. Parler libere la pensee de
>cette exigence optique qui, dans la tradition occidentale, soumet depuis
>des millenaires notre approche des choses et nous invite a penser sous la
>garantie de la lumiere ou sous la menace de l'absence de lumiere. Je vous
>laisse recenser tous les mots par lesquels il est suggere que, pour vrai
>dire, il faut penser selon la mesure de l'oeil." (L'entretien infini,
>p.37-8).
>
>But doesn't Blanchot himself liberate this optical tradition that wants to
>see everything either in the pure light of reason (idea as pure presence)
>or to see error (and la parole) as simply the absence of light (and hence
>just another thing to be seen - seen as what is not-there: the invisible
>again as presence, just missing).
>Such a liberation - a liberation of the error, the neither to-be-seen, nor
>invisible - would be his comment on the cadavre. Non? Hence an image,
>albeit a particular one.
>
>But again he writes: "Ecrire, ce n'est pas donner la parole a voir....et
>voir, c'est se servir de la separation, non pas comme mediatrice, mais
>comme un moyen d'immediation, comme im-mediatrice. En ce sens aussi, voir,
>c'est faire l'experience du continu, et celebrer le soleil, c'est-a-dire
>par-dela le soleil: l'Un." (EI, p.39) Here Blanchot sounds like Lacan,
>whereas with the cadavre he's doing something more interesting. Here "voir"
>is a maintenance of the "interdit": it gives us something to see precisely
>at the moment when there is a distance to be both covered and held from us.
>This distancing (the english word is good here) is therefore not the same
>thing as the parole-debordante.
>
>Again, in this chapter, we have something like the cadavre. Only here its
>the fascination of the dream: "Voir dans le reve, c'est etre fascine, et la
>fascination se produit, lorsque, loin de saisir a distance, nous sommes
>saisis par la distance, investis par elle. Dans la vue, non seulement nous
>touchons la chose grace a un intervalle qui nous en desencombre, mais nous
>la touchons sans etre encombres de cet intervalle. Dans la fascination,
>nous sommes peut-etre deja hors du visible-invisible." (EI, p.41)
>
>So there seems to be an opposition going on here. Fascination of the
>cadavre and the dream (that depasses the invisible-visible opposition)
>opposed to "voir" as "vue d'ensemble" or the immediate siezure at a (or of)
>distance ("Voir, c'est donc saisir immediatement a distance"). Is this
>opposition my own? Or Blanchot's? And couldn't writing itself be placed on
>the side of fascination when Blanchot writes: "Je me demande si Heraclite,
>lorsqu'il dit de la parole sacree qu'elle 'n'expose ni ne cache, mais
>indique', ne dit pas quelque chose la-dessus. Ne pourrait-on lui preter
>l'idee que vous voudriez presenter : qu'il y a un langage ou les choses ne
>se montrent ni ne se cachent?" (EI, p.44)
>
>I've been racking my brain over this and had given it up for a while, only
>I saw that recently some people have been interested in reading "The Gaze
>of Orpheus", and I've seen here and there that the comments on the cadavre
>printed above are reprinted in this same text.
>
>Well, it was an attempt. You know, I just cannot stand to talk about what
>to talk about as everyone seems to be doing. It is to me the worst disease
>of all and the day I left America it seemed to disappear like rats from a
>sinking ship. Please, whether "voir" be our subject or not, let us drown
>ourselves in thought, not stand above the abyss looking at what route we
>could take down....
>
>
>Douglas Edric
>Paris. late, 1995.
>
>"C'est qu'il y a peut-etre une invisibilite qui est encore une maniere de
>se laisser voir, et une autre qui se detourne de tout visible et de tout
>invisible." (EI, p.43)
>
>Sorry for all the french, I am too timid to translate and have no english
>editions. Then again, why should English be the forced language of
>Internet?
Your first paragraph only: Sorry, but the title is well chosen. "Le
regard d'Orphee" is>the central essay of L'ESPACE LITTERAIRE --the
whole book derives its force and significance from it; and the Orphic
myth (as Blanchot interprets it, is absolutely crucial for Blanchot's
work and thought during the years 1945-65. (Pardon the immodesty: See
Walter A. Strauss, DESCENT AND RETURN, Harvard Univ. Press, 1971,
pp.250-61.)
                  w.a.s.
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