Date: Wed, 11 Oct 1995 20:28:39 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: MB: Les yeux sans regard des statues...


I like Stanley's account of Blanchot a lot--I think the opposition is there in
Blanchot, and the footnote about fascination at the end of chapter one of EL
counts here as well.  So too does the material in EL about idolatry and the
exigency that forbids it, since idolatry leads to the realm of fascination.
I think as usual in Blanchot no opposition is a true opposition, and that,
as in Le Tres-Haut, the options on both sides--speaking, seeing--are equally
spooky.  In Blanchot this spookiness is often the difference between the
spookiness of malheur and the spookiness of attention, or--slightly later?--
attention/waiting and forgetting.   I think of the female figure in L'attente
l'oubli and her relation to her presence--la de par son presence--but always
hidden behind that very presence.  Also relevant is the end of Le Dernier Homme:Comme vous etes silent, vous qui faites signe en dernier (I think I'm quoting
right).  At any rate, one of the other motto-like moments in EI is the 
question "Comment decrouvir l'obscur?"--evidently not by illuminating it, but
perhaps by seeing it as obscure=reading it.   I think the crucial distinction
in Blanchot is that between presence and proximity (cf Libertson's book).
L'autre nuit and le jour--the law and those who are hors-la-loi share at least
a sense of something that is preoriginary.  It is interesting to see Blanchot
praise and then go beyond certain formulations, esp. in EI, where the chapter
on Simone Weil is followed by Etre juif, in which he precisely goes beyond
what he'd been praising in her.  Well, he's subtle, but I think that the
conversations--in the critical books, in the recits--are about these oppositionsthat get you into the region of spookiness.

William Flesch