Date: Mon, 20 Nov 1995 07:10:35 GMT
Subject: MB: a beginning


 Blanchot quite simply paralyses me.  It happens every time I glance at any
of his works and it doesn't matter if I am reading his essays or his
fictions.  He paralyses me, hence I am already no longer me but someone who
cannot but exist (as if existing itself was nothng more than pure
vulnerability), and hence the attentiveness and the relation to death
William Flesch speaks of.  What is more, in that paralysis there is a
strange 'puissance' that I find myself submitting to.  It is all very
disturbing, as I said, --unsettling, like the effect the unburied dead have
on the living.  So, no, I doubt I will ever write on Blanchot again, but I
am nonetheless altered for good by his works, like it or not.  I would add
that, although he does not mention Blanchot very often, Giorgio Agamben has
been doing extremely interesting analyses with great finesse of a certain
'puissance' that cannot be resolved into simple active or passive modes and
that, in their very delicacy, are an effect of the kind of thing that the
Blanchotian text "does" to somebody.

Tom Wall