Date: 23 Nov 95 07:48:04 EST
Subject: MB: comments?


Hello all of my lost, ungraspable blanchotians!  
(this poses some interesting problems for the *cybermind* list, considereing
that you are all very ungrasable for me.  You are there, I hear your words, but
I can't grasp you.)

I have been working on *THE SPACE OF LITERATURE* for my master's thesis in
philosophy.  In the mean time, I am trying to get  my work accepted into this
graduate conference at Essex University in England.  (I live in Belgium, so it's
only a short ferry ride across)  Because I have a hard time defining Blanchot at
times, I think the questions and comments would do me good -- both at the
conference, and here on the list service.   
The following is a short, still working, title of where my ideas are leaning at
the moment.  Of course abstracts always (superficially) make the problem seem
easier to grasp than the real paper.  But anyhow-- any comments are helpful. 


*Blanchot on Writing and Dying: The Question of Mastery*
It seems that in the act of writing, the writer is trying to grasp, claw, at
something.  Blanchot, in  The Space of Literature, claims that the writer is
drawn into the infinity of his own mind and seduced by the idea of completing a
'work'.  Can the work sufficiently capture that space of infinity? Is the
writer, when he enters the infintiy of his own mind actually entering into
something 'more' infinite-- and thereby claiming that something for his own in
putting it into words?   
With death, we encounter a similar problem in Blanchot.  The subject wants to
know and define death, have power over what he finds most obscure and
frightening.  Can the subject have some mastery over death in taking the
randomness and impersonality out of death, ie, making death 'my own'?  
A close reading of Blanchot will reveal, however obliquely, man's failure in the
mastery over writing and death.  This paper will focus on four essential
questions:  What is the nature of death and writing?  Why does man seek to
master them?  Where does this pursiut of mastery leave man, and what does this
say about man's being?