Date: Fri, 15 Dec 1995 04:41:50 GMT
Subject: MB: Re: Levinas and Blanchot


Tanya,

The Libertson book--Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and
Communication--is very good and very difficult but worth the effort.  For
Blanchot in particular I like Shaviro's chapters from --Passion and
Excess-- .  For Levinas, Petrosino and Rolland's --La verite nomade-- (with
an introduction by Levinas) is helpful, and also Gerard Bailhache's --Le
sujet chez Emmanuel Levinas-- .  Most work on Levinas in English is
disappointing.  My own dissertation is about a passivity "older" than
subjectivity in Blanchot, Levinas, and Agamben.  I write about passivity as
fragility and as communication and I loop my readings through Heidegger's
notion of Dasein as "being-the-there" and through Kant's obscure, or, if
you prefer, transcendental, rapport with the "object=x", that is, the
constraint to--to what? think? represent? speak? be?--prior to any thought.

As to your comments about Levinas and Blanchot.  I have never found any
great difference between the two with regard to the --il y a-- .  I think
you are a little hasty in trying to establish a difference between them and
I am certain you are hasty in characterizing thinking and writing as having
a dialectical relation in Blanchot and Levinas.  I really think that it is
best to begin thinking about Levinas and Blanchot by noticing that they are
saying the same thing--and sometimes in each other's voice, as Libertson
observes--rather than to begin by trying to force them apart.  Levinas
celebrates the beginning of Blanchot's --Thomas the Obscure-- as a precise
description of the --il y a-- .  And many passages from Levinas's
--Existence and Existents-- could have been (and maybe were!) written by
his friend.  The very notion of --il y a--is a Same that is always already
different, or, "shattered", as Jean-Luc Nancy says, criticizing Levinas
somewhat, in one of his "community" essays (I forget which one).

I wish you good luck in your work because there is nothing more obscure,
austere, and wierd than what Blanchot and Levinas do.

Tom