Date: Tue, 27 Feb 1996 12:10:01 -0700
Subject: Re: MB: 2-things


I am happy to continue the discussion about this, and it is not at all in a
polemical mode that I respond to you. Your Lacanian quote actually makes me
think even more that the notion of "fetish" is quite inappropriate as a
parallel to the "blanchotian" image. 
>         "...the secret collusion with which it envelops the pleasure of
>knowing and of dominating with jouissance, these amount to no other
>derangement of instinct than that of being caught in the rails -- eternally
>stretching forth towards the *desire for something else* -- of metonymy.
>Hence its 'perverse' fixation at the very suspension-point of the signifying
>chain where the memory-screen is immobilized and the fascinating image of
>the fetish is petrified."

=46or one thing, the relationship of the subject to the "image" _never_
implies any "secret collusion with wich it envelopes the pleasure of
knowing and dominating with jouissance".  No mastery is to be reached in
fascination.  In other words, the "image" is not an object that can be used
for deriving an un-shared pleasure from it.  The essential solitude, in
Blanchot, is, at least in my opinion, quite something else: it is precisely
the awareness that  there is no "afterward" for fascination. The "image"
will not be possessed, dominated and used, as a fetish might be.  This is
why the subject is essentially alone. This has strictly nothing to do with
a "satisfaction" to be reached in a solypsistic way via an "image" - I
shrink even in saying that.  The "image" only exists as such in its "gaze",
that envelopes the subject in an other "space", "the space of literature",
the space where objects take on another life. The examples in the "Space of
Literature" (Eurydices- "the image" for Orpheus", or Death for Rilke) or
even in Blanchot's narratives of the '50s - mostly L'Arr=EAt de mort, Au
moment voulu, Le Dernier Homme, and still L'attente l'oubli - make this
very clear. The image is _never_ an object upon which a "domination" is to
be exerced, not even literally - it is generally a woman, or a "thought".

The notion of "metonymy" is more interesting in this context, since there
is indeed a certain "seriality" in a some blanchotian narratives,  for
instance in the Arret de mort, where different women come to occupy a
similar position in their relationships with the narrator.   I do think,
though, that the linguistic parallelism is a bit misleading here, even in a
Lacanian sense.  Even if for Lacan language is the symbolic, and thence
there is no "reality" to be described through it, I think that what
distances him enormously from Blanchot is his idea that there are "fixed"
positions in the Unconscious, and that therefore the different symbolic
objects always have to find their "right" position in this very structured
system, and that they are totally equivalent since they "represent" the
same position.  (see the famous or infamous Seminaire sur la lettre volee
and for instance, Derrida's response to it) All of this has simply _no_
parallel in Blanchot, who has never used the notions of "re-presentation"
or even of "metonymy" in his discourse.  Actually, he hasn't talked about
Lacan at all, and viceversa - at least not in his major, published works -
and I am quite convinced that the discourse of psychoanalysis is quite
foreign to his theory of literature.

You also say the following:

>The features that I think made me associate fascination/image in
>Blanchot and the fetish are primarily two -- the immobility of the object;
>its 'fixation' and the cessation of the signifying chain -- one might think
>here of the intrasitivity of fascination (at least on the part of the
>subject), solitude and neutrality in Blanchot, as well as other things;
>second, is what one might call an original absence, such that, contrary to
>what is suggested below, there can be no real question of substitution, or
>if there were, it would be a matter of an original substitution -- one might
>think in Balnchot of resemblance, of the measurless distance

 The "fixation" that Lacan is talking about is, if I am not mistaken, the
pathologic "fixation" of the psychoanalitic subject on a certain object,
and it is in his/her mind that the "petrification" is wished for and
achieved.  You seem to imply  that it is the "object" that is fixated in
its position in the "signifying" chain. I think that the very notion of a
"signifying chain" is a lacanian one much more than a blanchotian one,
since Blanchot is not interested in the "signifying" function of the image,
while the "fetish" always signifies something, at least its own "lack of
object". 

The image, in a way, nevers lacks its object.  The notion of "resemblance"
is quite telling in this regard.  Apparently similar to "metonymic chain",
it is different in that the object is not substituted:  the image resembles
itself.  The dead body resembles itself when it was alive. Eurydices
resembles itself, Death resembles itself, I. in the Arret de mort resembles
itself when she is dead.  What changes is the status of the object, not the
object.  


   
I am sorry for this too long - and still maybe not long enough - posting.
There would be much more to say in this regard.

=46riendly

Giuseppina Mecchia
gmecchia-AT-rikki.cc.colorado.edu