Date: Mon, 11 Mar 1996 17:13:47 -0800
Subject: Re: MB: 2-things


Chris,
i have been reflecting on our post for a couple of days and had some trouble 
squaring your question concerning heidegger's reception --perhaps we could say 
repitition -- by the french and the play of anthropological (read existential) 
against some other mode of interpretation as yet unnamed offered by Derrida -- 
and i suppose Nancy, and Lacoue-Labarthe.  Strictly speaking, to couch heidegger 
in  _human_ terms is not only to think of him as an existentialist.  The false 
aporia, act as being or being as being, mistakes heidegger's phenomenology for 
latter day gnosticism.  Rather, when heidegger argues that the human is the 
being for whom being is a question or that language is the house of being and in 
that house man dwells, he is not arguing simple that the human is the conduit of 
 Being, but that humanity as an opening toward being in the question of being 
cannot as such be separated from Being. This cursory outline of heidegger was 
made to suggest that perhaps heidegger's textuality in the face of blanchot is 
something quite other than the way we've been writing here.

There is an anthropology at work in blanchot, but as with heidegger (which 
Lacoue-Labarthe shows nicely in _La Fiction du politique_)the realm of the human 
can something quite other than that traced by sartre, or Lukacs.  Blanchot works 
within the central nexus of heidegger's deposition of metaphysics when promoting 
a humanism he challanges existentialism and marxism, as well as deconstruction 
and certain branches of Christian theology in fashioning a solid repitition of 
the death of god (Writing of the Disaster, p. 90ff).  It is here that he seems 
to be united with Nietzsche and Heidegger in turning away from foundations and 
toward excess.

-leo