Date: Mon, 08 Apr 1996 08:38:08 -0700
Subject: Re: MB: universal library


>I think that the context of that quotation would actually be of great he*lp
>in interpreting it.  I don't have time to look it upo now, but generally
>Blanchot is not an author that you can read as if he were writing aphorisms
>or "maximes"...

        The context is "Lazare, Veni Foras", which deals with reading and
communication.  More specifically, he is distinguishing between literary and
non-literary readings and between the literary and non-literary work.  The
(a) central issue here is the "presence" of the book as well as the reader.
Perhaps I'm missing something or guilty of a hermeneutics of suspicion, but
the paragraph seems to follow a logic that hypostatizes the real/ideal
existence of a universal library -- an almost Hegelian hypostatization (I
cite the full paragraph below) -- ind moving from the reality of paper and
ink through the "web of stable meanings" and "the community of readers" to
"the universal library".  The meaning of this isn't made any more
transparent to me by his remark, in the preceeding paragraph, that seems to
try to distance the literary reading from the book and "'the text'" when he
says that "Only the nonliterary book is presented as a tightly woven net of
determined significations [viz. web of stable meanings?]."  
        I guess it's just not clear to me what the nature is of this
'universal library' -- what is its relation to books of all sorts; what is
the nature of this 'peril,' this 'gap' -- what is it that threatens in this
gap? What sort of concept of preservation is at work here?  Many more
questions are possible.
        I might say that I have a particular interesting in Blanchot's
appropriation/use of Hegel, and this might have a direct bearing on this
passage, which seems not an unreasonable working assumption given the
importance of Hegel for Blanchot's conception of communication and 'the real.'

[From SL, pp 194-95/ EL pp. 258-59]
        "Hence the strange liberty of which reading -- literary reading --
gives us the prime example: a movement which is free insofar as it does not
submit to, does not brace itself upon anything already present.  The book,
doubtless, is there, and not only its paper and ink reality but also its
essence.  It is there as a web of stable meanings, as the assertiveness
which it owes to a preestablished language, and as the enclosure, too,
formed around it by the community of all readers, among whom I, who have not
read it, already have a place.  And this enclosure is also that of all books
which, like angels with intertwined wings, keep close watch over this
unknown volume.  For a single book imperiled makes a dangerous gap in the
universal library [ ..car un seul livre en pe'ril fait une dangereuse
bre`che dans la bibliote`que universelle].  The book is there, then, but the
work is still hidden.  It is absent, perhaps radically so; in any case it is
concealed, objuscated by the evident presence of the book, behind which it
awaits the liberating decision, the 'Lazare, veni foras'."


Reg Lilly
rlilly-AT-skidmore.edu