Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 13:14:28 -0700
Subject: Re: MB: Derrida on Blanchot


[snip]
>
>If one remembers, though, the way in which Blanchot reads other people's
>texts, one would start questioning the way in which he has been too easily
>assimilated with deconstructive criticism.  Blanchot never takes as his
>point of departure linguistic puns, fake etymologies or mimetic writing. 
>He procedes, it seems to me, in a much more "classical" way, trying to find
>in these texts what he deems to be the essence of the "writing exigency". 
>His approach remains, on my opinion, a phenomomenology of writing much more
>than a "deconstructive manifesto". In the _Arret de mort (Death Sentence)_,
>this phenomenology of experience encompasses history, relationships and
>writing.  In this respect, I resist a bit the deconstructive, essentially
>tautological reading that is often given of this and other Blanchot's
>texts. 

        I would agree with your caution aginst too quickly assimilating
Blanchot to Derrida and deconstruction (one might also caution against the
same with Blanchot and Foucault); Derrida and Foucault (whose disdain for
each other is legendary) both feel themselves to be in the neighborhood of
Blanchot, both owe much to him, but I would agree there is something more
classical about Blanchot.  And your mentioning of phenomenology is
provocative.  I don't mean to suggest that Blanchot was a Husserlian, for
there clearly are irreconsilable differences between them, but nevertheless
there are some similarities between them.  I think what you have in find
when you mention the phenomenology of writing is something like the
description of the experience of writing, and I would agree witht his.
There might be futher, more 'formal' similarities between Blanchot and
Husserlian phenomenology.  Just to name one that seems especially
significant: an 'ontological' neutrality seems central to both of them; for
Husserl, the phenomenological method requires a bracketing [epoche] of the
question of existence (reality vs unreality), a bracketing which opens up a
field of presence and absence which it is the task of the phenomenologist to
describe.  Moreover, Husserl explicitly calls fantasy, picture-consciousness
and recollection "neutrality modifications."  Of course for Husserl, this is
all a matter of intentional modifications, of volition, motivation, etc. and
for Blanchot this is obviously not the case.  But it seems there is a
similar sort of bracketing in writing, in the being of language, and there
may be other 'topological' similarities between them -- for instance, a
similar marginalization of history.  Just a quick thought.
reg