Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 15:56:09 -0400
Subject: Re: MB: Derrida on Blanchot


joris-AT-csc.albany.edu wrote:
"any discussion involving Derrida/ Blanchot, one should keep in mind
that BlAnchot is the elder, is in fact a core source for Derrida et
alii -- & deconstructive thinking. Blanchot's writings of the forties
& fifties were essential prefugartions, opening up the space in which
JD could think & write in the sixties & seventies. (Though obviously
one must guard from a too simplistic thinking of diachronic influence)"

Has anyone read Steven Shaviro's _Passion and Excess:  Blanchot, Bataille,
and Literary Thought_?
He seems to imply that not only did Derrida and other deconstructionists take
much from Blanchot's early thoughts/publications, but that in taking these
thoughts in a different direction, they actually headed back to formalism, et
al. that Blanchot was (is) abandoning.  In this line of thought, Shaviro
appears to assert that Blanchot (and Bataille) are much more "radical," if
you will, than deconstruction will ever be.

He talks about the triple line of Foucault, "to question our will to truth;
to restore to discourse its character as an event; to abolish the sovereignty
of the signifier" and says, 
"But what could be more difficult?  The languages of criticism that we all
know and use  take for granted the will to truth, repress the event by seeing
disourse as a formal structure, and exalt the signifier.  Even the
self-consciously most "advanced" forms of criticism practiced today
participate in this dilemna.  Thus, deconstruction traces the continual
frustration of the will to truth, but never conceives any horizon for art and
criticism other than that of such a will.  It privileges language as a play
of signifiers, thereby foreclosing any possibility of approaching discourse
as an event.  And thus it assumes and perpetuates the structural imperative,
even as it rightly demostrates that formalization can never be complete.  In
its narrowly linguistic and epistemological focus, and its compacently
self-validating structure of arguement, deconstruction appears as a massive
hypostasis of the very tradition of academicism, idealism, and
intellectualism whose futility it has so amply exposed." (9-10)

Am I right in interperting his writing so?  Any thoughts?  (sorry for such a
long quote)

heatherly