Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 09:00:59 -0700
Subject: re: MB: The experience of writing?



>On the experience of writing then.  Inasmuch as Blanchot's writings 
>may be viewed as a sustained interrogation of the possibility and 
>impossibility of experience, and hence suspends any certainty about 
>the nature of subjectivity, does it not also offer a critique of the 
>notion that in language (and particularly poetic language or writing 
>in general) we find a priviledged mode of access to being? 

        It seems to me that there is a certain priviledging in Blanchot; the
'Orphic moment' is 'truer' than the ordinary everyday experience that
believes experience yields contact with being-qua-substantive-presence,
i.e., what Blanchot often refers to as 'reality.'  I think that given an
appropriate definition of being and the subject -- which would clearly be
one incompatible with traditional conceptions of being and subject --
Blanchot could state some certainties about the subject and being.  After
all, isn't there someting like an 'ontological thesis' in everything that he
says about the image and imaginary, and, in a somewhat classical gesture,
doesn't he hold that the exposition of any such theses is made possible by
virtue of having attained that priviledged standpoint (which for him is the
'writerly')?  (Parenthetically, I think if Blanchot has a nemesis when it
comes to conceiving of the subject, being and language, it is Hegel, and
that his anti-Hegelianism is one of his legacies for the likes of  Foucault,
Derrida, etc.)  

> Is it 
>then permissable to argue that Blanchot's novels and recits are 
>organised around the "writing event" as a double task?  A task which 
>on the one hand seeks to construct a subject, an origin, or what you 
>will and a task which exposes that fragile subject to its own 
>impossibility? 

        This sounds like a very apt description of Blanchot's project.
Exactly what such a construction/disaster means will, I think, depend on how
you deal wih the stuff in the first part of your statement.