File spoon-archives/blanchot.archive/blanchot_1998/blanchot.9803, message 70


Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1998 21:44:58 -0800 (PST)
From: twall-AT-oz.net (Thomas Wall)
Subject: Re: MB: Negativity - LRD


>We are not to understand, Blanchot tells us, literature in terms of the
>power of negativity.  Negativity here refers to the work of Hegel, and
>those inspired by his work (many in the list have already pointed this
>out).  How are we to understand Hegel's negativity?  Is it the power
>consciousness has to transform the world in the form of its ideas.
> Negativity as freedom.  What has this to do with death?  We know that
>Hegel linked the power of the negative to death, and Bataille was moved
>by this.  But how can the negative be death?  Having told us that
>literature cannot be understood through the concept of the negative,
> Blanchot then approaches what seems to him the paradox of writing
>through Hegel's own analysis.  This paradox seems simple enough, and is
>presented pretty much in the same form at the beginning of Heidegger's
>Origin of the Work of Art,  without a work one is not a writer, but if
>one is not a writer how could one begin to write the work that would make
>one a writer?  Now occurs, perhaps, the first divergence from Hegel.
> Contradictions are to be overcome, but Blanchot writes that this essence
>of writing is something that must and must not be overcome (surmonter) by
>the writer - an arrested dialectic, so to speak.  What must the writer
>overcome and not overcome?  First of all she must not remain within
>herself, she must write, but this writing, and I suppose this is what is
>particular to Blanchot, this writing, which is kind of externalisation,
>does not overcome, that is to say does not negate, the original paradox.
> But why doesn't it?  Is it because the words on the page are not the
>expression of her interiority or anyone else's?  Because the end toward
>which one aims when one writes is absent, but this absent aim must still
>be there if one writes.  This would mean that the activity of writing and
>is determined by nothing from the start - or it is, as an action, a
>negativity 'working within nothingness.'  Writing would be a purpetual
>recommencement without end. We have to ask ourselves again, how far is
>this with Hegel or against him?
>stawla.

On this question I refer you to Libertson's entire book _Proximity:
Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication_.


T. Wall




   

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