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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