From: "Large.W" <stawla-AT-lib.marjon.ac.uk>
Subject: MB: LRD
Date: Thu, 23 Apr 1998 15:39:00 +0000




The more one reads this essay in the detail, the more one is convinced   
that one is reading a strange and perverse Hegel.  One keeps coming   
across strange dialectics that do not resolve themselves.  The writer,   
Blanchot tells us, only becomes so because of the work.  First dialectic.   
 But the work only becomes a work by being read.  Second dialectic.  The   
difference, however, between this method and Hegel's is that there is no   
progress, Aufhebung, from dialectic to another.  The second dialectic   
does not negate the first, rather it jams it.  For in being read the work   
ceases to be the work of the author and thus by the logic of the first   
dialectic the writer ceases to exist.  Blanchot tells us that there can   
be two solutions to this impasse, either the writer retreats into   
herself, and demands the work for herself, or she offers the work to the   
reader and negates herself.  Two very Hegelian solutions to a stalled   
dialectic.  For Blanchot, however, both solutions are false.  Why write   
unless one writes for someone, but equally only writing for someone is   
not writing.  He is, none the less, out of the two, more interested in   
the first temptation - writing for the sake of writing itself, for in   
some sense this seems essential to what we might call literature.  Why   
must this first temptation be avoided?  Because the double negative which   
describes the writer's activity (which is not an activity in any ordinary   
sense) must, if it is to remain negative, express itself in a result.  Or   
to put this in the figure which Blanchot uses often, the night must   
become the day, not so the night can disappear in the day, but so its   
disappearance can appear so to speak.  The writer must risk the   
disappearance of the work, so what is most strange and alien about the   
work can appear, but appear only as this strangeness.  The resistance at   
the centre of the work, the resistance to all communication, which no   
redundancy would obviate, is not in the writer or in the reader, but   
between them.  Is this disappearance in which the work affirms itself the   
unity of the two original dialectics?

stawla