Date: Thu, 23 Apr 1998 09:06:52 +0100 (BST)
Subject: Re: MB: LRD


From:          "Large.W" <stawla-AT-lib.marjon.ac.uk>
To:            "'Blanchot list'" <Blanchot-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu>
Subject:       MB: LRD
Date:          Thu, 23 Apr 1998 15:39:00 +0000
Reply-to:      blanchot-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu



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  


I largely concur with this.  Can any Hegel readers out there figure
out whether MB is reading Hegel in German, on the basis of
Hyppolite's translation, or on the 1947 commentary by Koj=E8ve?

Don't all rush.

Leslie Hill

Leslie Hill
Department of French Studies
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
tel: + 44 (0) 1203 523014
fax: + 44 (0) 1203 524679
e-mail: l.j.hill-AT-warwick.ac.uk