Date: Tue, 9 Jun 1998 00:20:30 +0100
Subject: Re: MB: A Question


In message <35753ED4.25FAB37C-AT-skidmore.edu>, Reg Lilly
<rlilly-AT-scott.skidmore.edu> writes
>

>Thinkers are
>not removed from being; their experience is in no way derivative.

>As Heidegger
>says (I can track the quote down if need be), the poet and philosopher are
>standing atop mountains separated by an abyss.  
>       I've never run across this interpretation, but it strikes me that the 
>poet and
>the philosopher each have original relations to being (aka language), but in
>different wise; namely, the poet, like a lightnig rod, hears/fashions words in
>response to 'what is,' it's 'occurence.'  There is an immediacy to poetizing. 
>The philospohers relates to being (aka language) in a more diachronic,
>traditional manner, hearing the history of being in the basic words of
>philosophy.  For the thinker, being happens mostly as Seinsgeschickte; for the
>poet, it happens mostly as Ereignis.  These are not separate, but related in a
>mysterious way.

>


... I should have been more careful in my discussion of experience here.
As you rightly note, Heidegger does not subordinate thinking to
poetising; on the contrary, he claims, that poetry itself constitutes a
form of thinking, that it precisely enacts a thinking meditation upon
Being as such. Together on separate mountains: yes ... because the
thinker and the poet both bear a relationship to the Being of beings
insofar as they are language users. The relationship between thinking
and poetry in Heidegger clearly deserves lengthy consideration. 

But I want to think about Blanchot - specifically, about his
relationship to philosophy. I am always a little disturbed by his
attempts to distance himself from Heidegger - for instance in the Space
of Literature where he assimilates Heidegger's thinking of death to a
tradition of idealism in which Blanchot also includes Hegel and
Nietzsche. Of the course the Space of Literature owes a great deal to
Heidegger, in particular 'The Origin of the Work of Art.' The question I
want to raise today, however, is not merely a textural dispute between
Heidegger and Blanchot, but bears upon the vital question as to what
philosophy is and what (even) it must become. For Blanchot, at least in
the Space of Literature, philosophy is at least one remove, as you
rightly claim, from the literary space - the revelation that all
revelation destroys - because it always resurrects Lazarus - i.e., it
animates and mobilises death to its own ends. Philosophy, it would seem,
cannot READ the literary work of art without disavowing the other death,
the Lazarus who does not respond to the Lazare veni foras of the
philosopher. The difference between these two Lazaruss grants the diadic
structure to which you refer. 

But what of the status of Blanchot's own reading of the work of art? How
can he talk about what cannot be talked out? How can he attest to this
OTHER death? And how, if he CAN attest to the excess of death over and
above its mobilisation, can he distance his work from philosophy? - Why,
indeed, would he WANT to open up such a distance?


PS I haven't quite worked out how to set the signature on e-mails ... I
am not David Melling but Lars Iyer ...

-- 
Lars