Date: Tue, 9 Jun 1998 00:52:46 +0100
Subject: Re: MB: again LRD


I
>> 
>
>       And I'd offer just two comments here.  Though I agree with much of what 
>you say
>about Heidegger, I think that if you want to understand what Blanchot means by
>'world' and 'thing' in LRD you'd do better to look at Hegal than Heidegger -- of
>course giving a Heideggerian reading of Hegel's thoughts on 'world' and 'thing'
>would be very interesting for a reading of Blanchot.
>       Second, for Heidegger the work of art is not so much a thing as a site -
>- that
>site where the world is thrust down into the earth and the earth juts up into
>the world -- the site of the struggle of world and earth.  This site is itself
>relative to a 'larger site' -- the open (das Offene) where being primordially
>'opens up.'  This Open is, so to speak, for Heidegger the 'outside' of the work
>(but is also the 'inside').  For Blanchot, it strikes me that the world is the
>outside of the work; the work, language, must destroy the worldliness of of
>things to open up that space of literature where, as if transposed, those things
>repose not with the postivity/negativity of worldly things, but with the
>neutrality of literature.

You're right with regard to LRD - Blanchot's conception of world IS it
would seem articulated through a certain Kojevean/Bataillean reading of
Hegel rather than a direct engagement with Heidegger. Blanchot's pages
on 'world' here remind me of Levinas on the transcendencies of truth and
light in his Totality and Infinity. On the other hand, does Levinas in
Existents and Existence not assimilate Heidegger's conception of world
to just such a Hegelian conception of world? I make this point, I
suppose, because at the back of my mind are Blanchot's attempts to
distance himself from the idealism that, he claims, is bound up with
philosophising as such (and Heidegger in particular) in the Space of
Literature five or six years after LRD. 

What then is the question that literature poses us - we who want somehow
to make sense of Blanchot? Being, as you write, opens up for Heidegger
through the disclosure of world that the work of art constitutes. This
disclosure is predicated upon a covering up or self-withdrawal of the
Being of beings.In Blanchot, the disclosure of the work of art also
brings the world into contact with it's 'outside.' And yet Blanchot
divides existence (Being) from existents (beings) even further ... the
'outside' to which the work attests digs away in the word we deploy to
denote 'this woman or 'this rose'. For Blanchot, the materiality of the
word takes us beyond the earthiness of the word in Heidegger's 'The
Origin of the Work of Art.' But what does Blanchot demand of us? The
incredible difficulty of reading Blanchot for me lies in what he argues
is the impossibility of the work of art, i.e. an equivocation that
cannot be resolved. I have already asked this question on this list -
please forgive the repetition: 

How can Blanchot write of this equivocation without himself being caught
up in just such an equivocation? 

Or:

Is the stance he adopts to the literary work of art viz. his own
critical practice not assimiable to the tradition of philosophising that
he abandons as idealist? - 

Or:

Is Blanchot condemned to philosophy? (i.e. Does he enact a certain post-
Heideggerian philosophising insofar as it must bear upon that which
recedes from us as the ineffable?)

-- 
Lars