Date: Tue, 9 Jun 1998 01:10:10 +0100
Subject: Re: MB: blanchot/heidegger


In message <v01530500b19ae46613e9-AT-[139.133.41.14]>, Ian Maclachlan
<i.maclachlan-AT-abdn.ac.uk> writes
>Re. David Melling's questions about Heidegger and Blanchot. This is hardly
>an 'answer', but one route for thinking their proximity and divergence
>might be provided, for instance, by this remark from Heidegger's commentary
>on Holderlin's 'Andenken': 'the thinker thinks on the condition of
>ex-patriation which for him is not a state of passage but the condition in
>which he is 'at home'. The thoughtful interrogation of the poet on the
>other hand poetizes the condition of repatriation.' Isn't it around this
>notion of a possible horizon of repatriation that one could locate
>Blanchot's divergence? An early Blanchot essay which 'accompanies' one of
>Heidegger's Holderlin commentaries would be worth looking at in this
>respect: 'Holderlin's 'Sacred Word'' in 'The Work of Fire' (ugh - don't
>like that translation!). Leslie Hill has some really helpful pages on this
>in his recent study, by the way.
>
... the quotation from Heidegger's lectures on Andenken reminds me of
the Levinas' words in his on Blanchot ... to paraphrase: "writing does
not lead to the [Heideggerian] truth of being. One might say that it
leads to the errancy of being - to being as a place of going astray, to
the unihabitable." [p. 134 trans.] This reversal is so difficult to
think!!!!! Isn't it too easy?

You are right to direct me towards "Holderlin's 'Sacred Word'" and to
the marvellous pages in Leslie Hill's book on the subject. What, I
wonder, did Heidegger make of the astonishing short essay that Blanchot
contributed to the Festschrift for Heidegger i.e. "Waiting"? I'll wager
that Heidegger was not an attentive reader of Blanchot (with ref. to
Leslie Hill's recent inquiry.)
> 
>

-- 
Lars