Date: Thu, 11 Jun 1998 12:51:20 -0400
Subject: Re: MB: A Question


David Melling wrote:
>[snip]
> 
> 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.

	I would agree with you here, although, since Blanchot hardly ever mentions
Heidegger by name, I've found his treatment of Heidegger's ideas in SL as rather
ambivalent.  Sometimes he seems to use Heidegger as an example of non-Hegelian,
'death-doesn't-work' position, and sometimes he seems to assimilate him to
Hegel, which for Blanchot is the name with which he seems to sign all
'philosophy.'  It strikes me that sometimes he may actually be criticizing
Sartre (who can sound close to Heidegger) rather than Heidegger.
	But generally, I think Blanchot's relation to philosophy is difficult.  Of
course, if you let me define the term, then he can only be right, but his
characterization of philosophy is very unnuanced, polemical.

> 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?

	I would agree that there is a certain failure of self-reflexivity in Blanchot,
at least or especially where he wants to make generic differences,
'philosophical' differences -- between philosophy and literature. And I think
that the question of how we are to read Blanchot's own critical essays is a good
question.  It strikes me that Blanchot runs into some difficulties that are
strangely similar to those that Levinas, the philosopher of ethics, runs into
when he tries to speak of politics. 


Ciao
Reg