Date: Tue, 2 Jun 1998 15:25:18 +0100
Subject: MB: RE: RE: RE: RE: and RE: again LRD


In message <199805151813.OAA28201-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU>, Large.W
<stawla-AT-lib.marjon.ac.uk> writes
>
>Sure a thing or a person must belong to the world, since it is the world   
>which is their, to use a Kantian formulation, condition of possibility.   
> No world, no things or persons, though the world is neither a thing nor   
>a person.  But it's Blanchot's question whether what we call literature   
>is a thing, and in that sense whether it can belong to a world.  Of   
>course in one sense, literature can belong to our world, doesn't one read   
>about literature everyday in the newspapers.  But there belongs, at least   
>for Blanchot, essentially, though one shouldn't use the word 'essential'   
>if one means whatness, to literature what, though again it is not a   
>'what',  is not just outside this is that world, but outside every world   
>(this outside has everything to do with how we understand language).  And   
>this is his problem with Sartre.  It is not just a political problem, but   
>a matter of how one thinks about literature.  Or maybe it is a political   
>problem, but in this case, this 'outside' is perhaps more unsettling in   
>relation to the political than Sartre's engagement, which takes the world   
>as it is from the viewpoint of the subject which knows itself to be   
>honest.
>
I offer 2 points to clarify what is at stake for Blanchot in the use of
the terms 'world' and 'thing' in order to clarify the recent discussion
as to the relationship between LRD and Sartre.

It is certainly the case that Blanchot, after Heidegger, problematises
the notion of essence with regard to the literary object. What is at
stake in the work of art just as for Heidegger in 'The Origin of the
Work of Art' is the thingness of the thing. In what respect does the
work of art belong to the world? If we read world as the familiar
contexture of things as they are revealed in terms of our concern with
them, then, insofar as the work of art has been determined as that which
escapes or exceeds the familiar, then the work of art precisely does not
'belong' to the world but steps beyond it. But the work of art does not
step beyond the apparent world to the real one; rather, for Blanchot and
Heidegger is the way in which the work of art breaks through the horizon
of the familiar. Cf. Heidegger's discussion of reliability and the
peasant shoes in 'The Origin of the Work of Art and Blanchot's of the
image in "Two Versions of the Imaginary" in The Space of Literature. The
outside to which the work of art attests and is in relation to by and
through such attestation can be called the outside not because it
somehow gives access to that which is beyond being, but because it gives
onto being as such, i.e. over and above the manner in which it is veiled
to us because of its ostensible 'familiarity.' In this sense Blanchot
appeals to an ontic-ontological differentiation by, as is well known,
appropriating Levinas's differentiation between existence in general -
the il y a - and the existant. Literature is a thing insofar as the
thingness of the thing cannot be determined exhausively as in its
'worldly' appearing to us - i.e. as the tool we deploy, as the standing-
reserve we mobilise etc.. Literature is of the world insofar as it
breaks through the parameters of the familiar understanding of being. It
precisely opens up the question as to the 'essence' of the world and the
'essence' of the thing by and through its existence. Literature ATTESTS.
This is why it is important to philosophy. Sartre forbids such an
attestation by circumscribing the work of art within the parameters of
what we have here called 'the world.'




-- 
Lars