Date: Wed, 03 Jun 1998 08:29:22 -0400
Subject: RE: MB: again LRD


David Melling wrote:

> >
> 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.'
> 

	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.

Regards,
Reg