Date: Sat, 18 Jul 1998 23:08:35 -0600
From: Wynship Hillier <whi-AT-wenet.net>
Subject: MB: Blanchot/Parmenides


Many thanks for your responses to my question on _death sentance_.  If I may, I would like to press your charity further, with an equally uninformed question regarding _The Space of Literature_, of which I have only read the first half, so far.  In the first chapters thereof, Blanchot wrote of the time of literature as the time of time's absence.  When I first read these first chapters years ago, a thought, unwelcomed, sprang into my mind, that this is the time of mathematics as much as it is the time of literature.  How incongruent, I thought, mathematics being as it is so seriously caught up with metaphysics, idealism, logocentricism, and totalization.  But this broached the larger subject of the ambiguous status of mathematics with regard with structualism.  Now I know many structualists thought of mathematics as the very core of structualism, with its (total?) absence of force and utter meaninglessness.  I am acquainted, also, with Lacan's topology of the soul, and there a!
ppear to be some appreciative references to mathematics, syntax, and notation in _Of Grammatology_.  And yet there is also the complicity with metaphysics mentioned above, as well as the fact that mathematics seems utterly hostile to any notion such as the supplement, or the Outside, as written by Derrida and Blanchot, respectively.  All of this foreshadows the posing of the question, which follows:

That the time of mathematics would be the time of time's absence takes support from the Eleatics -- Parminides and Zeno, et al. -- who made the argument, for instance, that motion is impossible, which subsequently became a philosophical basis for much mathematical thought which followed.  Time's passage is negated in becoming just another variable for mathematical calculation.  In mathematics, all times are made present.  Now Heidegger, in what many see as an effort to read his philosophy into the pre-Socratics, wants to show that what is generally thought to be the very first glimmerings of reason in Western society -- namely Eleatic thought -- have been radically misunderstood.  In his lectures of the 1930's and 1940's, specifically the ones translated in English as _Basic Questions of Philosophy_ and _Parmenides_, he attempts what seems to me an impossibly strained reading of the Eleatics as writing about something much more like what he wants to call the clearing.  The Par!
median sphere, in which nothing moves (because that would involve non-being, which it negates), absolute immobility itself, as the absolute absence of non-being, as pure and bare being itself, as traditionally thought in any case, is really, Heidegger says, the Open, the Clearing of Being.  Thus, even mathematics and logic, when understood properly, are reflective of not a negation but an affirmation of a richer, more primordial understanding of being, which has been subsequently dessicated, determined in specific directions, and largely forgotten.  Blanchot's text seems eerily reminiscent of this sort of Heideggerian movement, all the more so because of the lack of any specific reference to it.  Specifically, this business about the time of time's absence seems like a surprisingly Eleatic approach to "the clearing".  My overly long and poorly-posed question to you is, am I reading Heidegger into Blanchot when he doesn't belong there, or are their projects complicit in this sp!
ecific respect?  I have only read enough Bruns and Foti on the subject to make dangerous mistakes in this area.

Yours,
Wynship Hillier