Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 22:37:58 +0100
Subject: Re: MB: Blanchot/Language/Heidegger


In message <199807220124.SAA01952-AT-glinda.oz.net>, Thomas Wall
<twall-AT-oz.net> writes
>All,
>
>With regard to Reg Lilly (our wonderful list manager) and others who want
>to find in Blanchot a "being of language" via Husserl and others, I still
>think this is the wrong way to go.  For Blanchot, language is expenditure,
>and this is quite otherwise than being.  


Do you really take Blanchot at his word on this? I'm not sure I do. I
can't stomach his hasty disavowals  of Heidegger ... cf. the long
footnote to 'The Most Profound Question' in The Infinite Conversation
... I'm baffled at your apparent juxtaposition of Bataille's
('expenditure') and Levinas's ('otherwise than being') vocabulary here.
Inordinately difficult questions: what is the relation between bataille,
Levinas and Blanchot here? - Would this let us sort out what the
connection between expenditure and being ...?


>Agamen says this somewhere in
>_Homo Sacer_ and Shaviro's _Passion and Excess_ is good on this point.  I
>am wondering if what you are really after is something more like a "being
>of pure manifestation" in which case your real interlocutor would be Michel
>Henry and not Blanchot.  

Please give references to the Henry
>
>Also, with regard to Blanchot's fascination with time's absence and its
>possible correlation with a Heidegerrian "clearing" one should read further
>on in _Space of Literature_ to "The Outside, the Night" (SL 163; EL 213)
>where he speaks again of 'everything disappearing' and where: Cela est
>vide, cela n'est pas, mais l'on habille cela en une sorte d'etre (It is
>empty, it is not; but we dress it up as a kind of being).  And he goes on
>in language far from any sort of clearing or anything foundational or
>pre-foundational.
>
But is that REALLY the case? Foundational? - Pre-foundational? --- I
distrust this vocabulary. The Space of Literature is SO close to
Heidegger ... and yet Blanchot insists on this tiny difference ... this
movement from the possiblity of impossibility to impossibility of
possibility. But I've banged on enough about that. 

>Some time ago P. Adams Sitney said
>something to the effect that Blanchot echoes quite a lot of thinkers but
>just try to really compare him rigorously with any one of them and he
>disappears.
>
>
Nevertheless I find such work vital ... I've just finished a long piece
of research on Blanchot where I found I HAD to read him through
Heidegger, Bataille, Levinas ... even Deleuze. What an inordinately
difficult writer Blanchot is! - Paul Davies has done an exemplary piece
of work in his essay "Difficult Friendship" on the relationship between
Blanchot and Levinas. It seems to me that such work is vitally important
for those of us 'working' on Blanchot.
>
>
>
>

-- 
Lars Iyer