Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1998 19:39:12 +0100
Subject: Re: MB: MB early morning thought


In message <199808220943_MC2-5700-F16E-AT-compuserve.com>, Jay Ludwig
<75127.3703-AT-compuserve.com> writes
>Blanchot's wanting to name the unnamable is like Sade's terminal
>theological "perversion", sodomy, it is the desire of total destruction, of
>suicide, since it is him who is the writer/God of words, therefor it is God
>destroying his creation by creating it. This necessity is one that can only
>take place in a temporality of the word, not like Johns' ( in the beginning
>was the word... ) but in the present, since past or future are not known to
>the word but only to the human/writer who when writing experiences the loss
>of time.

So many themes elaborated so briefly ... a desire? - There are two
(fundamental) desires in Blanchot, that can be mapped onto the economy
of negation on the one hand, and the 'general economy' of nothingness on
the other hand. There is a desire that draws us towards us towards a
total destruction ... the 'total negation' of the author as Blanchot
thematises it in "Literature and the Right to Death" ... that is, the
desire on the part of the writer to maintain himself in global negation,
carrying through the 'terrorism' that is specific to literature. Ah -
splendid pages! ---- This 'other' desire exposes the author to the 'time
of the absence of time' as Blanchot writes in The Space of Literature.
But the desire for the total destruction of authroial subjectivity - and
the desire to suspend oneself within that suspension - can never,
actually, be carried through. These are the two slopes - of death, of
literature - this is the complex topos of the writer.

Why sodomy, then? - I don't know my Sade, and I don't know Blanchot's
book on Lautremont and Sade? 

>why does maurice blanchot have this fixation on destruction, nihilism and
>nothingness. why is it that the major thoughts of this century revolve
>around what is not? why think of the unthinkable? why write about the
>unwritable? what chase is it?


The possibility of thinking itself - of thought that begins in the
exposition that Blanchot describes. We are impelled towards a
destruction, a self-sacrifice, a dispersal of our subjectivity.
Literature attests to this. Eroticism attests to this. The relation to
the Other also attests to this. And yet this desire is always
interrupted; it can never be carried through. And as such: thinking
begins in its exposition. Always and already. The (scientific?
metaphysical?) image of thought as this ... adequating, progressive
colonisation of being conceals such exposition. And yet it always
returns - always haunts. Thinking cannot exclude exposition. Exposition
sustains it. Nothingness runs in the veins of negation. 

Why is this important? - Because we must think. Because there are two
desires that drive thought, two motors. Strange rewriting of Plato's
Phaedrus - the two charioteers. - We have no choice.


-- 
Lars Iyer