File spoon-archives/blanchot.archive/blanchot_1998/blanchot.9808, message 6


Date: Fri, 07 Aug 1998 13:40:31 -0400
From: Reg Lilly <rlilly-AT-scott.skidmore.edu>
Subject: Re: MB: Blanchot/Language/Heidegger


I just returned (temporarily) from abroad, so I'm a bit slow on the uptake.  Thomas writes that those

> who want
> to find in Blanchot a "being of language" via Husserl and others, I still
> think this is the wrong way to go.

	I'm not quite sure of the opposition here.  It seems that being was a central issue for Blanchot, and indeed he seems
to follow Heidegger quite closely in many [but not all!] of his reflections on being and language.  It's true that
Blanchot doesn't reflect so directly on the being of language per se, but I would suggest that such a reflection can
(and perhaps ought to) take place.  Most simply, such a reflection would have, as  one of its principle moments, a
development of Blanchot's understanding of the relation of language to 'things,' to 'beings' and, especially, to the
nature or being of beings.

>  For Blanchot, language is expenditure,
> and this is quite otherwise than being.  Agamen says this somewhere in
> _Homo Sacer_ and Shaviro's _Passion and Excess_ is good on this point.

	I think here part of the issue is what one means by 'being.'  'Expenditure,' as understood in the light of Bataille, is
hardly without its ontology.  Derrida has brought out some of this in his essay on Bataille.  The question would be,
What *is* expenditure?  What *is* language such that one can speak of its conservation and expenditure?  Musn't the
conception of language-as-expenditure have an understanding of what being 'is' in order to formulate itself as such? 
Your reference to 'otherwise than being' seems to invoke Levinas, and I think such invocations are appropriate. 
However, Levinas, in his rejection of ontology of course had a very specific conception of being that he was rejecting. 
That, however, does not relieve him of reflecting on the nature of language, what is is, does, and does not do; what its
relationship to things, to people, community, etc., is.  Not surprisingly, it is in these questions where one sees the
full weight of Levinas's project concentrated (in the end) and, I think, they become for him virtually imponderable
precisely because of his rejection (or reductions) of what 'being' and 'language' mean.  I think something similar *may
be* the case with Blanchot.

>  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.  (A couple things Lilly said last time made me
> think of this.)

	This is an interesting reference.  I'm familiar with some of Henry's work, but not as much as I perhaps should.  Do you
have a specific work in mind?  I realize that Henry generally falls into the phenomenological tradition that Blanchot
has little sympathy for, but what is the core opposition you see between them?  Don't you think that Blanchot was
interested in something that could be called a phenomenology of literature?  


> 
> 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.


	I certainly don't think that Blanchot was interested in something foundational or pre-foundational in the way those
terms are used in philosophy, but I do think that he was very interested in the *condition* or *conditions* of
literature.  His language, to my ear, often rings with the language of necessity, the necessary conditions for the
appearance of disappearance, of the other night, etc.  To be a bit provocative, I might suggest that the Blanchot of the
'50s was quite caught up in what Adorno called (in reference to Heidegger) the "jargon of authenticity."  If that were
the case, then one might read his works from the '60's, especially L'Intretien infini both as a 'self-critique' and as a
more intense engagement with other philosophers, especially Levinas.  Leslie Hill has developed this, as have others.

> 
> I don't mean to be throwing cold water around on everyone, but Blanchot is
> full of temptations, he's very alluring.

	I agree, there is danger here.

> 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.

	I'm not so interested in comparing Blanchot to other thinkers with the intention of reducing him to them, or to make of
him a moment in the history of post-whatever writing/thinking.  I'm interested in a philosophical reading of Blanchot
(certainly only one of many [possibly] worthwhile readings), and philosophically speaking, its quite clear that Blanchot
thinking did not occur ex nihilo; he drew heavily from contemporary philosophers even if he transforms them in doing
so.  When I introduce other thinkers such as Husserl or Heidegger, I mean to introduce 'lights,' vocabulary and issues
that find traces in Blanchot, that help illuminate his texts.  I suppose one might introduce Nargarjuna or some Asian
thinker to shed light on Blanchot.  I would be uncomfortable casting so far afield.  I prefer to stay closer to home, so
to speak, with figures that I think Blanchot himself has/might have read and thought about.  Perhaps, however, I'm
guilty of practicing a theory of influence.
	I don't mean to be cute, but in reference to Sitney's comment, how could it be otherwise that Blanchot must disappear? 
This isn't to justify every sort of mangling of Blanchot's texts, but is it possible to read only Blanchot, to read him
apart from all others?  Beyond a sort of recitation, I'm not sure what it would mean.

Regards,
Reg

   

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