Date: Sat, 8 Aug 1998 18:44:10 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: MB: Blanchot/Language/Heidegger


Reg and all,

I'll just say a few things about Blanchot which, I guess, orient me and
which are why I resist contextualizing him, although I recognize he was
impressed by Heidegger and undoubtedly knows philosophy better than I ever
will even if I live to be 300.

First: He is one of a very few writers whom I have been impressed by in
such a way that there seems to be, when I read him, only solitude and
extreme urgency at once, as if there was another someone speaking to whom I
cannot even willfully attend because nothing concrete remains of that
speaking.  I my book I say it's like evesdropping--someone is speaking to
someone and I happen to overhear, as if that fact alone were momentous (and
it is somehow).  But it doesn't leave me anything to remember exactly.
That's the price Blanchot's reader has to pay.  A momentous possibility
that only appears in its disappearance.  But this is not a pathos.  It's a
private joy.  I cannot but read Blanchot excessively.

Second: Although Blanchot thins out language, he does not isolate it.  On
the contrary, in literature, language thins out too much to leave behind
anything like its pure being, its "is".  What happens in Blanchot only
happens in its disappearing--unable to be, it is also unable to be absent.
This is the torment of the narrator of _L'arret de mort_ who complains that
he wants to say eveything but that not everything has happened yet.

Third:  Heidegger was interested in language insofar as it is like Being.
The word names the thing, identifies it, but more than that it lets the
thing 'thing itself'--let's it be.  Otherwise than provide information,
language, in the "as", gives the thing to itself by adding nothing (as only
language can do), thus allowing the thing, the being, to be.  He left
unsaid the relation between Being and language but indicated that there is
a direction there for more thought.  (I think I'm getting this right.)
        Also, I believe you (Reg Lilly) translated Michel Haar's _Song of
the Earth_ in which 'die Sprache spricht' and 'die Stimme stimmt' are
linked to the 'es gibt' of Being.  In that book the relation or trace of
sonority is spoken of with regard to language as part of the dynamic (or
the battle) earth/world.  With sonority belonging to poetry and
presupposition belong to metaphysics, Heidegger is wishing to wrestle
himself away from that opposition in poetic language.  Is there a way to
inscibe Blanchot in this battle?  Does he have any light to cast on it?  I
still think that for Blanchot language cannot be isolated and he's not
interested in sonority or language's metaphysical bias; in literature's
strange irresponsibity, it will approach that which escapes all grasp--is
only "had" in being lost, a fine moment we can only try to perpetuate,
where speech and silence are the same, are not yet differentiated, and
where things appear only immediately to disappear--where appearing and
disappearing are the same and where there is no 'giving' and no 'letting
be' that is not simultaneously lost.

I'll sum up; if I (as I have been told) am often too negative in my
readings of Blanchot and Levinas, I think that attempting to approach an
*is* of language is too positive. (Now, I forget what you said that made me
think of M. Henry but the books of his to read are _Essence of
Manifestation_ and _Geanealogy of Psycholanaysis_ where he maintains there
is another origin than ek-stasis, something eternally dark, namely,
affectivity as original manifestation.  Not language but 'la vie' --the
only really important thing--is where attention ought to be focussed.  From
Descartes through Schopenhauer through Nietzsche through Freud, it was
never anything other than life touching itself, affecting itself, that
really mattered.  This would be the origin of any positivity whatever.)

Best,
Thomas Wall