Date: Mon, 08 Feb 1999 12:15:19 -0800
From: Catherine spaeth <spaeth.8-AT-pop.service.ohio-state.edu>
Subject: Re: MB: Re: []


"Poetry is only an exercise, but this exercise is the mind, the mind's
purity, the pure point at which consciousness  - that empty power to
exchange itself for everything - becomes a real power, enclosing its
infinite number of constructsand the whole range of its maneuvers within
strict limits."  The Work and Death's Space, SL, p. 88

I'm a beginning writer.  It is difficult to begin, to be caught up in
the act and at the brink of a loss, a speechless, paralysed insomniac.
Sometimes, at the beginning, I gather the archive around me in
preparation for the explanation of an historical event.  At other times,
I am the writer who loses face before death, awkward, confused, touching
no one. I rarely finish what I have begun, and when I do, it faces the
world in empty decency, a dead end. Its the space where suicide is still
possible, and a coming up short in the face of death. 
	Slowing things down a bit, I begin here by saying that what draws me to
Blanchot is his force as a writer.  It is so obvious and so difficult. 
All allegiances to Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, [...] fall away in the
face of it and are called upon by its demand.  This "passion bereft of
will" can show us the clarity of fiction, but is not of quite the same
palpable silence - there is an address.  But rather than  intention
there is what the painter Christian Bonnefoi would call an extensive
intensity.  It is this in-tension that closes off the work, defining its
limits.  Blanchot always finishes, where Kafka could not, and his
endings are never handed over to the etceteras of negligence's act.  I
read with envy.  - catherine spaeth


Ariosto Raggo wrote:
> 
> >
> > what is this disaster, which takes care of everything, that Blanchot wrote?
> >
> > interested
> >
> > Sebastian
> >
> >
> >
> 
> I am not sure Sebastian but I started reading an essay last night on
> pictorial play and divination through fragments. In it there was some
> advice from de Vinci who said to his young students that in order to
> become inspired and come to express fantastic inventions one could do
> no better than examine the spots and cracks in old walls.
> 
> Ariosto
> 
> --
> 
>