File spoon-archives/blanchot.archive/blanchot_1999/blanchot.9902, message 21


Date: Tue, 09 Feb 1999 09:57:09 -0400
From: william flesch <flesch-AT-BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.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
>

(I just want to register how much I like [and agree with] this posting.)  --WF



   

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