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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