Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 04:05:08 -0800
From: John LeTourneux <johnl-AT-nmresearch.com>
Subject: Re: MB: Academics


Look I am so sorry for this interruption but I am half drunk and I can
hardly help myself putting the following crude question out there.  Raise
your hand if you have ever worked a straight job?  Quite there is a
question of work, economics, uninterrogated as you please, perhaps even at
the bottom of any such distinction.  Tell me more.  There are academics,
but there are certainly poets, Olson, Creeley, whoever, rectors and M.A.'s.
 There are writers, whose thought one would have liked to redirect, towards
a more authentic, less pre-comprehensible space of exploration.  What is
this?  Am I getting the gist of such a discussion?  It is discardable to
propose anything outside of the academy, insofar as the academy is itself
the locus of any dialectics or beyond; i.e., thought/philosophy; or more
gravely, the dream of reaching Blanchot through his texts.  Am I the only
one, and this is not so, perhaps, who might imagine that what we call
Blanchot consists of something already to be found in Derrida, in
Lacoue-Labarthe, in the most determinable, rigorous sense of what...it is
that we find...there?  If not, why not just read Genet and work or steal or
hustle for a damned living, in other words, read him and at the same time
get a life? j.l.

P.S.

The certain distinct lack of, in J.-L. Nancy's words, "Philological
seriousness..." (tr. Sparks) is remarkable, and leads me to believe, as an
observer, as impartial as you like since, that there is something being
killed, here.  Maintenant.
At 09:41 PM 3/10/99 +0200, you wrote:
>
>
>
>> But isn't this a rather romantic view of the artist?  To put it another  
>
>> way.  Can the demand of writing be thought of in terms of a creativity   
>> that is thought in terms of an opposition between those who are at the   
>> 'creative end', and those, for wont of a better word, who are academics?
>
>I would take this a little further and ask whether it can be thought of in
>terms of creativity at all. It seems to me this is a far more serious
>difficulty with Claire Dinsmore's position than the (non)opposition between
>academic and extra-academic receptions of Blanchot.
>
>Nicholas Dawes
>