Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 10:35:19 -0500
Subject: Re: MB: Concepts


leslie hill wrote:
> 
> This is a valid point.  But is it possible after Hegel not to subscribe to
> Hegel's concept of the concept?  Was the encounter with Hegel in Blanchot's
> case, prompted as it was by Jean Hyppolite and Bataille, a necessary or a
> contingent move?  And does it skew Blanchot's thinking in any way?

	These I find very provocative thoughts; it seems that much French thought in the 1950's and 1960's -- especially those
who were reading Nietzsche -- use Hegel as something of a whipping boy, perhaps no one more than Deleuze, Foucault, and
(seemingly to a lesser extent) Blanchot.  But, to borrow a phrase from Foucault's "Discours," to what extent is it
possible to escape Hegel?  What is everything that one can find in Hegel worth rejecting.  
	Even if one subscribes to a certain 'dialectic' of the concept, it's not clear that that must inevitably result in an
absolute, totalizing system as it did for Hegel who conceived of this dialectic as a process of determinate negation
which led to an Aufhebung.  Isn't it the Aufhebung that is really so questionable or objectionable from Blanchot's et.
al.'s position?  It has always struck me that there is a very rigorous dialectic -- even conceptually intelligibly so --
in Blanchot, but, being less the magician than Hegel (behind whose back the Aufhebung miraculously occurs), one gets no
an Aufhebung, but the other night, or what Levinas might call the il y a.  Indeed, it strikes me that, in an a way worth
contemplating, Blanchot needs Hegel, that Blanchot (and others) could only be 'after Hegel.'  Obviously this cannot mean
that Blanchot is reducible to Hegel.
	Indeed Deleuze strikes me as more simply binarily opposed to Hegel than Blanchot; perhaps this is the way Deleuze is an
heir of Hegel.  But strikes me that such is not the case for Blanchot, and that there's a possible (and for the most
part heretofore neglected) richness to be found in Blanchot if he is read otherwise.

Regards,
Reg