Subject: Re: MB: Criticism and Writing in MB
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 10:32:30 +0000


Leslie, 

I guess it is my fault that you have got the wrong msg. This all has to do
with the way I construed the first two sentences. I put a full stop instead
of a semi column "... exegesis and commentary; stepping outside philosophy
is illusory.  What I meant is that seeing MB from within a Derridian shelter
leads to the idea that stepping from philosophy is illusory. This is a weak
position and not positive. 

amd


At 02:27 PM 3/15/99 +0000, you wrote:
>At 17:59 11/03/99 +0000, you wrote:
>>Dear Leslie, 
>>
>> Instead, we
>>>need to find a way of thinking MB's fiction as constituting in itself a
>>>philosophical (and more than philosophical) act, and thinking how MB's
>>>critical and philosophical writings (as Derrida puts it) question
>>>philosophy (as well as a lot of literature) from the perspective of an
>>>experience that is irreducible to it (to them).  
>>
>>I reckon the way you have allocated MB within a Derridian shelter makes that
>>philosophical act a hermeneutical exegesis and commentary. Stepping outside
>>philosophy is illusory. The reinscription of that perspective that is
>>outside philosophy is just a functional juncture for the return of the
>>question that works as a reasonable strategy for subverting certain
>>hierarchical dualisms. In my own view, this creativity is not positive.
>>Blanchot creates the philosophical concept within frames of paradoxes, not
>>to just question, but to build a counter intuitive fictions, imaginary
>>worlds or alternative universes in the manner of a Borges or a Le Guin.
>>
>
>Stepping outside philosophy may be illusory, but this does not mean
>philosophy has no outside.  To claim this would be to subscribe to the view
>that philosophy, as totalising logos, always knows the truth about its own
>exteriority.  It has always been philosophy's ambition (and no doubt task)
>to appropriate or incorporate what is other to it.  This is a movement that
>Blanchot, on my reading, is constrained to resist, in the name not of the
>night (which belongs to the light of reason), but the otherness of the
>other night.  At the same time, it is clear for Blanchot (as for Levinas)
>that this appeal to the other does not dispense him from traversing
>philosophy, while not necessarily taking up residence within it.  Blanchot
>has no truck with irrationalism.  But I think one can doubt whether
>Blanchot is, in the convcentional sense of the term, a philosopher at all.
>Blanchot, I would claim, creates no concepts.  The neuter is not a concept,
>the outside is not a concept, disaster is not a concept, and so on.  Yes,
>Blanchot's fictions are dedicated to an alternative universe, but only in
>the sense (Blanchot himself puts it) that their object is not another
>world, but the other of all world.  Would this apply in your view to Borges
>or Le Guin?
>
>Leslie
>
>
>