Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2000 21:56:52 +0200
From: Reg Lilly <rlilly-AT-skidmore.edu>
Subject: Re: MB: 'being' in MB




Christophe Wall-Romana wrote:

> The very question-of-being presupposes too much, an a priori closure at
> the very least, which cannot be reconciled with the priority of
> open experiencing qua writing.

    Why does the question of being presuppose beyond that 'there is'?  One
might easily say that the framework of power/powerless presumes not only
that 'there is what is', but that power and powerlessness comprehends 'what
is.'

    I will admit that I'm Heideggerian enough (but Nietzshce, who denounces
being as 'a vapor and a fallacy' also says the same) that language --
whether written, spoken, thought -- always 'speaks being.'  Language itself
is imbued with a sense of being. even if it doesn't explicitly pose the
question.


> But why Hegel? I'd be interested to know more about Blanchot's seeking
> in Hegel determinations about 'what is'. (MB cites Hyppolite's rather
> than Kojeve's study, and I don't think attended the latter's famed
> seminars).

I haven't done a tabulation, but it strikes me that Blanchot mentions Hegel
explicitly more often than anyone else, and through a greater span of time.
And "Literature and the Right to Death," as you mention, is in many respects
extremely close to sections in Hegel's Phenomenology (Gasche has an
excellent article on this, and I'd go even a bit further than he does it
showing the depth of Blanchot's engagement in Hegel).  In that essay, as
elsewhere, the name Hegel comes to be a similacrum of 'reality', 'daylight',
'dialectic, 'the world' and 'being/non-being'.

It's not as thought Blanchot wrote a short study on Hegel and then went on
to other things.  The basic features that he marks out there -- the
opposition of literature and reality, of daylight and night, of dialectic
vs. paralysis -- are dealt with rather systematically there and can be seen
'sprouting' in earlier essays and continuing on until later.  "Le Grande
refus" in Infinite Conversation is, I think, a good example of Blanchot's
finding in Hegel's determinations of a 'what is' that he rejects.  What are
his own determinations of 'what is' are not answered thereby, but it does
shed some light on it I think.

I would agree that Blanchot is closer to Heidegger than Levinas is to
Heidegger, but both make a 'distancing from being' a central gesture of
their thought, which obviously places them far from Heidegger.  I think that
J.-L Nancy (for whose thought I have a deep attraction) makes precisely the
question of being *the* difference between himself and Blanchot.  If you've
read his Etre Singulier Pluriel, and keep in mind Heidegger and Blanchot, I
think that one can begin to appreciate what the question of being can mean;
unfortunately, it doesn't really shed much light on what Blanchot's
conception of 'what is' is.  He's mentioned in passing perhaps only one or
twice, if that. Nancy most recent book on Hegel also suggests what Hegel
might mean for Blanchot.

Regards,
Reg