Date: Sat, 08 Jul 2000 00:15:34 +0200
From: Reg Lilly <rlilly-AT-skidmore.edu>
Subject: Re: MB: Neuter / $cripture / apophasis


Christophe,
    I may come back and 'interpretively interpolate' your message more in its
entirety, but (and not meaning to be 'picky') I'll pick just one site where what
puzzles me seems to be in operation.  You say:


> And so, I have to fundamentally disagree with Reg about the being vs.
> language priority, in that if the neuter is anything at all it is
> precisely what is spoken that isn't being.

    To look at the sentence, you say "the neuter is ... what is spoken that
isn't being."  It's this little word 'is' (mentioned three times) that provokes
me.  Something 'is that isn't being.'  If there is a difference between 'is' and
'being,' then I'm not sure I understand what it is.  When I speak of a 'prior
restriction of being,' it is precisely such a restriction that seems to have
been made in this case (no one does this to 'is' -- it seems to be too small and
too necessary a word for anyone to say 'it is but isn't').  My awkward turns
such as 'what is' are an attempt to take focus off the big bad word, being.


> Language is more or less than
> the house of being, there is some room left unaccounted for, 'literary
> space' if you wish, that is my intuition of what fascinates Blanchot.

    This expression pleases me, though I'm not sure what it means.  In what
sense 'is' literary space in surplus of being.  Can something be outside of
being?  What is the sense of being that is passed byond by literary space?


> Reg is absolutely right about the importance of Hegel for Blanchot
> though, and I should correct myself in that Kojeve's Hegel is mentioned
> twice in "Literature and the Right to Death"; but isn't Hegel's
> dialectic definin a general econmy that isn't reducible to ontologizing?

    I'm not big fan of ontologizing (if by that you mean offering doctrines of
being), but thinking about being is not the same as ontologizing.  I take this
to be perhaps Heidegger's most basic (late) hobbyhorse.  But in terms of
offering doctrines of being, Hegel sure was at the head of the class.  The
Doctrine of Being is the first major part of his Science of Logic.  As I
understand it, 'general economy' = systematicity, and that's what Hegel's
dialectic is all about.  Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your comment.

>
> Isn't the great discovery of Hegel that language need not be in a
> mimetic relation with reality, but that a rationality exists beyond
> being, a meta-physics within the world that is the dialectical Notion?

    For Hegel, there's no beyond being, only dialectical and non-dialectical
ways to understand it.  Dialectically speaking, becoming, which is the sublation
of being vs. nothing (which are the same thing) is not beyond being, but indeed
is the truth of being.  In Hegel, the more 'beyond x' you go, the closer to the
truth of 'x' you get.


> I
> need to think more about Blanchot's and also Levinas' rapport to Hegel,
> and also to Heidegger. Reg, can you provide infos on the Gasche essay on
> Hegel/Blanchot?

    It's Gasché, Rodolph, "The Felicities of Paradox: Blanchot on the Null-Space
of Literature, in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, ed. Carolyn Bailey
     Gill, London: Routledge, 1996.

Regards,
Reg