File spoon-archives/blanchot.archive/blanchot_2000/blanchot.0007, message 7


Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2000 11:46:30 +0200
From: Reg Lilly <rlilly-AT-skidmore.edu>
Subject: Re: MB: neuter & fragment




Christophe Wall-Romana wrote:

>

>
> The neuter cannot properly "be", or have any ontological status (being 
> or non-being). It can only write itself or utter itself, so that it may 
> reveal something of what is the counterpart of 'existing' for
> literature, if not for what it is never exactly time yet it is always
> more proper to call $cripture ($ as neuter form of 'neither S nor
> s'...).

What do you mean by 'properly' be and 'cannot have any ontological
status'?  I recognize what you are saying here as very much in line with
things Blanchot says, but I can't help but think that this
characterization of the neuter as 'otherwise than being' is based upon a
prior restriction of what 'being' means (one can read the same
restrictive gesture in Levinas, which is not without its difficulties). 
No doubt the neuter 'isn't' if one defines 'isness' as .... say, as
Hegel understood it (which I'm more and more convinced is what Blanchot
means by 'being' when he uses that term, i.e. being conceived of as
being opposed to non-being -- which isn't the only way to understand
being), or as Plato did, or take your pick.  But that seems, at least to
me, to raise the question of, 'Well, ok, so the neuter isn't in that
(those) way(s) of is-ing, but it indeed is if you understand 'is' as
....'  (what comes after the ellipsis is what I'm after). I'd like to
better understand 'what is' for Blanchot such that the neuter isn't just
an empty word which can be invested with any and all meanings, but 'is'
in its own way, which may well be different from (but perhaps relative
to) the way whatever isn't the neuter is.  

I realize it may not always make sense to ask this question of a writer
-- what could one expect if one asked what Steinbeck's conception of
being was? -- but it seems that the neuter certainly is a idea that is
meant to bear upon 'what is' as such, after all.  

Is it possible to say 'what is' for Blanchot?  If not, why not? 

No thought unwelcome!

Regards,
Reg



   

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