January 27, 2005

Blanchot: two quotes and....

Bear with me as I'm trying to get a handle on Blanchot.

If Nietzsche and Derrida are philosophers of the fragment (ie., Nietzsche writes a poetics of aphoristic compactness, whilst Derrida produces a highly-styled fragmentary and interrogative treatment of marginality and presence),then is Blanchot a writer of the fragment?

Does Blanchot follow Nietzsche and Bataille in forgetting the world of Apollinian order and reason, and remembering the world of Dionysian suffering?

Two quotes written by Timothy Clark about Blanchot taken from the Literary Encyclopedia:

"Literature fascinates Blanchot as a site of irreducible strangeness and resistance to conceptual thought. Blanchot's critical thinking re-engages the old dispute between poetry and philosophy. The mode of being of literature eludes notions of strict essence, evaluation or weighing, in terms of its supposed truth or falsehood. The space of literature is not one that can feed into any sort of thinking in terms of cultural monuments, human values or edifying reflection. It is a space of crisis and the dissolution of certainty."

Why would literature be a space of crisis? Are we stepping outside the literary institution? Calling it into question? Why is lterature a resistance to conceptual thought? Does not literature use words and them together in some fashion? Or by conceptual thought do we mean 'Theory'?

And why is literature disconnected from values? Is not the space of writing (as poesis) circumscribed by that of philosophy?

My gut feeling, that we are standing on the threshold of a naive romanticism, is dispelled by the next quote:

'In many ways it is possible to read Blanchot's poetics as a radical continuation of that strain in post-Kantian aesthetics that stresses the irreducibility of the art work to any system of rules and concepts. For Blanchot, this is not to affirm some romantic concept of the inexpressible, or to affirm the relation of literature to some deeper principle of life that exceeds the rational (as in Schelling, von Hartmann or Nietzsche, or (closer in time and space) the revolutionary utopian affirmation of the surreal in the practices of André Breton and his followers) – all these anti- or supra rational rational principles still seem too recuperative and idealizing for Blanchot. The literary is rather “an object capable of rendering contradictory or meaningless any attempt to study it theoretically” ('The Novel is a Work of Bad Faith'(1947). Blanchot's work, in this sense, is a dismantling of classical and Romantic aesthetics, concepts of unity, work, meaning and form (one would call it a 'Destruction' in Heidegger's sense of the term were it not that Blanchot's work is often also in tension with Heidegger's own idealization of the poetic).'
Though the Literary Encyclopedia treat Blanchot as a literary theoriest we are talking about philosophy---aesthetics---here.

So I take it that Blanchot is engaged in a dismantling of the categories of asthetic theory? Fair enough.


Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at January 27, 2005 01:19 PM | TrackBack
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Yes, with Blanchot, we are stepping outside the literary institution. More polemically, Blanchot exhibits a kind of contempt bordering on disregard for "culture," which he characterizes in one essay (can't recall which one, will look later) as simply a "storehouse." To "map" this, so to speak, I'd urge a close consideration of what he says is the function of the "image" in "Two Versions of the Imaginary." (Space of Lit.) It "humanizes" the formlessness of the nothing, according to Blanchot, it provides a border, a shape, a sense of defintion that provides a false sense of security and situatedness in time and space. Culture, which I'd probably argue is very much a production of the imagination -- the productive imagination, in the Kantian sense even -- performs a simialr function.

I don't have a lot of time right now to go into this further, but there is a marked Kantian dimension to Blanchot's project, and he speaks admiringly of Kant: "just as Kant's critical reason is the examination of the conditions that make scientific experimentation possible, criticism is implicated in the search for that which makes the experience of literature possible." ("Lautreamont and Sade") But at the same time, it is not a strict Kantian or neo-Kantian undertaking. Blanchot clarifies his allusion to Kant this way: "the word 'search' (recherche) ought not to be understood in its intellectual sense but rather as action taken at the heart of and with an eye toward the space of creation." (ibid)

At the risk of reduction, Blanchot's question is concerned with the question of the possibility of literature. Not 'what is' literature, as Sarte asked, but rather, 'how is literature possible'. The short answer: it's not, and yet it it *is,* it exists, nonetheless.

To get a hold on why literature is a space of crisis, and why it is also valueless, a reading of Blanchot's essays on Kafka may help. And, indirectly, this may help with the "being jewish" question in the post just above this one. Again, a short point: in the judaic tradition, at least as Balnchot understands it, and as he finds in Kafka, literature is a kind of transgression, a break with the Book -- here the Talmud. In a manner of speaking, there already exists A Book in judaism, and there is no need for another. And to try to write another is at once a violation, and also an impossibility, to which Kafka devoted his entire existence.

At some very deep level there is a conection to be discussed between, to borrow the phrase Gary used, the "mode of being of literature" and ... being Jewish.

I gotta' run, hope this helps a bit. I'll try to get back later.

Posted by: Chris on January 29, 2005 01:03 AM
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