Blanchot's reading of Nietzsche on nihilism in his 'Crossing the Line' essay in The Infinite Conversation fails to deal with Nietzsche's affirmation of values that enhance life as a response to nihilism. The essay remains caught up in nihilism, with an account of the movement of nihilism twisting in it on itself; without making the shift to connecting the will to power to the transvaluation of values and to the overcoming nihilism.
Blanchot writes:
Until now we thought nihilism was tied to nothingness. How ill-considered was this: nihilism is tied to being. Nihilism is the impossibility of being done with it and of finding a way out even in the end that is nothingness...nothing ends, everything begins again; the other is still the same. Midnight is only a dissimulated noon, and the great Noon is the abyss of light from which we can never depart...Nihilism thus tells its final and rather grim truth: it tell so the impossibility of nihilism. (p.149)
"...that the extreme point of nihilism is precisely there where it reverses itself, that nihilism is this very turning itself, the affirmation that, in passing from the NO to the Yes, refutes nihilism, but does nothing other than affirm it, and henceforth extends it to every possible affirmation."
What is clear is that Blanchot does not walk done this pathway to make contact with Nietzsche's overman, the transvaluation of values and affirming those values that enhance life.
Instead the essay turns to the debate between Ernest Junger and Martin Heidegger on nihilism.
So why Blanchot's silence about Nietzsche's passing over the precipice through the creation of new values that affirm of life as a way of overcoming the movement of nihilism? Is it blindness? Is it an unease with ethics? Is it the old disconnect between literature and ethics in the 20th century?
A suggestion. Have we reached the limit of Blanchot where literature is nowhere and disappears into the space of the void? Blanchot seems to make everything darker? So we remain enclosed within the darkness of nihilism as writing withdraws language from the world.
Though he reconnects with Heidegger in the 'Crossing the Line' Blanchot does not connect with the way Heidegger puts some content into Nietzsche's proposal for a revaluation of values: a "homecoming" to the earth through marginalized practices and poetics in our technological mode of being.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at February 19, 2005 11:57 PM | TrackBack