Blanchot's 'Crossing the Line' essay in The Infinite Conversation ends with a short look at the exchange between Heidegger and Junger. I do not know the texts referred to. There is this piece by Ernest Junger, called 'Over the Line,' whilst Heidegger's 'Concerning the Line' (ie. "The Question of Being") is a response to Junger. The latter text is not online, but it is referrred to here.
Junger rejects Nietzsche's favorable prognosis of overcoming nihlism through the counter movement of the transvaluation of values by philosophers as lawgivers and legislators; these great individuals express their autonomy and self-determination in acts of courage, creation, destruction, passion, etc. The implication here is that autonomy opens up to those individuals able to create their own lives though positing new values.
Junger dashes the optimism presupposed in Nietzsche's value-creation, even though he accepts the need to cross the line of nihilism.
My understanding is that Heidegger interpreted Nietzsche as strieving for new values, thus trying to pass over nihilism by dancing in the abyss.I presume that as, this is seen as operating within the metaphysics of technological modernity, so Heidegger would critique Nietzsche's understanding of values. The latter is based on human beings positing our values, as creating them. Understanding nihilism as the lack of values is part of the problem not its solution.
Heidegger would see Junger's desire to 'cross over' the line of nihilism as operating within the same region of the metaphysics of technological modernity.
What does Blanchot say about this?
He is obscure as usual. He says:
Heidegger suggested--and this was his principal contribution to the examination of this strange adversary---that we would henceforth be well advised in writing both the word being and the word nothingness only as crossed with a St Andrews cross: being, nothingness.
What ever it means it is clear that Blanchot does not address the issue of the transvaluation of values. He avoids the ethics and is silent about the creation of new values.
Blanchot goes on to question Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche as the last metaphysician of the West:
It is certainly appropriate to mediate on this [Heidegger's] invitation, but by returning to quite another reflection that would ask whether all preceding interpretations do not forget Nietzsche by placing him back into a tradition tha the himself was not content to simply put into question... the tradition fo the logical discourse issues from logos, of thought as a thought of the whole, and of speeech as a relation of unity...
He makes the turn to the poetic Nietzsche and literature, which is understood as a site of irreducible strangeness and resistance to conceptual thought of philsoophy. Hence Blanchot's critical thinking re-engages the old dispute between poetry and philosophy.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at February 22, 2005 07:03 AM | TrackBack