Comments have been turned off due to very heavy, computer generated comment spam over the weekend. The poker was flowing in at around 2000 comments a day. It was overload. Things had to be shut down whilst we install more anti-spam sofware.

In the meantime comments can be emailed, and I will incorporate them into the post as updates. In the light of this spam attack I have posted some comments made by Chris with respect to Blanchot. They are too good to be buried away in the comments of an old post.

Chris says:

"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" in Space of Literature. It "humanizes" the formlessness of the nothing, according to Blanchot; it provides a border, a shape, a sense of definition 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 similar 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." ("Lautreamont and Sade")

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 *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 this post. 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 connection to be discussed between, to borrow the phrase Gary used, the "mode of being of literature" and ... being Jewish."