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January 21, 2005
I'm reading Blanchot's The Infinite Conversation. I have to admit I was attracted by the word 'conversation' in the title.
The text appears to be a collection of essays in the form of a dialogue with a friend (Levinas, Bataille?) or a barely present other (Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Holderlin?) in a space between philosophy (ethics), poetry and literature. It is an interesting space, given the history of antagonism between philosophy and literature since Plato.It appears to be a space beyond the traditional (Mathew Arnold?) conception of literary criticism as the servant or handmaiden of literature.
Is this new creative kind of essay writing a philosophy that has become literature? Or is it an aesthetic philosophy as distinct from a philosophical aesthetics, such as Adorno's Aesthetic Theory?
I have not read The Space of Literature (1955), The Book to Come (1959) or Friendship (1971. So The Infinite Conversation(1969) is my first encounter with Blanchot. All I know about him is that he was part of the 1930-1940s French philosophical scene that was the philosophical roots of poststructuralism of the 1960s.
So I am going in naked with only a vague grasp of the history of literary criticism and theory. I accept the conception of literary criticism as a form of creative writing, the Nietzschean idea that such a form of writing can undertake the critique of metaphysics, and that we can read philosophical texts through the eyes of literary criticism.
Maybe, it is here in Blanchot's space between philosophy,poetry and literature that we can find a way to connect the individuals interior experience to society? That connection needs to be made given the opposition or conflict between Bataille's inner experience with what society conventionally recognizes as valid experience. I accept the conflict, but how do we deal with it if we do not want to take the mystical turn?
I came across this Blanchot quote via Spurious:
"We must not doubt that suffering weighs more heavily on us to the extent that our estrangement from religious consolations, the disappearance of the other world, and the breaking up of traditional social frameworks deprive the one who suffers of all distance and more clearly expose him to the truth of suffering: a truth that consists in withdrawing from him the space that suffering requires, the little time that would make his suffering possible."
That phrase---'the breaking up of traditional social frameworks deprive the one who suffers of all distance and more clearly expose him to the truth of suffering'---is so Nietzschean.
Is this not what happened to the Aboriginal people in Australia? Have they not lost their traditional social and value frameworks? Do they not live in the terror of the immediate? Do they not suffer deeply as they live on the margins of our cities or try to rehabilitate and revitalise their devasted communities in the desert.
I guess that literature works in this nihilistic space. Doing what though?
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Excellent choice. It's a bit longer than The Writing of the Disaster or The Space of Literature (probably the most accessible), but with many rich potential points of departure, for instance regarding "the terrible monologues of Hitler" and political speech in general.