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March 6, 2005
Below is a quote from Stephen Mitchelmore's essay, Maurice Blanchot, the absent voice, from The Gaping Void. It is from a section of the essay that deals with with disaster, the trauma of past disasters and the knowledge of the disaster to come, specifically our own death. How does one deal with this?
"The fragmentary work, perhaps the apogee of 20th Century Modernist literature and philosophy, is Blanchot's approach. Its refusal to insist on narrative or theoretical completion, as well as, in the process, weakening the voice of authority, means both reader and writer are constantly moving toward understanding, toward what is absent, yet never assuming the nihilism of no truth, no meaning even as it encroaches on each clearing."
'Moving towards what is absent'----does this refer to what is absent in a positivist scientific culture? Can we think in terms of black holes in such a culture? Is this the philosophical background that enables us to make sense of the linking literature, fragments and absences.
These guys in the 1940s were just beginning to think about the consequences for art, literature and philosophy in a positivist scientific culture; just begining to think otherwise. So beginning to think otherwise deals with disaster and the abysses of modernity that a positivist science avoids, and is silent about?
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