'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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Blanchot: essay on
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March 5, 2005
My apologies. Posting has been light because I've been looking for a new job. My old job as a staffer (researcher/advisor) for a federal Senator in Canberra is coming to an end. The Senate is going to be a very different place after June 30th when the conservatives gain control, and I don't want to be around to see all the good work of the last ten years undone.
This is a good essay on Blanchot from The Gaping Void. It appears to be the work of Stephen Mitchelmore, formerly of In Writing and now of This Space? Is this right? Does anybody know?
The essay is entitled 'Maurice Blanchot, the absent voice', and it opens with a statement about what Blanchot offers us in relation to literature:
"what Blanchot offers...is a return to the fundamental mystery of literature. That is, why do written words have so much power over us, yet also seem completely estranged from the world they supposedly refers to? When we say that literature takes us to "another world", we say more than we might imagine. It is an asymmetry that Blanchot presents to us relentlessly. "There is an a-cultural aspect to art and literature which it is hard to accept wholeheartedly" he says. In this age of shortcuts, in which the value of literature is judged by how well literature effaces itself, so that the asymmetry is denied, avoided, denounced even, Blanchot's resistance makes him, in my opinion, one of the most important writers.....Might the asymmetry of art and world be what makes it vital and important? In a short essay from 1953, published in a new translation by the Oxford Literary Review, Blanchot goes back to the beginnings of modern thought to investigate this possibility, specifically to ancient Athens, and Socrates' preference for speech over writing."
Fine. I'll put that to one side as I'm more interested in the literary institution and the relationship between tradition and modernist rebellion.
The essay says:
"The idea of overthrowing cliché and the tired generic forms (that is, Tradition) has dominated our conception of literature for 150 years....Yet the rebels themselves are divided into two camps. Those, like Wells, who are keen to dispense with literature altogether in an amphetamine-fuelled auto-de-fe and so destroy the complacent world of bourgeois stolidity, and those, like Amis, who want to prune language of its deadwood so that a consciousness can be experienced in all its grotesque, singular richness. What Blanchot .... does is to point out that in order to do either requires a scrupulous attention to language."
I'm lost on the rest of it about literature, oracles, absences--literature as the absent voice. Something is missing here, which I cannot put my findger on.
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Yes that's definitely Steve Mitchelmore.