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March 29, 2005
I bought a copy of Maurice Blanchot's Lautreamont and Sade the other day. It was one of the few books of Blanchot's sitting on the shelf. I've ordered The Space of Literature and The Writing of the Disaster.
Why Lautreamont and Sade? I was interested in what Blanchot had to say about de Sade. I presume that the Comte de Lautreamont is seen by Blanchot as the inheritor of the Sadean tradition of exploring evil. The Introduction, 'What is the purpose of criticism?', locates the text within the literary instituion rather than philosophy, even though it engages with Heidegger.
Blanchot says that there is very little to literary criticism compared to literature itself--'commentary is just a little snowflake making the bell toll.' He adds:
"Critical discourse has this peculiar characteristic: the more it exerts, develops, and establishes itself, the more it must obliterate itself; in the end it disintegrates."
So de Sade's work is the bell that rings whilst the commentary on these texts is nothing?
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Something like that, I think, yes.
Of course not all critics are parasites, but you are right to recognize Blanchot's insistence on simplicity, and on failure.