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April 13, 2005
In digging around looking for material on Blanchot on the way that he explores the limits of philosophy from the perspective of literature, I came across this site.
I was looking for material/reviews on Gerald L. Bruns' Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy but I couldn't find any. However, I did happen upon Ullrich Haase & William Large's Maurice Blanchot.
This quote caught my eye:
"The overarching question of Blanchot's thought is the meaning and possibility of literature. He does not understand literature in terms of a canon; that is to say, a hierarchy of great works to be judged according to their relative value. As we have pointed out, it would be impossible to find detailed textual criticism in Blanchot, even when his work is more traditionally presented in terms of a study of an author."
It sounds like a retreat into modernism with its apolitical promotion of a "pure" literature untethered to either ideological statements or grand projects to me. Literature is opposed to that of everyday life and the rational calculation of instrumentalreason. A modernist literature examines itself, the nature of the fictive act, and all this entails in terms of speaker, addressee, thought, and temporality/ies. So we have the fundamental opposition of literary modes of operation to those of the bourgeois world with its goal-oriented work, time, and technology.
More philosophically literature expresses the being of language that is prior to communication and so is not primarily about communication. Literature is a search for its original moment of emergence from the silence.
The blub continues:
"..for Blanchot, literature cannot be separated off into a sphere where all that matters are questions of value and good taste, as it touches upon fundamental philosophical questions. This explains why the most important writers for Blanchot are not other literary critics, but, on the one hand, philosophers, especially G. W F. Hegel (1770‑1831), Martin Heidegger (1889‑1976) and Emmanuel Levinas (1906‑95), and, on the other hand, those literary writers such as the Austrian (Czech) novelist Franz Kafka (1883‑1924), and the French Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme (1842‑98), for whom the question of literature emerges from the activity of writing."
Literature puts philosophy into question because it questions the conceptuality of philosophy. Literature brings a difference into human life in which the systems and ontologies that govern the real world of everyday exchange and rationality no longer apply.
That is about as much as I could make out.
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For what it's worth, I think you'd really like the Bruns book, Gary. His use of the word, "anarchy" may be a bit circular, but definitely an Aristotelian-friendly read, (while still calling into question the governence of ontologies...) Maybe I'll try to use it in a post sometime soon)