I've always found Blanchot hard to read and I've struggled with interpreting his texts and his idea of the limit-experience.

So in this post I'm just going to take the easy way out and juxtapose two texts about Blanchot.

The first is one by Matt over at Long Sunday, who has a post on Blanchot's politics of writing. Matt asks:

Does Blanchot present a "negative eschatology?" In a time––this moment, now––so saturated with capitalist noise and whining about the "victory of (neo)liberal democracy" and its accompanying, mantric, superficially (neo)Hegelian echoes of an "end of History"––we might do well to heed the warnings contained in Derrida's later writings, particularly Specters of Marx....Writing, finally no less homesick than speaking, remains a potential site for a certain kind of politics--one not without fragility or risk... Is Blanchot's politics of writing diagnosably apocalyptic? ...Writing then refuses the present, but never in the same way as the phrase, "end of history," forecloses on the present (or never in the same way twice). If writing has the power to transform eras, or if writing itself is the change between eras, there is a sense in which writing both hears and refuses its own present––or at least its own presence as a representation of power (over the future, for instance). Blanchot's politics of writing is, at least in Leslie Hill's reading, nothing if not a responsibility (very much in the sense Derrida gives to this word) to alterity and to the Other (as irriducibly other).

One kind of writing is poetry. I'm going to montage Kevin Hart's text to Matt's text.

I've generally interpreted Blanchot as working in the romantic tradition. Kevin Hart says that Blanchot rejects the romantic notions of genius and imagination. So how does Blanchot understand poetic writing? Hart says:

For while Blanchot speaks with Georges Bataille of 'inner experience', of 'a voyage to the end of the possible in man', he identifies an event that explodes rather than preserves an interiority, that exposes the individual to the community that precedes him or her both in fact and by right...Blanchot will therefore evoke an experience that comes at the limit of power, where all dialectical possibilities are exhausted, including those upholding meaning and truth, and especially those that underwrite the myth of coherent selfhood. It is in art, Blanchot tells us, that we characteristically feel the pull of this limit. We find ourselves losing the origin that once attracted us to a work, and being approached by an irruption in immanence, not a transcendence but an infinite dispersal of indeterminate being. As if trapped, we yield to the fascination this irruption exerts in language, giving ourselves over to the allure of the imaginary.

I use the first person plural not to suggest that the experience is universal but to indicate that, for Blanchot, no 'I' can rightly claim to know it. Like Rilke, Blanchot will propose that the artist’s experience is a foretaste of death, a dissolution of individual consciousness as ground of possible experience...With implacable logic, Blanchot will tell us that the experience of writing is never a 'lived event'; it does not engage 'the present of presence' and is 'already nonexperience'. This is not because the writer encounters being in an eminent sense, an eternal One that eludes the present as much as it does the past and the future.

Rather, it is because fascination reigns in an absence of time, before any effective stirrings of negativity, at the threshhold of logic and history where, as Hegel observes, being is 'neither more nor less than nothing' The ontological indeterminacy where the dialectic begins is, on Blanchot’s interpretation, also thatwhich the dialectic never quite overcomes and which he believes idles behind its each and every moment, remaining forever in excess of Spirit. It marks a limit ofexperience, and it offers itself as an experience of the limit. We cannot live this neutral indeterminacy--the very thought implies recuperation of a transgression---and we cannot escape the trial to which it summons us. This, then, is the danger to which art exposes us: 'the menacing proximity of a vague and vacant outside, a neutral existence, nil and limitless.

That writing is the truth of the sacred, and the sacred is the truth of writing. And more: that writing indicates the final truth of religion, namely that the sacred expiates itself in the realisation of community. Blanchot turns out to be an apologist after all: art is of value because it discloses the meaning of being...Blanchot ultimately wants to affirm that there is one sacred, that it is the neutre, that it constitutes 'the most profound question' and that 'writing ... is present in the language where the real is articulated'. And he also wishes to claim not only that the neutre is unpresentable but also that art presents it as unpresentable. In this hyperbolic sublime we pass from a romanticism to a mysticism. The form of divine communication is preserved while its religious content is expiated.

I'm not doing an either politics or mysticism here. Both are bound up together.