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Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature
A Voice from Elsewhere
Reflections on the enigma and secret of "literature."
Anacrusis : on the poems of Louis-René des Forêts. A voice from elsewhere ; The white, the black ; Anacrusis --
The beast of Lascaux --
The last to speak --
Michel Foucault as I imagine him. A man in danger ; Farewell to structuralism ; The demand for discontinuity ; Knowledge, power, truth? ; From subjection to subject ; The innermost conviction ; Who is me today? ; Society of blood, society of knowledge ; Deadly racism ; The determination to talk about sex ; Oh my friends
Anacrusis : on the poems of Louis-René des Forêts. A voice from elsewhere ; The white, the black ; Anacrusis --
The beast of Lascaux --
The last to speak --
Michel Foucault as I imagine him. A man in danger ; Farewell to structuralism ; The demand for discontinuity ; Knowledge, power, truth? ; From subjection to subject ; The innermost conviction ; Who is me today? ; Society of blood, society of knowledge ; Deadly racism ; The determination to talk about sex ; Oh my friends
- GenresPhilosophyFrance
148 pages, Paperback
First published November 20, 2002
6 people are currently reading
171 people want to read
About the author
Maurice Blanchot
146 books609 followersMaurice Blanchot was a French philosopher, literary theorist and writer of fiction. Blanchot was a distinctly modern writer who broke down generic boundaries, particularly between literature and philosophy. He began his career as a journalist on the political far right, but the experience of fascism altered his thinking to the point that he supported the student protests of May 1968. Like so many members of his generation, Blanchot was influenced by Alexandre Kojeve's humanistic interpretation of Hegel and the rise of modern existentialism. His “Literature and the Right to Death” shows the influence that Heidegger had on a whole generation of French intellectuals.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 28, 2023
The Infernal Necessity of Language
There is a fatal flaw in all the stories we tell ourselves about life. They lack any detail about our transition from non-being to being and vice versa. We try to fill these gaps with what we call religion. But religious stories are never about me, only about everyone. The change in subject is not just disruptive, it is also essentially fraudulent. My personal history simply does not figure in religion no matter how much others insist. Yet the world is full of believers.
Birth and death, our own, are things we know nothing about. Blanchot associates the Ancient Greek idea of anacrusis, a silent prelude, to these events. Although Blanchot doesn’t mention it explicitly, this also describes the opening rest in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the Hebrew letter Aleph which has no sound of its own but prepares the mouth for speech. All represent a necessary silence into which language intrudes. The silence seems to have meaning, a meaning that is entirely non-linguistic.
Plato believed that written text was dead language because it was unsubtle and was not confronted by immediate reaction. Text is, he felt, too impersonal to be trusted. It cannot be questioned but sits mutely stubborn. Speech was sacred, not the written word. And yet he wrote, and wrote, and wrote. And his legacy includes such things as dogmatic Christianity which deify written language.
Poetry, like prophecy, tries to bridge the gap between language and that which is not language. But in order to do so it must undermine the authority of language itself. It distorts and corrupts and misdirects words to discover what lies beyond in the silence. But still poetry is trapped in the language it is attempting to escape. It effectively can only construct more and better steel bars for our linguistic prison and pulverise itself. Yet poets persist; as do readers of poetry.
Language is not natural. It comes to us ready made from elsewhere. But it is created by us. Its use overcomes nature, often obliterating it. It masquerades as reality and is capable of manipulating its most accomplished manipulators. It camouflages itself so astutely that we cease to recognise its existence much less its agenda. So that we fail to notice when death is bearing down, sometimes on us, sometimes on others, through the words we use. These deaths are unnatural but lead to silence nevertheless.
Blanchot’s very first essay in this collection discusses the poetry of Samuel Wood [des Forêts], whom he quotes in, I suppose, the only way possible: “But let us speak, for we have no other instruments but words, which ‘remain our masters in all things / Since we have to make use of them in order to be quiet’… ~and in order to stop writing, one has to continue to write, to write endlessly until the end, or starting from the end.”
There is a fatal flaw in all the stories we tell ourselves about life. They lack any detail about our transition from non-being to being and vice versa. We try to fill these gaps with what we call religion. But religious stories are never about me, only about everyone. The change in subject is not just disruptive, it is also essentially fraudulent. My personal history simply does not figure in religion no matter how much others insist. Yet the world is full of believers.
Birth and death, our own, are things we know nothing about. Blanchot associates the Ancient Greek idea of anacrusis, a silent prelude, to these events. Although Blanchot doesn’t mention it explicitly, this also describes the opening rest in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the Hebrew letter Aleph which has no sound of its own but prepares the mouth for speech. All represent a necessary silence into which language intrudes. The silence seems to have meaning, a meaning that is entirely non-linguistic.
Plato believed that written text was dead language because it was unsubtle and was not confronted by immediate reaction. Text is, he felt, too impersonal to be trusted. It cannot be questioned but sits mutely stubborn. Speech was sacred, not the written word. And yet he wrote, and wrote, and wrote. And his legacy includes such things as dogmatic Christianity which deify written language.
Poetry, like prophecy, tries to bridge the gap between language and that which is not language. But in order to do so it must undermine the authority of language itself. It distorts and corrupts and misdirects words to discover what lies beyond in the silence. But still poetry is trapped in the language it is attempting to escape. It effectively can only construct more and better steel bars for our linguistic prison and pulverise itself. Yet poets persist; as do readers of poetry.
Language is not natural. It comes to us ready made from elsewhere. But it is created by us. Its use overcomes nature, often obliterating it. It masquerades as reality and is capable of manipulating its most accomplished manipulators. It camouflages itself so astutely that we cease to recognise its existence much less its agenda. So that we fail to notice when death is bearing down, sometimes on us, sometimes on others, through the words we use. These deaths are unnatural but lead to silence nevertheless.
Blanchot’s very first essay in this collection discusses the poetry of Samuel Wood [des Forêts], whom he quotes in, I suppose, the only way possible: “But let us speak, for we have no other instruments but words, which ‘remain our masters in all things / Since we have to make use of them in order to be quiet’… ~and in order to stop writing, one has to continue to write, to write endlessly until the end, or starting from the end.”
October 15, 2024
Neat, clean, elegant. Blanchotian, pure. But could the cadence use a hint of a legato sometimes?
December 16, 2020
scatter-warped thoughts out of the void and into nothingness back into the origin only to reach back around into eternity -- There's better Blanchot.
September 4, 2011
cluck cluck cluck... celan ... cluck cluck heidegger... cluck token swipe at hegel cluck cluck celan... fin. I usually enjoy blanchot - in moderation - for its insightfulness, but this time around I could only detect a certain hastiness and tone of exhausted, solemn and priestlike repetition. But on the bright side: the font! The redeeming quality of this book lies in its font!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews