The Writing of the Disaster: L'Ecriture Du Desastre - Softcover

Blanchot, Maurice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803261209 ISBN 13: 9780803261204

Verlag: University of Nebraska Press, 1995

Inhaltsangabe

Modern history is haunted by the disasters of the century-world wars, concentration camps, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust-grief, anger, terror, and loss beyond words, but still close, still impending. How can we write or think about disaster when by its very nature it defies speech and compels silence, burns books and shatters meaning?

 

The Writing of the Disaster reflects upon efforts to abide in disaster's infinite threat. First published in French in 1980, it takes up the most serious tasks of writing: to describe, explain, and redeem when possible, and to admit what is not possible. Neither offers consolation.

 

Maurice Blanchot has been praised on both sides of the Atlantic for his fiction and criticism. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas once remarked that Blanchot's writing is a "language of pure transcendence, without correlative." Literary theorist and critic Geoffrey Hartman remarked that Blanchot's influence on contemporary writers "cannot be overestimated."

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ann Smock is a professor of French at the University of California at Berkeley. She has translated Blanchot's The Space of Literature, also available as a Bison Book. Jeffrey Mehlman, a professor of French at Boston University, is the author of many books and articles on twentieth-century France and French literature.

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Modern history is haunted by the disasters of the centuryworld wars, concentration camps, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust - grief, anger, terror, and loss beyond words, but still close, still impending. How can we write or think about disaster when by its very nature it defies speech and compels silence, burns books and shatters meaning? The Writing of the Disaster reflects upon efforts to abide in disaster's infinite threat. First published in French in 1980, it takes up the most serious tasks of writing: to describe, explain and redeem when possible, and to admit what is not possible. Neither offers consolation. Maurice Blanchot has been praised on both sides of the Atlantic for his fiction and criticism. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas once remarked that Blanchot's writing is a "language of pure transcendence, without correlative". Literary theorist and critic Geoffrey Hartman remarked that Blanchot's influence on contemporary writers "cannot be overestimated".

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The Writing of the Disaster = L'Ecriture du désastre

By Maurice Blanchot, Ann Smock

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Copyright © 1995 University of Nebraska Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8032-6120-4

CHAPTER 1

* The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. It does not touch anyone in particular; "I" am not threatened by it, but spared, left aside. It is in this way that I am threatened; it is in this way that the disaster threatens in me that which is exterior to me — an other than I who passively become other. There is no reaching the disaster. Out of reach is he whom it threatens, whether from afar or close up, it is impossible to say: the infiniteness of the threat has in some way broken every limit. We are on the edge of disaster without being able to situate it in the future: it is rather always already past, and yet we are on the edge or under the threat, all formulations which would imply the future — that which is yet to come — if the disaster were not that which does not come, that which has put a stop to every arrival. To think the disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch as we suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in which to think it.

The disaster is separate; that which is most separate.

When the disaster comes upon us, it does not come. The disaster is its imminence, but since the future, as we conceive of it in the order of lived time, belongs to the disaster, the disaster has always already withdrawn or dissuaded it; there is no future for the disaster, just as there is no time or space for its accomplishment.

* He does not believe in the disaster. One cannot believe in it, whether one lives or dies. Commensurate with it there is no faith, and at the same time a sort of disinterest, detached from the disaster. Night; white, sleepless night — such is the disaster: the night lacking darkness, but brightened by no light.

* The circle, uncurled along a straight line rigorously prolonged, reforms a circle eternally bereft of a center.

* "False" unity, the simulacrum of unity, compromises it better than any direct challenge, which, in any case, is impossible.

* Would writing be to become, in the book, legible for everyone, and indecipherable for oneself? (Hasn't Jabès almost told us this?)

* If disaster means being separated from the star (if it means the decline which characterizes disorientation when the link with fortune from on high is cut), then it indicates a fall beneath disastrous necessity. Would law be the disaster? The supreme or extreme law, that is: the excessiveness of uncodifiable law — that to which we are destined without being party to it. The disaster is not our affair and has no regard for us; it is the heedless unlimited; it cannot be measured in terms of failure or as pure and simple loss.

Nothing suffices to the disaster; this means that just as it is foreign to the ruinous purity of destruction, so the idea of totality cannot delimit it. If all things were reached by it and destroyed — all gods and men returned to absence — and if nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little. The disaster is not of capital importance. Perhaps it renders death vain. It does not superimpose itself upon dying's scope for withdrawal, filling in the void. Dying sometimes gives us (wrongly, no doubt), not the feeling of abandoning ourselves to the disaster, but the feeling that if we were to die, we would escape it. Whence the illusion that suicide liberates (but consciousness of the illusion does not dissipate it or allow us to avoid it). The disaster, whose blackness should be attenuated — through emphasis — exposes us to a certain idea of passivity. We are passive with respect to the disaster, but the disaster is perhaps passivity, and thus past, always past, even in the past, out of date.

* The disaster takes care of everything.

* The disaster: not thought gone mad; not even, perhaps, thought considered as the steady bearer of its madness.

* The disaster, depriving us of that refuge which is the thought of death, dissuading us from the catastrophic or the tragic, dissolving our interest in will and in all internal movement, does not allow us to entertain this question either: what have you done to gain knowledge of the disaster?

* The disaster is related to forgetfulness — forgetfulness without memory, the motionless retreat of what has not been treated — the immemorial, perhaps. To remember forgetfully: again, the outside.

* "Have you suffered for knowledge's sake?" This is asked of us by Nietzsche, on the condition that we not misunderstand the word "suffering": it means, not so much what we undergo, as that which goes under. It denotes the pas ["not"] of the utterly passive, withdrawn from all sight, from all knowing. Unless it be the case that knowledge — because it is not knowledge of the disaster, but knowledge as disaster and knowledge disastrously — carries us, carries us off, deports us (whom it smites and nonetheless leaves untouched), straight to ignorance, and puts us face to face with ignorance of the unknown so that we forget, endlessly.

* The disaster: stress upon minutiae, sovereignty of the accidental. This causes us to acknowledge that forgetfulness is not negative or that the negative does not come after affirmation (affirmation negated), but exists in relation to the most ancient, to what would seem to come from furthest back in time immemorial without ever having been given.

* It is true that, with respect to the disaster, one dies too late. But this does not dissuade us from dying; it invites us — escaping the time where it is always too late — to endure inopportune death, with no relation to anything save the disaster as return.

* Never disappointed, not for lack of disappointment, but because of disappointment's always being insufficient.

* I will not say that the disaster is absolute; on the contrary, it disorients the absolute. It comes and goes, errant disarray, and yet with the imperceptible but intense suddenness of the outside, as an irresistible or unforeseen resolve which would come to us from beyond the confines of decision.

* To read, to write, the way one lives under the surveillance of the disaster: exposed to the passivity that is outside passion. The heightening of forgetfulness.

It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence.

* The disaster has already passed beyond danger, even when we are under the threat of — —. The mark of the disaster is that one is never at that mark except when one is under its threat and, being so, past danger.

* To think would be to name (to call) the disaster the way one reserves, in the back of one's mind, an unspoken thought.

I do not know how I arrived at this, but it may be that in so doing I struck upon the thought which leads one to keep one's distance from thought; for it gives that: distance. But to go to the end of thought (in the form of this thought of the end, of the edge): is this not possible only by changing to another thought? Whence this injunction: do not change your thought, repeat it, if you can.

* The disaster is the gift; it gives disaster: as if it took no account of being or not-being. It is not advent (which is proper to what comes to pass): it does not happen. And thus I cannot ever happen upon this thought, except without knowing, without appropriating any knowledge. Or...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Nebraska Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1995
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0803261209
• ISBN 13: 9780803261204
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 170
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland