Date: Mon, 20 Feb 1995 20:57:50 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: MB: Picture me dead


Does this message really need answering?  Well, because the dead person--in
this case the image--is always other.  I can't see myself dead, b/c by
seeing I'm alive.  What I see as dead is always another.  As to why Blanchot
would refuse to be photographed, I take it that this is a not particularly
tough-to-understand way of resisting the cult of the author as authority.
That it has its own cult status may be inevitable, but I think it ought to
be said that Blanchot's influence and importance is not really primarily
founded on his refusal to be photographed.  And his various interventions in
the public sphere since the 40s show that he is not himself idolizing his own
invisibility.  On the lure of publicity, see the last chapter of Le livre a
venir.  On another, related issue, someone complained about the idea of doing
lunch with Blanchot--his willingness to meet Richard Howard, his unwillingness
to meet Jabes.  The lunch part at any rate might make one think of the moment
in La parole suppliante in L'entretien infini where he describes Achilles's
insistance that Priam eat with him as une "parole sublime."  This is in the
context of the choice "Ou la parole ou la mort," and perhaps it becomes clear
that corresponding, and not meeting, is a way of prefering la parole to la
mort.  At any rate, I think the cult of Blanchot's impersonality is a somewhat
jejune response to his work, fun but not so utterly important.

William Flesch