Subject: Re: MB: new member
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 14:18:34 GMT


This is a difficult question, and in a sense I'm not even sure where or how 
to begin to reply, in part because adjectives such as 'best' don't really 
seem to fit with respect to Blanchot's writing. His work is, I think, 
predicated first on the impossibility of writing, and there is a sense in 
which the 'best work' would be the one which completed an annihilation of 
language, leaving no word or work standing (while preserving the possibility 
of language and writing as
such).

Having said that, I think there are a few good places one can start with 
Blanchot, and perhaps the question here could be one of accessibility 
(another contentious issue when one is speaking about Blanchot, but the 
difficulties associated with reading Blanchot can often be off-putting to 
one coming to him for the first time, and I'm going to let it pass). My own 
initiation to Blanchot was through The Unavowable Community, and in many 
ways it's still the work of his which I'm closest to, touching as it does on 
so many concepts close to my own work (community, desoeuvrement, friendship, 
death...).

Each of Blanchot's texts might be 'best' for different reasons, but my own 
favorites also include The Writing of the Disaster (alas, its fragmentary, 
aphoristic style can be daunting, to say the least), The Space of 
Literature, and the Work of Fire (early literary/philosphical essays). A 
good place to start with Blanchot's fiction would be the Station Hill 
Blanchot Reader, which collects many of his key <recits> as well as selected 
essays from The Gaze of Orpheus.

In the end, maybe the best way to come to Blanchot is to engage with any of 
his texts, not as a better or worse effort in a long career of writing, but 
outside of such categorical judgement, on its own terms and in its own 
words, as it were, in a reading whose closeness is demanded of us by the 
text itself.

welcome aboard!

-Keith

>From: Janetjet65-AT-aol.com
>Reply-To: blanchot-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>To: blanchot-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject: MB: new member
>Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2000 15:01:45 EDT
>
>Hello,
>     I'm new to this. Please send me a suggestion as to the best work of
>blanchot in your opinion and why you feel it is his best.
>
>Thank You

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