Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2003 23:57:41 +0100
Subject: Re: [fyi] To Blanchot


Rene, you wrote:

>>  It is that detestation that I love. That was Blanchot's gift, his
>>  gift to me
>
>This phoney is asking for the final gift,
>the coup de grace.
>
>More work for bin?

It escapes me on what grounds you label James Griffith a phoney here
(would you call Leibniz a phoney because he plagiarized Spinoza ?).

The gift Griffith is talking about here, the gift he soo gratefully accepts
(not from, but) with Blanchot, is not the final gift, but, on the contrary,
the original gift, namely the birth-gift that language (literature, logos) is.

Only with/in this gift of language, Blanchot contends, men is granted the
right to live (in fear and joy) and is able (eventually and ineluctably !)
to-die-a-good-death. It is a gift worthy of remembering, especially in a
funeral oration.

Here is the opening paragraph from: _Literature And The Right To Die_
[MB:1949] (my rendering).

   "Oh sure, it's possible to write without wondering why. But does the
   author, observing his pen writing the letters, has the right to interrupt
   this flow and say to her: Stop ! What do you know of yourself ? Where
   are you going to ? Why don't you see, that your ink leaves no traces,
   that your progress is free, yet there to stay and circle within emptiness
   only, that you won't be hindered by any obstacles, because you've never
   left your point of departure, your origin ? And yet you write: you write
   ceaselessly, and in the mean time, you let me discover what i dictate
   to you and reveal what i know; in reading, others enrich you with what
   they take from you and give back to you what you teach them. What
   you haven't done, you've done now; what you haven't written, is written
   nevertheless: you're condemned to the unerasable."

Where for Heidegger the Angst-of-Death is the prime opening-up of
Dasein's horizons (cf. SuZ:§40). Blanchot further complements this with
his reflection that the stories (traces) of our (spoken en written) lives are
nothing other than a movement from "angst to language", and thus it is
Lang(u)age, originally, that gives us the Right-to-Die-a-Good-Death.

yours,
Jan







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