The Infinite Conversation (Theory & History of Literature) [Paperback]

By the above I don't mean to imply that Blanchot's works are not coherent or that they don't merit reading. I think Blanchot is one of the most important writers of this century. His work is far more significant than Foucault or Derrida, not to denigrate them or deny the vitality of thier work. Readers of Derrida's more recent works (Politics of Friendship, the Gift of Death, Cinders, even Postcards) will find Blanchot quite worthwhile.

In The Infinite Conversation are an extensive collection of essays and dialogues composed by Blanchot over several years and most of them originally published seperately. In this book Blanchot explores in a rigorous and almost orderly fashion "what it would mean for something like literature" to exist. Starting with the idea of literature he explores, through consideration of literature--Hoderlin, Homer, Kafka, Levinas and others--the vacant center of such concepts as identity, agency and subjectivity. Almost ex nihilo, Blanchot constructs an ethics that asks extraordinary responsibility from us without drawing on God, natural law, humanism, or any kind of center.

After reading Blanchot, the weight of words weighs heavily. Anyone with even a slight interest in continental philosophy ought to read this book.

I have read this book all the way through the final page, but I am far from done with it. I will never be done with it. For, as Blanchot says, "The book: a ruse by which writing goest toward the absence of the book." (p. 424)
I cannot help but start from Jean-Luc Nancy's protests against accusations of Blanchot being mystical and nihilistic (Multiple Arts; The Muses II (Stanford, CA; 2006); p. 85). I protest, but not because Blanchot is not a mystic, but because the word is thrown out by these erstwhile critics as an epithet. For me a mystic is one of the four figures that are essential for demarcating a human endeavor worthy of the name. Blanchot is a mystic in that his work breaks out of the everyday, the set, commonplace and utilitarian to the "ungraspable ambiguity" that opens onto "being's inertia," its foregone onwarding, toward which the human reaches its extremity and its strangely demarcated way. He is a mystic because he does the work, and places into circulation the precept and precursor on which a course of vibrancy and generativity can take shape.
It is not surprising that such a stance and such work escapes the comprehension of many, or that it frightens those who get the words and syntax but cannot place themselves in motion synchronous with Blanchot (or Nancy -- the two are synchronous and syncopate, without repeating together).
This book publishes late writings in Blanchot's career. They are crisp and without exposition in casting out into word-forms what always exceeds these words, always originates what words set into play. I call this a "destinational comprehension: a "region" of psychic/somatic formation that arises in order to generate a locus of human gathering, a gathering most at home when in estrangement, new lands of newly strange and potent, and as yet unnamed forces. (If Blanchot is anti-Semetic -- another charge vehemently protested by Nancy -- he is one in the way of Moses, shattering the tablets of what beckons to become law in order to form a new people who then seek out a new law, one of generative ventures into the art work: "the unique, ineffable and untranslatable." (p. 231), "the voice, but not speech..., the reverberation of a space opening onto the outside." (p. 258). He opposes any and all rigid formulation as having any value for generative human life. He writes as a Jew, always venerating the Exodus, reaching out even into the desert, toward that destination that cannot be reached, Hearing (O Israel) that word that is never comprehended. See Pt II, Chr V; and Pt III, Ch XVIII.
Calling Blanchot a "critic" or "social commentator" is like calling Frank Lloyd Wright a home builder. Blanchot is marking out new dimensions of human capability, right in the heart, as Nancy might say, of the most strident and difficult, the most obscure and ambiguous of human endeavors. His company -- Bataille, Sade, Nietzsche (right in the middle of the work), Mallarme (throughout the work), Rimbaud, Kafka and Mann among others -- bespeaks of the courage of this journey (for all involved). Hegel forms the backdrop and foil, and Heidegger's shadow looms silently over the the work.
The paradox of the work is that while extolling speech, it inscribes what is only now becoming writable -- though his efforts, and the efforts of his companions, Nancy, Foucault, even Deleuze. But written, these words stand not just for affect, but to set in motion a new encounter that offers a return and a new gathering, and not just once, but as a way, a as a demarcating of a re-envisioned human endeavor (the exigency set before us after the 20th century's catastrophes of wars, holocaust and self-satisfied ignorance, bigotry and power grabs).
The book amazes me. It may be the one that I rescue from the fire. It shows the benefit of keeping good company, and since a book cannot refuse the company that enters its sway, I will keep company with it.

Among Blanchot's publications in American (English), this is one the reader can turn to repeatedly. The index is wonderful, and the Introduction by the translator is very helpful when trying to situate ourselves within the con-text of Blanchot's work.

I never start at the beginning of the book and read it in order. Instead I'll open it randomly and scan the words until I am drawn in, somehow.

Or I'll turn to the marvel of an Index at the back of this book and scan this until I find a topic, or textual arrangement that grabs at me.

Or if you find yourself wanting to pursue a curiosity with a certain writer, poet, or intellectual/thinker it is fascinating to turn to the Index and see what Blanchot's take on it might be.

Make this book your own! Follow its coursings and angulations perhaps as a way of holding your own mind-ful inquiries (conversations) against the page as a mirror and watch where the light dances, refacts, or is obscured. And the cracks, silvered coating ('reflecting glaze'?), and mirrorized display will work and 'un-work' the space which surrounds or unbinds you. And of this "space" what of it is parlayed by the 'space of literature'( to borrow what Blanchot refers to in another book of his ). Isn't this an uncanny notion (or how is it we forget?): that we make our way in the world by thinking, and speaking? And so what or how are we to 'read' into that? What is the topology of this, as such? Do we enter the maps as 'surs'? (Thinking of Michael Palmer's poetry here, perhaps).

What is it that draws us on? What 'calculus' observes or holds us within a 'recognizable context'? Or what one are we observing and holding to, without criticism or re-course?(Palmer again:"An indefinite calculus watches/ writes and re-writes")

What is determined within this "sphere" of recognized forms, gestures, figures, and their articulation,where-in we recognize our movements:

the re-formed un-maskings, shown coverings, and 'un-workings', which pass on to the un-recognizable, the un-accountable, the unavowable? Only to make their way back again, but is this re-transmitted, re-circuited? Or are, we though "acting", somehow short-circuited in our thinking and speaking? Do we have a prayer? Thanks be to Maurice Blanchot...but somehow... and yet...?

Now, finally, to end this review, one way to adjust to the "infinite" in the title of his book, looking at some lines by Isaac-the-Blind,who writes:

For every sphere fills itself from a sphere above it. //

& they are given in order to meditate from the sphere that appears //

in your heart, to meditate //

up to the infinite. //

For there is no path to prayer other than that whereby //

man is sucked up by finite words & rises in thinking to the infinite//