“The possibility of the poetic said”

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Notes

Gabriel Riera

Department of Comparative Literature

103 East Pyne

Princeton University

Princeton, NJ 08544

USA

E‐mail: [email protected]

For a comprehensive study of literature in Levinas, see Jill Robbins, Altered Reading. Levinas and Literature .

For a reading of “Reality and Its Shadow,” see Françoise Armengaud, “Éthique et esthétique. De l'ombre à l'oblitération” 605–19; Robert Eagleston, “Cold Splendor: Levinas's Suspicion of Art” in Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas 13–38; Jill Robbins, “Aesthetic Totality and Ethical Infinity” in Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature 75–90; and Thomas C. Wall, “The Allegory of Being” 13–30.

I have analyzed the functioning of this allusion in “Literary Language in Otherwise than Being (Allusion, or Blanchot in Levinas I),” Diacritics (forthcoming).

See Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law” in Acts of Literature 181–220; and Parages 60–64.

In a forthcoming essay, “Art's Inhumanity,” I explore how “Reality and Its Shadow” juxtaposes a critique of Heidegger's ontological use of the work of art to a more general critique of the materiality of the work of art. Levinas's argument revolves around a debatable interpretation of the biblical prohibition of representation.

It is necessary to stress that in Otherwise than Being the reversal of ontological difference is followed by its re‐inscription and displacement. This is a precondition for writing the “otherwise than being,” as Levinas states explicitly in the Preface to the second edition of De l'existence à l'existant (1977) and in part as a response to Jean‐Luc Marion's objections in L'Idole et la distance. Levinas's treatment of Heidegger's ontological difference is a contentious issue, as evidenced in Derrida's “Violence and Metaphysics.” For an assessment of this problematic, see Silvano Petrossino, “D'un livre à l'autre. Totalité et infini et l'Autrement qu'être”; and Silvano Petrosino and Jacques Roland, La Verité nomade: Introduction à Emmanuel Lévinas .

For an analysis of the peculiar structure of Otherwise than Being see Paul Ricouer, Autrement. Lecture d'Autrement qu'être; ou Au‐delà de l'essence d'Emmanuel Lévinas.

Simon Critchley has systematically studied the different conceptions of the il y a in Levinas and Blanchot in his Very Little … Almost Nothing! Death, Philosophy and Finitude.

For a reading more attuned to the dimension of a saying that exceeds the grasp of the said, see Jacques Derrida, “La Loi du genre” in Parages .

I base my reading of this crucial section of Otherwise than Being on Derrida's “En ce moment même dans cette ouvrage me voici” in Psychè. Les Inventions de l'autre and on Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction. Derrida and Levinas . A consideration of the allusion to The Madness of the Day does not form part of these studies.

Emmanuel Levinas, Sur Maurice Blanchot .

Joseph Libertson, Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication .

See Maurice Blanchot, “Knowledge of the Unknown” in The Infinite Conversation . The thinking/writing of the neuter can take place only by presupposing that the working of totality has already been accomplished (Hegel) and that the neuter does not constitute a form of opening (Heidegger). In the first part of The Infinite Conversation the neuter becomes the question of the “other than being” or “the most profound question” (EI 1–39/IC 5–47). This turning point opens a new period in Blanchot in which writing, understood as the question of the neuter, is also conceived as the question of the other in the ethical sense of the term. This period closes with The Step (Not) Beyond (1973) and The Writing of the Disaster (1980).

See Emmanuel Levinas, “Interiority and Economy” in Totality and Infinity 109–21.

“Is Ontology Fundamental?”; “Freedom and Command” (1953); “The Ego and the Totality” (1954); and “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity” (1957).

This distinction was never overlooked by Blanchot, as the following formulation makes clear: “Writing, without placing itself above art, supposes that one not prefer art, but efface art as writing effaces itself” (ED 89/WD 53).

Taking into account the different ways that Heidegger and Levinas understand this term. While for the former ethics refers to an ontic or regional domain grounded in metaphysics (Letter on Humanism), for the latter ethics refers to a breaching of ontology.

Much like Heidegger, Blanchot is apprehensive regarding the term “ethics,” but does not elude the force of the ethical injunction, as The Writing of the Disaster and The Step (Not) Beyond clearly show.

See Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature and his Au moment voulu .

See Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics” in Writing and Difference .

“Le Servant et son maître” originally appeared in Critique 229 (1966).

These concepts are the trace, the distinction between the said and saying, as well as the ethical reduction of the said to the saying.

The French text reads: “fait signe sans que le signe soit porteur de une signification en se déssaisant de la signification” (SMB 39).

Blanchot has insistently questioned the modern doxa on writing's self‐referentiality. That writing becomes a question as “the question of writing” (objective and subjective genitives) means that the borders separating inside and outside open themselves up in a complex manner. The inner core of language (the other, the referent) becomes the strange par excellence. A good way of characterizing Blanchot's project would be by employing a Lacanian expression: “the extimate [extimité] writing.” Lacan used the term extimité in his seminars. Jacques‐Alain Miller gave currency to this term in his unpublished Seminar 1, 2, 3.

Maurice Blanchot, La Folie du jour . The text was originally published as “Un récit” in the journal Empedocles in 1948.

Maurice Blanchot, “Discours sur la patience” 19–44. These fragments later became part of The Writing of the Disaster.

“The work […] is a movement from the Same toward the Other that never returns to the Same. To the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca, we would like to oppose Abraham's story leaving his homeland for good for a land yet unknown” (EEHH 191; translation mine). For Blanchot's reading of Odysseus as a conceptual persona of the man of power, see “Le Chant des sirènes” in Le Livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959). Odysseus' figure has to be opposed to Orpheus', the poet whose infidelity is both toward the realm of action and power, as well as to that of the artwork.

The reader should note that the expression “sens inspiré” is deleted from the English translation, although it appears in the second paragraph within a less decisive context.

• Outdoors, I had a brief vision: a few steps away from me, just at the corner of the street I was about to leave, a woman with a baby carriage had stopped, I could not see her very well, she was maneuvering the carriage to get it through the outer door. At that moment a man whom I had not seen approaching went in through that door. He had already stepped across the sill when he moved backward and came out again. While he stood next to the door, the baby carriage, passing in front of him, lifted slightly to cross the sill, and the young woman, after raising her head to look at him, also disappeared inside. (See “The Madness of the Day” in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader 189–200)

See Maurice Blanchot, “The Absence of the Book” in The Infinite Conversation . For a compelling reading of this demanding text, see Leslie Hill, Maurice Blanchot. Extreme Contemporary .

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gabriel riera

Gabriel Riera Department of Comparative Literature 103 East Pyne Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544 USA E‐mail: [email protected]