Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit by Leslie Hill (review)

Abstract

984 Reviews message in the volume, preserves7it from monotony. The more vivid tales often seem at odds with Monelle's teaching: in 'La Predestinee' the inability to engage with life and its limitations represents a loss, and Morgane discovers herself in sensuality and cruelty in 'LTnsensible'. Schirosi sees Le Livre de Monelle as springing from Schwob's own preoccupations and experiences; the volume represents an accounknot of Monelle but of the inner adventure provoked by her in the narrator, a fascinating figure, but one from which he turns in the closing paragraph towards a world of suffering and love. Schirosi does not explore the intellectual climate in which the work is situated (for Gourmont, 'toutes les notions qui sont demeurees communes aux intellectuels d'une generation'): the anarchism that marks Monelle's calls for destruction; the idea of the 'innocent eye' and the attack on 'intelligence' and habit ('J'essayai d'apprendre l'ignorance et l'illusion et l'etonnement de l'enfant nouveaune '); the nineteenth-century themes of the ouvriere and the prostitute. The usefulness of the volume is moreover limited by its presentation. There is no indication of the prehistory of the text (other than the previous appearance of 'La Decue'), nor notes nor bibliography. The introduction is marred by frequent misspellings (Saldmbo, Catulle Mandes, Pochaontas). The text has several errors of punctuation and spelling, notably omitted tirets.On four occasions in the final section, 'Monelle' (pp. 84, 84-85, 90, 91), eight lines of text have been replaced by lines from two tales of Monelle's sisters, 'La Predestinee' and 'L'Exaucee'. University of Southampton P. W. M. Cogman Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writingat theLimit. By Leslie Hill. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2001. 277 pp. The subtitle of Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot designates the terrain which Leslie Hill's several books (on Beckett, Duras, Blanchot) have explored, constituting through this body of work a now recognizable and important voice in French studies and outside. Though it must be said that the book does not treat the three writers its title refers to in relation to each other, except in the brief introduction, and each writer thus remains, so to speak, within the limits of their name, each of them in turn is brought to an internal limit or to a kernel in their thought. In Bataille, forexample, the thought of sacrifice is sacrificed, or in Klossowski language approaches in the name a singularity which it cannot generalize, or in Blanchot literature approaches its essence as a disappearance or a withdrawal. Hill's admirably lucid readings, significantly of the lesser-studied fictional texts ofthe three writers, sacrifice nothing to lucidity ofthe complexity and the demands of the texts themselves, and acknowledge the inevitable failure ofany response as these readings respond to the aporias into which they are led. The demand to which these writers enjoin us to respond is to confront at the heart or at the edge of literature a meditation on the possibility of literature as such, which is also a meditation on death and on finitude. Death emerges as the double figure,as Hill points out with regard to Blanchot, which, generalized and common, yet absolutely singular, calls these texts to account at the limit of themselves. This limit is not, then, one which is there as an extremity or as avant-garde of the centre-ground of 'literature', but is the most interior point ofthis ground, where literature confronts the violent emptiness on which it rests,and where literature confronts death or negativity as its condition of possibility. Perhaps this internal limit may be approached only via the singularity of the work, and the intellectual biography of each writer, and Hill executes this convincingly, not only offeringreadings of Bataille and Blanchot's fictional texts, and Klossowski's trilogy Les Lois de Vhospitalite, but also doing this in proximity to the intellectual and political itineraries of each writer. Perhaps the limit MLRy 97.4, 2002 985 Hill seeks to confront or to approach would be sacrificed in the generalized and, so to speak, socialized dimension of Bataille, Klossowski, and Blanchot together, Hill's title then connoting singularity and separation through the hiatus of its commas. But then...