Illegibility: Blanchot and Hegel. By William S. Allen

Abstract

This is the latest in a series of books by William S. Allen devoted wholly or partly to Maurice Blanchot’s work. It begins with a clear statement of its guiding principle: ‘a text that is beyond comprehension offers itself to thought in other ways’ (p. 1). This ‘problematic of illegibility’ arises when thought enquires into its own language, and as such it ‘lies at the heart of a certain response to Hegel, particularly that of Blanchot’, for whom it is literature that provides one such ‘other way’ (p. 2). The loss of finitude that results when thinking ‘seeks to come to terms with itself’ exposes the mind to an experience of death and the infinite that philosophy alone cannot comprehend (p. 2). Through the ‘ineradicable linguistic supplement’ provided by literature, Blanchot turns the ‘syncope of language’ that the experience of illegibility induces in thought into ‘an entirely different form of relation’ (p. 5). Having persuasively established a clear relation between the three terms of his title, however, Allen almost immediately abandons it. A chapter on Michel Foucault, Raymond Roussel, and the Comte de Lautréamont, designed to ‘offset’ Blanchot’s understanding of literature and ‘situate the subsequent analysis’ (pp. 10, 15), is followed by one on Jacques Derrida’s reading of Hegel, which begins by contrasting it unfavourably with Blanchot’s but otherwise says little of note about the latter. Then comes a chapter devoted entirely to Hegel and Aufhebung, in which Blanchot only intermittently appears. In the final third of the book Blanchot and Hegel at last become the focus. By that stage, however, the theme of illegibility — the notion that gives the book its title — has almost disappeared from Allen’s argument, having received only a handful of mentions in what precedes. As a result, although it is invoked once or twice with reference to the neutral, to L’Attente l’oubli (1962), and to Theodor Adorno’s approach to artworks or to the reading of texts, illegibility provides the argument with neither direction nor substance, so that the book often appears aimless and digressive. When he focuses closely on Blanchot’s texts, Allen certainly provides some illuminating insights, for example in what he says about ‘the reflexive point of intelligibility’ with which the indexical marks in L’Attente l’oubli mark the moment of reading (p. 179). Too often, however, the telescope swings round to reveal a remote thinker, engaged in a protracted wrangle with abstruse notions and talking primarily to himself. It is disappointing that there is no bibliography, even though the often lengthy notes contain copious references, and referencing in the main text is sometimes allusive, as if it is assumed that the reader’s knowledge of the material being discussed is identical to the author’s. Moreover, the index is partial and quirky: in one case, the author and the title of a single book are listed separately with the same (incomplete) page references, while numerous other authors appear more often in the text than in the index, or are simply not listed there at all.