Renewing the Infinite Conversation

Abstract

Blanchot's thought is to some extent an attempt to grasp the absolute, or at least to open a conversation with the infinite. My question here is how he sets out to do that, and if I'm asking this question today with renewed emphasis it is in part because of the work of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux, both of whom overcome - or claim to overcome - the constraints of finitude and renew the speculative project. As one would expect, this overcoming of finitude carries with it at least an implicit, if not an explicit, critique of those who have come before. Meillassoux has gone further in this direction than Badiou, constructing an entire typology of methodological failures which fall under the name correlationism.1 Blanchot, however, provides a difaferent and historically richer approach to these questions. To make this point, in this essay I ask two related questions: what is the meaning of being according to Blanchot, and how does he know that; in other words, what is his system and what is his method? It's this insistence on system that distinguishes my Blanchot from that of his many excellent readers. Gerald Bruns' description of his approach to Blanchot is a good description of the dominant tendency in much of the secondary literature. Because Blanchot's texts are so difficult and often themselves fragmentary, Bruns practices what he calls philological reading. By philology he does not mean the close attention to specific words, their conventional and historical usage, and the ways in which that history speaks in the present. He means the close attention to moments of Blanchot's texts: Philology works from the bottom up. Since ancient times, it has meant a concentration on the bits and pieces of texts, moving from one fragment to another as best one can.2 My approach, while heavily indebted to Bruns, is exactly the opposite. Instead of thinking the fragment, I want search for - and construct - the whole. This search is warranted for two reasons, one external to Blanchot's work, one internal. Reading from the outside, we can't help but notice that there is an unmistakable monotony in Blanchot. His essays, whether on Kafka, Rilke, or Weil, continually tend toward a broad but finite set of themes - death, writing, worklessness, and time, to name only four. Some of these are clearly more fundamental than others - worklessness, for example - and while we could remain content to say that his thought simply tends toward these fuzzy concepts, there must also come a time when we begin to push for more specificity with regard to the relations between concepts. This isn't just a requirement of a naive reading from the outside, however. Blanchot's thought, I will argue at the end of this essay, requires the construction of a whole - even if it is ultimately inauthentic. fragmentary impulse is fundamentally tied to a totalizing impulse. first part of this essay is simply a broad sketch of the outlines of this system. I should say at the start that I do not expect this system to eventually achieve the kind of self-referential totality of the rationalists' God. Rather it is the kind of totality that Blanchot thinks Nietzsche teaches us to see: The incomparably instructive force of Nietzsche's thought is precisely in alerting us to a non-systematic coherence, such that all that relates to it seems to press in from all sides in order to resemble a coherent system, all the while differing from one.3 After sketching the outlines of this non-coherent system, I will raise the question of method. System Alain Badiou has claimed that Gilles Deleuze's work, far from constituting a series of monstrous productions, as Deleuze himself claimed,4 was actually only a series of monotonous productions. While Deleuze begins by speaking about the most diverse topics, Badiou claims, he always arrives at conceptual productions that one could unhesitatingly qualify as monotonous, composing a very particular regime of emphasis or almost infinite repetition of a limited repertoire of concepts. …