The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski by Eleanor Kaufman (review)

Abstract

218 Reviews Perry's study is not always easy to read: the extensive notes at times show a tangential digressiveness; at the same time discussion in the text itself is often delayed by the inclusion of qualifications or associative leaps that would have figured more ap? propriately in a note. Extended quotations of verse are given in French, with English translations, but quotations of prose and isolated lines of verse in the text appear only in a sometimes gallicized English, which does few favours to Noailles's tendency to gush. Perry reminds us that Cocteau found himself able to praise both Noailles and Tristan Tzara; she is an attentive and well-informed reader who should encourage others to dip into Noailles's poetry with a fuller awareness of its qualities. Southampton Peter Cogman The Delirium ofPraise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski. By Eleanor Kaufman. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001. xii + 224 pp. ?26. ISBN 0-8018-6513-1. What happens when a writer?a thinker or essayist, say?writes in celebration of a friend or kindred spirit, when the detachment and measure associated with the critical function give way to complicity and excess? At times, as Eleanor Kaufman concedes in this ambitious and fascinating study, the result may resemble a faintlyembarrass? ing form of mutual adulation. But at others, as in the reciprocal tributes addressed to one another by such like-minded friends as Bataille, Blanchot, Foucault, Deleuze, and Klossowski, something more profound is at stake, reflectingwhat Kaufman, in effusive words of her own, describes as 'a new form of intellectual hospitality, a mode of being in common that is not a form of correcting, or out-mastering the other, but rather a way ofjoining with the other in language or in thought so that what is created is a community of thought that knows no bounds, a hospitality that liquidates identity, a community ofthe soul' (pp. 140-41). The argument is an appealing one; but it is not without possible pitfalls. Kaufman's main critical strategy is to argue that the form ofthe intellectual exchanges she studies is mirrored abysmally in their content. Pub? lished exchanges between Blanchot and Bataille, she argues, turn on issues of silence and chatter; Blanchot writing about silence and chatter in Des Forets's Le Bavard, then, in memory of Bataille, according to Kaufman, is writing primarily about his own relationship with Bataille. So far so good, one might say, and Kaufman shows astutely enough how the intellectual dialogues she studies are all inhabited by spectral presences of one kind or another. But her approach remains unhappily circular. Dif? ferences, not to say discord, covert polemic, mutual resistance, are all elided. Friends only come into relation with one another, according to Blanchot, if there is distance between them, but in Kaufman's analysis there is little evidence of this encounter with the other , or of the complex inflections or shifts of emphasis that are a feature of the exchanges she discusses. Her treatment of the friendship between Blanchot and Bataille is a case in point. While allowing that the two men were 'eminently distinct', she emphasizes their fusional identification with one another to the point of assimilating them to that famously canonical pair of friends that were Montaigne and Etienne de la Boetie. But in doing so she disregards Blanchot's reservations regarding Montaigne's description of friendship, which Blanchot voices in remembering his own friendship with Robert Antelme in an essay entitled Pour l'amitie. Kaufman seems unaware of that text. But elsewhere too, in a passage she does cite, Blanchot repeats the crucial point that to affirmthe other is precisely not to transform the other into a mirror image of the self. For if an affirmativeresponse to the other is possible, it is only in so far as differences are not annulled, but exacerbated. In this context, MLR, ioo.i, 2005 219 rather than welcoming community 'that knows no bounds', it becomes urgent rather to resist its allure?precisely in order that alterity may be affirmedat all. University of Warwick Leslie Hill Andre Malraux u: Malraux lecteur. Ed. by Christiane Moatti and Julien Dieudone . Paris and Caen: Lettres Modernes...