The Infinite Conversation (Blanchot, 1969, 1993)

The Infinite Conversation (Blanchot, 1969, 1993)

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars The most coherent of Blanchot's critical works

July 26, 2002, review by "rpatz"

By the above I don't mean to imply that Blanchot's works are not coherent or that they don't merit reading. I think Blanchot is one of the most important writers of this century. His work is far more significant than Foucault or Derrida, not to denigrate them or deny the vitality of their work. Readers of Derrida's more recent works (Politics of Friendship, the Gift of Death, Cinders, even Postcards) will find Blanchot quite worthwhile.

In The Infinite Conversation are an extensive collection of essays and dialogues composed by Blanchot over several years and most of them originally published separately. In this book Blanchot explores in a rigorous and almost orderly fashion "what it would mean for something like literature" to exist. Starting with the idea of literature he explores, through consideration of literature--Hoderlin, Homer, Kafka, Levinas and others--the vacant center of such concepts as identity, agency and subjectivity. Almost ex nihilo, Blanchot constructs an ethics that asks extraordinary responsibility from us without drawing on God, natural law, humanism, or any kind of center.

After reading Blanchot, the weight of words weighs heavily. Anyone with even a slight interest in continental philosophy ought to read this book.

p.26 To err is... to give oneself up to the magic of detour... One who goes astray... exhausts himself while under way, not advancing, not stopping.

p.27 error is an obstinacy without perseverance that, far from being a rigorously maintained affirmation, pursues itself by diverting the affirmation toward what has no firmness. Essential error is without relation to the true, which has no power over it. Truth would dispel error, were they to meet. But there is an error of sorts that ruins in advance all power of encounter. To err is probably this: to go outside the space of encounter.

p.108 We... are less in the habit of doubting than questioning. We enter into thought, and especially our own, only by questioning. We go from question to question to the point where the question, pushed toward a limit, becomes response - the response then being... no more than the question's last step.

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