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University of Wisconsin Press Substance: This Content Downloaded From 103.52.254.102 On Sun, 30 Jul 2017 07:27:54 Utc
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Contradictory Passion: Inspiration
in Blanchot's The Space of Literature
Timothy Clark
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Inspiration in Blanchot 47
Literature as a "limit-experience"
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48 Timothy Clark
culture," possessing an
modate oneself easily" (
familiar claim that literature has some universal value that remains in-
variant across time. Rather, the literary is radically ahistorical as the bearer
of a movement of transcendence that holds the text open on the question of
its own nature-a question that any reading in terms of historical context
could only foreclose. The very concept of literature as its own question
situates it in a perpetual crisis of belatedness. For Blanchot, H1lderlin's
phrase describing the loss to poetry of any generally recognized role or
purpose, "the time of distress," designates "the time which in all times is
proper to art," (246) and is without the possible promise of renewal that
Heidegger reads into the phrase ("What are Poets for?"). Literature be-
comes the institution of the limit-experience, and simultaneously, that of
the question of the totality itself.
SubStance #79,1996
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Inspiration in Blanchot 49
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50 Timothy Clark
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Inspiration in Blanchot 51
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52 Timothy Clark
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Inspiration in Blanchot 53
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54 Timothy Clark
SubStance #79,1996
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Inspiration in Blanchot 55
(religious, in Kafka's case) and the exigency of the literary passion itse
fact, Blanchot's work is a qualified defense of a certain purity of
literary.
The third risk is "impatience," a term with a precise sense in Blanchot.
He finds in it nothing less than "the principle of figuration" itself (79), a
necessary and decisive aspect of the literary process, albeit one at odds in
many ways with the work's exigency to affirm itself not "as a language
containing images or one that casts reality in figures" but as "an image of
language (and not a figurative language)" (34). The writer, striving with
the elusive and indefinite space of the work in quest of its origin, may
abandon the patience inherent to the work's unfolding, the requirement
"that one never believe the goal is close or that one is coming nearer to it"
(79):
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56 Timothy Clark
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Inspiration in Blanchot 57
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58 Timothy Clark
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Inspiration in Blanchot 59
NOTES
WORKS CITED
Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience. Trans. Leslie Ann Boldt. Albany: SUNY P, 19
Blanchot, Maurice. L'entretien infini. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.
-.. The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. Trans.
Davis. New York: Station Hill, 1981.
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60 Timothy Clark
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980.
- . Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row,
1971.
Jacobs, Karen. "Two Mirrors Facing: Freud, Blanchot and the Logic of Invisibility."
Qui Parle 4 (1990), 21-46.
Jardine, Alice. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1983.
Libertson, Joseph. Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication. The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1985.
Lyotard, Jean-Franqois. "The Sublime and The Avant Garde." Trans. Lisa Liebmann.
Paragraph 6 (1985), 1-18.
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Inspiration in Blanchot 61
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