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Review: [untitled]

Author(s): Thierry DurandReviewed work(s):

Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy by Gerald L. BrunsSource: The French Review, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Oct., 2000), pp. 148-149Published by: American Association of Teachers of FrenchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/399313

Accessed: 12/06/2009 05:22

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tion "La Croix du Sud" chez Gallimard, et fit meme partie du Comite de redac-tion du tout premier CahierSaint-JohnPerse en 1978, peu avant sa mort. Ce gofitpour "la chose litteraire", il le devait a "l'Etrangere" dans sa vie d'exile, Victoria

Ocampo, grande femme de lettres argentine qui dirigea la revue Sur et financases Lettres Franfaises (tout comme Archibald MacLeish et Mina Curtiss aiderent

Saint-John Perse). D'ou l'interet de cette correspondance d'exil, montrant l'influ-ence de l'Amerique du Nord et du Sud dans l'ceuvre de nombreux ecrivains pourqui elle fut non seulement terre d'accueil, mais surtout terrain fertile, transfor-mant parfois l'exil en royaume.

Les dernieres lettres que Saint-John Perse et Caillois 6changerent, en fevrier

1971, concernaient l'election de Caillois a l'Academie francaise. Felicitations

d'usage, mais aussi hommage au maitre, a celui en qui Caillois avait toujours cruet qu'il avait si bien compris, que ce fut dans ses articles ou dans sa Poetiquede

Saint-JohnPerse. Sans oublier (en annexe) son article du Figaroen 1975, a la mortdu poete. Panegyrique qui ressemble 6trangement au long defil6 d'Exil, celui deceux qui furent comme eux des "princes d'exil".

Utica College of Syracuse University Marie-Noelle Little

BRUNS,GERALD L. Maurice Blanchot:The Refusal of Philosophy.Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins UP, 1997. ISBN0-8018-5471-7.Pp. xxxii + 339. $39.95.Bruns's study is not philosophical in the conventional sense of the word. Its ob-

jective is not to situate Blanchot's criticism in the history of philosophy or literarycriticism. The task of this study, which is pleasant to read despite some redun-

dancy, is "to clarify the work of this demon of impossibility, this figure ofworklessness, interruption, uneventfulness (desweuvrement)"5). Blanchot's expe-rience is presented in the preface as that of anarchy, the hither side of philosophy.Bruns describes or imagines (the reader is indeed often asked to "imagine" or to

"picture" rather than "to understand" or "to conceive," which would betray thenature of the Blanchotian poetic experience), as other readers before him,Blanchot's approach to writing, as that of an illegible saying which ultimatelystrips philosophy from its foundational precedence. It is an attempt at defining

the impossible aridness of inspiration-this anarchy-which motivates, if onecan use such a word, both the literary criticism and politics of Blanchot.

The first part introduces the reader to a poetics which cannot be reduced to itsAristotelian definition or absorbed within the history of the Hegelian negative,but must be inscribed in the experience of the demand of writing. Poetry and in-deed all literature is "on the hither (anarchic) side of negativity, that is, outsideof language and subjective sovereignty" (48), philosophy being, on the otherhand, "this breaking free from poetry" (61). The second part of Bruns's work ismore stirring in its description of Blanchot's refusal of the philosophical redemp-tion: the writing experience remains irreducible to any recuperation within ratio-

nalityand Blanchot's

thinkingconsiders "what

Levinashimself leaves

un-thought" (119). Bruns who, in the preface, declares that "the only emotion that

registers in Blanchot's work is that of sadness" (xxiii), makes philosophy, and es-

pecially the philosophy of ethics, appear, from a Blanchotian perspective, like an

arbitrary leap of faith. The literary experience is that of an interruption, a disas-ter, or an impossibility. But if one can describe the literary space and friendshiponly as a neutre ("not in the rational sense of disinvolvement" [162], it must be

tion "La Croix du Sud" chez Gallimard, et fit meme partie du Comite de redac-tion du tout premier CahierSaint-JohnPerse en 1978, peu avant sa mort. Ce gofitpour "la chose litteraire", il le devait a "l'Etrangere" dans sa vie d'exile, Victoria

Ocampo, grande femme de lettres argentine qui dirigea la revue Sur et financases Lettres Franfaises (tout comme Archibald MacLeish et Mina Curtiss aiderent

Saint-John Perse). D'ou l'interet de cette correspondance d'exil, montrant l'influ-ence de l'Amerique du Nord et du Sud dans l'ceuvre de nombreux ecrivains pourqui elle fut non seulement terre d'accueil, mais surtout terrain fertile, transfor-mant parfois l'exil en royaume.

Les dernieres lettres que Saint-John Perse et Caillois 6changerent, en fevrier

1971, concernaient l'election de Caillois a l'Academie francaise. Felicitations

d'usage, mais aussi hommage au maitre, a celui en qui Caillois avait toujours cruet qu'il avait si bien compris, que ce fut dans ses articles ou dans sa Poetiquede

Saint-JohnPerse. Sans oublier (en annexe) son article du Figaroen 1975, a la mortdu poete. Panegyrique qui ressemble 6trangement au long defil6 d'Exil, celui deceux qui furent comme eux des "princes d'exil".

Utica College of Syracuse University Marie-Noelle Little

BRUNS,GERALD L. Maurice Blanchot:The Refusal of Philosophy.Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins UP, 1997. ISBN0-8018-5471-7.Pp. xxxii + 339. $39.95.Bruns's study is not philosophical in the conventional sense of the word. Its ob-

jective is not to situate Blanchot's criticism in the history of philosophy or literarycriticism. The task of this study, which is pleasant to read despite some redun-

dancy, is "to clarify the work of this demon of impossibility, this figure ofworklessness, interruption, uneventfulness (desweuvrement)"5). Blanchot's expe-rience is presented in the preface as that of anarchy, the hither side of philosophy.Bruns describes or imagines (the reader is indeed often asked to "imagine" or to

"picture" rather than "to understand" or "to conceive," which would betray thenature of the Blanchotian poetic experience), as other readers before him,Blanchot's approach to writing, as that of an illegible saying which ultimatelystrips philosophy from its foundational precedence. It is an attempt at defining

the impossible aridness of inspiration-this anarchy-which motivates, if onecan use such a word, both the literary criticism and politics of Blanchot.

The first part introduces the reader to a poetics which cannot be reduced to itsAristotelian definition or absorbed within the history of the Hegelian negative,but must be inscribed in the experience of the demand of writing. Poetry and in-deed all literature is "on the hither (anarchic) side of negativity, that is, outsideof language and subjective sovereignty" (48), philosophy being, on the otherhand, "this breaking free from poetry" (61). The second part of Bruns's work ismore stirring in its description of Blanchot's refusal of the philosophical redemp-tion: the writing experience remains irreducible to any recuperation within ratio-

nalityand Blanchot's

thinkingconsiders "what

Levinashimself leaves

un-thought" (119). Bruns who, in the preface, declares that "the only emotion that

registers in Blanchot's work is that of sadness" (xxiii), makes philosophy, and es-

pecially the philosophy of ethics, appear, from a Blanchotian perspective, like an

arbitrary leap of faith. The literary experience is that of an interruption, a disas-ter, or an impossibility. But if one can describe the literary space and friendshiponly as a neutre ("not in the rational sense of disinvolvement" [162], it must be

14848 FRENCH REVIEWRENCH REVIEW

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pointed out) or as the Levinassian il y a, how can one account for Blanchot'schoice of the word "friend," how can one endeavor to explain his genuine andtormented concern with the fate of the Jews during World War Two, and injus-

tice in general? Nothing is said about "Pour l'amitie" published in 1993 inMascolo's A la recherched'un communismede penseeor about the role of "compas-sion" in L'Instantde ma mort (1994). How might one then be justified in using theword "ethics" when the relation with the other (or should it be merely aBataillian otherness?) ressembles an experience of vertigo? It is, Bruns answers,that Blanchotian humanism is "irreducible to identity, community, or shared

ground" (231), what the author of L'Ecrituredu desastrerefers to as the madness ofethics. This is what makes the third part of Bruns's study provocative, insistingmore on the desultoriness of the literary space than on the questioning of its ethi-cal demand (Is there a "good" in Mr. Blanchot's thinking? Is the question: "whyshould 'I' care about the other?"

pertinent?)which extends to the intellectual's re-

sponsibility. Such a perspective originates in the author's own thesis in regard to

anarchy understood as the heterogeneous according to Georges Bataille, a

process by which it is the philosopher (E. Levinas)-who thinks in the orb of thesame-who is unsettled by the exile, the "monstrous" (Blanchot), and not the re-

verse, as if, in a strictly unilateral relationship, it was Blanchot who was Levinas's"bad conscience."

Linfield College Thierry Durand

M'HENNI,MANSOUR, ed. HediBouraoui:a transpoesie.Actes du colloque internationalde l'universite York(Toronto, Canada),avril 1995. Vol. 2. Tunisie: L'Ordu temps,1997.ISBN 9973-757-37-8.Pp. 157. 120F.

Le deuxieme volume des Actes du ColloqueTunisie Plurielle est consacre a HediBouraoui. Dans son avant-propos, Mansour M'henni enonce trois mots-cles pourdecrire l'ecrivain et son ceuvre: "tolerance, traversee, pluralite" (5).

La premiere partie, intitulee "De la poesie avant toute chose", debute avec l'ex-cellent article de Giuseppina Igonetti. Selon Igonetti, l'alterite et la multiplicitetraversent les textes poetiques et romanesques de Bouraoui; il souligne en parti-

culier la presence de l'alt6rite feminine. Anthere Nzabatsinda demontre commentl'ceuvre de Bouraoui, Africain d'origine mais avant tout "transculturel", est "[ir-riguee] de l'espace africain et des valeurs de l'Afrique" (49). Dans une interven-tion courte mais enthousiaste, Cecile Cloutier revele la multiplicite de la poesiede Bouraoui impregnee de diverses cultures: tunisienne, franqaise et nord-ameri-caine. Francoise Naudillion, dans une etude bien menee, montre que "larecherche du signe" chez Bouraoui n'est nullement une froide demarche maisune creation lexicale qui invite le lecteur a se rebeller contre les injustices pro-venant de l'intolerance de l'Occident.

La deuxieme section, "Le Romanpoeme", debute avec une etude de Isaac-Celestin Tcheho. Tcheho

analysela

pratique paragrammatique de Bouraoui qui"devoile une volonte de l'ecrivain de sortir des sentiers battus, de la reclusiondans l'unidimensionnalite" (78). L'excellent article de Christiane Ndiaye presenteles notions du "tout-monde" et du "Divers" d'Edouard Glissant pour sonder

BangkokBlues et en conclut que ce texte est une invitation "a la Relation" avecl"autre' "pour l'orienter dans son chaos-monde" (98). La deuxieme interventionde Tcheho suggere que la poetisation de BangkokBlues vise a en intensifier la

pointed out) or as the Levinassian il y a, how can one account for Blanchot'schoice of the word "friend," how can one endeavor to explain his genuine andtormented concern with the fate of the Jews during World War Two, and injus-

tice in general? Nothing is said about "Pour l'amitie" published in 1993 inMascolo's A la recherched'un communismede penseeor about the role of "compas-sion" in L'Instantde ma mort (1994). How might one then be justified in using theword "ethics" when the relation with the other (or should it be merely aBataillian otherness?) ressembles an experience of vertigo? It is, Bruns answers,that Blanchotian humanism is "irreducible to identity, community, or shared

ground" (231), what the author of L'Ecrituredu desastrerefers to as the madness ofethics. This is what makes the third part of Bruns's study provocative, insistingmore on the desultoriness of the literary space than on the questioning of its ethi-cal demand (Is there a "good" in Mr. Blanchot's thinking? Is the question: "whyshould 'I' care about the other?"

pertinent?)which extends to the intellectual's re-

sponsibility. Such a perspective originates in the author's own thesis in regard to

anarchy understood as the heterogeneous according to Georges Bataille, a

process by which it is the philosopher (E. Levinas)-who thinks in the orb of thesame-who is unsettled by the exile, the "monstrous" (Blanchot), and not the re-

verse, as if, in a strictly unilateral relationship, it was Blanchot who was Levinas's"bad conscience."

Linfield College Thierry Durand

M'HENNI,MANSOUR, ed. HediBouraoui:a transpoesie.Actes du colloque internationalde l'universite York(Toronto, Canada),avril 1995. Vol. 2. Tunisie: L'Ordu temps,1997.ISBN 9973-757-37-8.Pp. 157. 120F.

Le deuxieme volume des Actes du ColloqueTunisie Plurielle est consacre a HediBouraoui. Dans son avant-propos, Mansour M'henni enonce trois mots-cles pourdecrire l'ecrivain et son ceuvre: "tolerance, traversee, pluralite" (5).

La premiere partie, intitulee "De la poesie avant toute chose", debute avec l'ex-cellent article de Giuseppina Igonetti. Selon Igonetti, l'alterite et la multiplicitetraversent les textes poetiques et romanesques de Bouraoui; il souligne en parti-

culier la presence de l'alt6rite feminine. Anthere Nzabatsinda demontre commentl'ceuvre de Bouraoui, Africain d'origine mais avant tout "transculturel", est "[ir-riguee] de l'espace africain et des valeurs de l'Afrique" (49). Dans une interven-tion courte mais enthousiaste, Cecile Cloutier revele la multiplicite de la poesiede Bouraoui impregnee de diverses cultures: tunisienne, franqaise et nord-ameri-caine. Francoise Naudillion, dans une etude bien menee, montre que "larecherche du signe" chez Bouraoui n'est nullement une froide demarche maisune creation lexicale qui invite le lecteur a se rebeller contre les injustices pro-venant de l'intolerance de l'Occident.

La deuxieme section, "Le Romanpoeme", debute avec une etude de Isaac-Celestin Tcheho. Tcheho

analysela

pratique paragrammatique de Bouraoui qui"devoile une volonte de l'ecrivain de sortir des sentiers battus, de la reclusiondans l'unidimensionnalite" (78). L'excellent article de Christiane Ndiaye presenteles notions du "tout-monde" et du "Divers" d'Edouard Glissant pour sonder

BangkokBlues et en conclut que ce texte est une invitation "a la Relation" avecl"autre' "pour l'orienter dans son chaos-monde" (98). La deuxieme interventionde Tcheho suggere que la poetisation de BangkokBlues vise a en intensifier la

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