Sunday, October 14, 2007

Blanchot and memory

Here is a good quote from Blanchot that outlines how what Heidegger in Being and Time calls "historizing," and in other places calls "the destiny/destining of Being" in its movement of "enowning"--how this "epochality" (as Derrida calls it in order to indicate how all these concepts form a nexus, cf. Of Spirit, 12) ties in with memory, life, and death. That is, how it ties in with Hegel, for whom these topics (Errinerung, Lebenserfahrung/Erfahrung, der Tode/das Nichts, respectively), are absolutely crucial. If you are thinking these things and their imbrication, let me just suggest you look at this quote (I'll elaborate what I think this imbrication is as indicated by this paragraph later--I don't have time now unfortunately!):

A novelist writes in the most transparent kind of prose, he describes men we could have met ourselves and actions we could have performed; he says hs aim is to express the reality of a human world the way Flaubert did. In the end, though, his work really has only one subject. What is it? The horror of existence deprived of the world, the process through which whatever ceases to be continues to be, whatever is forgotten is alwas answerable to memory, whatever dies encounters only the impossibility of dying, whatever seeks to attain the beyond is always still here.
-"Literature and the Right to Death," from The Work of Fire, 333-4.

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