Caterina.net: Blanchot, <i>The Essential Solitude</i>

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{ Wednesday, June 25, 2003 }

Blanchot, The Essential Solitude

Again, because of the aforementioned conversation with Paul, I am reading/rereading Blanchot. Blanchot died recently, in his 90s, after a long life lived in complete seclusion. The defining moment of his life was when he had been sentenced to death, was blindfolded and led out before a firing squad (or was it lethal injection? I don't know), and at the last minute was granted a reprieve. His life, and his work, pivoted on this moment of eluded death.

I just now finished his essay The Essential Solitude. Writing, as Blanchot sees it, is a timeless undertaking, that never ends, that is coterminous with one's life and that is an essential solitude.

Journal writing on the other hand, (or blog-writing, I would assume) dabbles in the temporal:

The writer who keeps a journal is one who cannot give up happiness or the satisfaction derived from days that are really days and really succeed one another.

He writes:

This has nothing to do with so called romantic self-indulgence. The journal is not necessarily confession or personal outpouring. It is a memorial. And what the author has to remember is himself, who he is when he is not a writer, when he leads an ordinary life, when he is alive and real, not dying and unreal; though strangely enough the medium in which he recalls himself is the medium of oblivion: writing. This is precisely why the journal's reality does not reside in the interesting literary observations it may include, but in the insignificant details which reflect everyday life.

(While I was typing this entry, two unheimlich things happened: I heard the happy sound of a substantial piece of mail falling on the ground, which generally means a book or magazine is being delivered. It was Inner Experience by Georges Bataille arriving by post. Then iTunes made its way around to Bela Lugosi's Dead by Bauhaus, and as I was typing "death", Peter Murphy was singing, "~~I'm dead, I'm dead, I'm dead...~~ Undead undead undead".)

(How's that for a tidy involution into self-referentiality? :)

LINK | 11:15 AM | TB

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{ COMMENTS }

Mondegreen --

I've always heard that line in "Bela Lugosi's Dead" as "Undead, undead, undead."

Jordan Davis | June 25, 2003 11:34 AM

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Wasn't Blanchot a contemporary of Sartre? They have much in common.

The idea of literally facing death is powerful. I've had the experience, and not a day goes by where it doesn't affect my consciousness. In my case, I had a shotgun to my head during a robbery at a store where I worked at age 16. After I gave him the money, the guy told me to turn around and stand at the top of the stairs leading into the basement storage room. He put the gun to my head. There are no words for that moment, I can only say I next heard the sound of a little bell that rang whenever a customer came through the door. Maybe the distraction made him change his mind, or maybe he saw he'd have to kill 2 people. He locked us in a cold storage freezer and left the store.

I never connected my love of Sartre and existentialism with that incident.

Note to self: Blanchot.

JEFF | June 25, 2003 11:49 AM

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It is "undead" (fits in with the vampire theme).

Caterina, what book(s) of Blanchot's do you recommend to someone who has never read him? It seems he wrote zillions...

Emily | June 25, 2003 5:42 PM

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Bataille's 'Inner Experience' is an amazing book, and connects closely with Blanchot; the theme of a radical account of death and finitude is common to both. Blanchot (in The Writing of the Disaster) describes his own idea of death as crucially distinct from that of Heidegger and Sartre: whereas for H, death means "the possibility of impossibility", for B it means "the impossibility of possibility", i.e. death disorients the very project of dying, it is beyond the voluntary or the will. Like Sartre, Blanchot and Bataille had studied Kojeve's lectures in the 30s, which had foregrounded the theme of a fight to the death in Hegel's master-slave dialectic in the 'Phenomenology'. Bataille remarked that he was left "senseless and reeling" by Kojeve's lectures. Both Bataille and Blanchot embarked on an attempt to come to terms with this idea of death as a radical negation which was somehow central to human existence, indeed taking it further than Kojeve had done, such that it becomes a black hole, unsettling even the notions of freedom and subjectivity which Kojeve (and Sartre) had made the cornerstones of their philosophies.

Adrian | June 26, 2003 2:41 AM

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didn't that happen to dostoevsky, too?

| June 26, 2003 7:55 AM

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oh yeah :D thanks wikipedia!

| June 26, 2003 8:00 AM

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Thanks Adrian, for your very thoughtful and interesting analysis. I can see I have much reading to do.

The European existentialists grasped so many extraordinary things about human psychology - not just phenomenology, but emotion and volition.

From your comments, I think I would appreciate Blanchot.

JEFF | June 26, 2003 8:27 AM

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lovely post, you may also be interested in Histoire de l'oeil as it's ability to strip raw human need is powerfully humbling... Was also wondering if the kickbacks you get from Amazon are enought to pay for your hosting? I would like to run this type of system myself and wonder if it's worth the trouble of creating an account with them... thanks.

brian howard | June 26, 2003 6:39 PM

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Yes, Brian, I never thought of it that way but Amazon kickbacks do pay for my hosting. The links generate around $30-50/quarter. I have an entire page dedicated to books too, which probably helps.

It's not hard to build the links, once you've gotten an ID it's easy to doctor the URL on the fly.

For example you take an Amazon URL and chop it off after the first long number:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0872862097/

change this part: "tg/detail/-"
to: ASIN

and add "ref=nosim/caterinanet"
to the end so you get:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0872862097/ref=nosim/caterinanet/

It's the only way I can support my full-blown blogging and reading addictions. And thanks to all you caterina.net readers who've clicked through! You're helping to support my habit.

Caterina | June 26, 2003 9:43 PM

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aie, that was much less than I expected. I thought a site of your caliber would bring in much more, like hundreds a month, I guess amazon gives very little back per purchase... Anyways, thanks for the info and how would one go about getting an ID? Also, did you make by scratch this lovely layout on your site? css I presume, though I may be wrong. It's ties to literary form while remaining weblike are amazing! thanks, from loyal reader.

Brian Howard | June 26, 2003 11:24 PM

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Yes it is a paltry sum -- this is on sales of around $1,000-2,000, so I guess the rate is about 3% ? They've gotten stingier as time has gone by.

To sign up go to the associates page. There should be instructions there.

Yes, layout from scratch, employing copious amts. of CSS.

Caterina | June 26, 2003 11:32 PM

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Your anecdote about Blanchot reminded me of two Borges stories which I had somehow conflated in my mind. In "The Secret Miracle" (1943), a playwright is led before a firing squad and, praying to God for a reprieve in which to finish his life's work, is granted a year of subjective time while the world stands still in the moment before the bullets kill him; he finishes his greatest play in his head, then time resumes and he dies.

In "The South" (1953) a man recuperating from a painful and humiliating accident gets stuck by chance in a small rural town where he is challenged to a knife fight by a local hoodlum; as he goes to the duel he muses that this sort of manly death is what he would have chosen from his sickbed, leaving the reader to suspect that in fact he never left the hospital.

Neither exactly parallels Blanchot but maybe you can see why one makes me think of the others.

Prentiss Riddle | June 30, 2003 2:28 PM

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This is strange. I was just searching this site because of the Blanchot link (I am writing a paper on Blanchot). Earlier today I was working on a new story about three girls trapped in a netherworld hotel room. The narrators name was Caterina. I only got here by accident.

amanda | November 30, 2003 1:43 PM

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