“Written during the struggle between Hegeliansim and anti-Hegelianism in French thought preceding poststructuralism, Blanchot’s Infinite Conversation provides a crucial link for understanding the more immediate roots of poststructuralism. Blanchot’s writings inform the thought of Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, and can provide contexts for some of the more difficult concepts of these other writers. The Infinite Conversation provides a mixture of rigorous theoretical thought and less formal converations, both of which are intriguing. Blanchot provides splendid readings of the way in which writers such as Nietzsche, Bataille, Pascal, Kafka, Heraclitus, and Sade develop a writing that interrupts being and postulates dissymetric relations. His readings of other writers are illuminating, and often quite surprising.” Review of Contemporary Fiction

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Infinite conversation theory and history of literature Aug 29, 2020 Posted By Robert Ludlum Publishing TEXT ID 654ab7b0 Online PDF Ebook Epub Library the poets of the anglo saxon beowulf have given a clear and interesting picture of the life of our barbarous ancestors of.

• Blanchot engages with Heidegger on the question of the philosopher's death, showing how literature and death are both experienced as anonymous passivity, an experience that Blanchot variously refers to as 'the Neutral'. Unlike Heidegger, Blanchot rejects the possibility of an authentic relation to death, because he rejects the possibility of.
• INFINITE CONVERSATION BLANCHOT PDF Infinite Conversation (Theory and History of Literature) Maurice Blanchot on.FREE. shipping on qualifying offers. In this landmark volume. The Infinite Conversation has ratings and 6 reviews.
• English The infinite conversation Maurice; translation and by Hanson. — (Theory and history of literature: v. 82) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-1969-7 (acid-free ISBN 0-81661970-0 (pbk. Acid-free paper) I. Literature—HistOry etc. 1993 g09-dc20 The University of Minnesota is an.

Blanchot’s Infinite Conversation

by Beth Metcalf

Deleuze says (Difference & Repetition274-5), “To ground is always to ground representation”.But when a form of representation itself is taken to be theground for knowledge, it always forms a vicious circle of‘proof’.How can the ground of representationavoid being determined by the very form that it claims to ground?Deleuze notices that determination must not be in terms of amatter-form coupling of representational thought, because thenthe form of matter is presumed to be already determined.Representationalthought thinks the condition in the image of the conditioned. However,Deleuze tells us that determination cannot directly determine theindeterminate. Something of the ground must rise to thesurface.There is a sub-representative domain that swarmswith pre-individual singularities of differentiating difference.That domain is not determined by the form-matter coupling ofrepresentational thought.Rather, it is asub-representative coupling of disparate intensity (DR 222).Determination cannot immediately ground the indeterminate.Determinationof a ground must confront groundlessness.Determination ofa ground must first confront the pure empty form of time thatDeleuze calls ‘Aion’ before the form of thedeterminable can rise to the surface.

Blanchot, like Deleuze, questions thephilosophical foundations of Western thought.Traditionally,the philosopher has been afraid of a violent encounter that wouldthreaten the philosophical Image of Thought.Sometimes thefoundation of knowledge has been thought to be given byour sense impressions.However, we have no ground for thatassumption.How can internal relations between our ideasand our sense perception be assumed to be the ground forrepresenting reality?Deleuze tells us we need to reach theform of the determinable – that by which the given isgiven (DR 222).The given is diverse, but thatby which the given is given is that which reaches theintensive external relations of sub-representative disparate‘difference’.Therefore, empiricism cannot be theground of thought, because it is in need of grounding.Also,transcendentalism needs grounding.As a priori condition ofpossible experience in the forms of intuition, space and time;transcendentalism is merely traced from the empirically given.The transcendental resembles the empirical.The conditionis in the image of the conditioned.Traditional philosophylooks for the foundation of our knowledge on the plane of Chronos– the given form of already spatialized time.Itnever reaches the sub-representative plane of Aion –the plane of that by which the given is given as itspatializes time disparately.Deleuze’s‘transcendental empiricism’ is the intersection of thetwo planes.The plane of Aion is a transcendental field of thatby which the given is given.The plane of Chronos isthe empirically given.The planes intersect as twotypes of multiplicities – transcendental conditions ofdisparate empirical forms of spatialized-time.We find amore adequate ground for our knowledge only when we reach thesub-representative plane of univocality – the plane of theform of the determinable – the plane of the empty form oftime, Aion – the plane of that by which the given isgiven. Each actualized empirical ‘use ofrepresentation’ must find its own form of possibilityin a sub-representative transcendental field of disparateintensity. The transcendental condition does not resemble theempirically conditioned.The transcendental field of senseproduces bodies and their mixtures.Bodies and theirmixtures also produce sense.But this is not a circularprocess (Logic of Sense 123-4), because thetranscendental production of sense does not occur through anindividuation that presupposes itself.Individuation inbodies and their mixtures presupposes a pre-individual neutraltranscendental field.The transcendental production ofsense is pre-individual, impersonal, and aconceptual.

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We have the habit of thinking in terms ofchronological time, Chronos.However, this time that isassumed to be given in consciousness cannot be the groundof consciousness.It is what needs grounding.Determinationof a ground must confront groundlessness of the pure empty formof time before a form of the determinable can rise to thesurface.If we want to confront an unconsciousgroundlessness of thought, we need to reach that by which thegiven is given to consciousness.But how can we thinkand speak about that which is unconscious?How can thoughtreach its ground outside the vicious circle ofrepresentation?How can we think the unthought? Wemust grapple with this paradox.Thought must reach asub-representative transcendental field that cannot be thought.Thought must be in the form of an unconscious dice game.Ifthought is to reach unconscious groundlessness, it cannot bemediated by conscious thought of a subject.Only a randomdice game can reach groundlessness.However, the dice gameof univocality is nothing like the dice games with which we areacquainted.In the dice game of univocal being, events areno longer related according to the time of Chronos and itsrelations of already formed corporeal elements.Thetranscendental field of this univocal dice game is on the planeof the empty form of time, Aion.This groundlessness is notan undifferentiated black nothingness where being and nothingnessare in a negative oppositional relation.That would stillassume a conscious ground in a vicious circle.Rather,groundlessness is the differentiated nothingness which is thebeing of the problematic.Ontology must be a dice game.Being-itself is univocal.It is not an equivocal conscioussubjectivity.

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Blanchot’s writings exemplify thatwhich Deleuze calls ‘univocal being’.Blanchotexplores the art of writing that has its source in the empty formof time on the plane of artistic composition.What is thisempty form of time through which we see and say new forms withoutidentity, analogy, or resemblance?Although MauriceBlanchot does not use Deleuze’s terms, in reviewingBlanchot’s writing I will use a mixture of terms used byDeleuze and Blanchot whenever I think they both express being asunivocal.In The Infinite Conversation*, Blanchotwrites about the void of the outside other.Between selfand the other is a void of the infinitely other.It isneutral nonrelation unmediated by any common measure.Inhis chapter, ‘Reflections on Hell’, Blanchot writesabout this absence of relation.It is the experience of thegroundlessness of the void.Orpheus can retrieve Eurydicefrom the underworld only by way of his song that does notrepresent or signify.It is the encounter that revealsEurydice as infinitely other outside conscious thought of asubject.The speech of this encounter is theintersection of two kinds of death.One death is the timeof ‘Chronos’.It is the present which causeseverything to pass.It is death by way of corporeal causes.The other is on the incorporeal plane of ‘Aion’ wheredeath has no relation to me.It has no presence.Itis the waiting of that which is always coming but is neverpresent.It is the abyss of nonrelation.When Orpheusencounters Eurydice, his choice is either ‘to speak’ or‘to kill’.When Orpheus looks back at Eurydice,his gaze brings death to her as other.His gaze is merely aconscious ground that represents self and other in an image ofsameness.If thought is to reach unconsciousgroundlessness, it cannot be mediated by conscious thought whichbrings death by seeing the other as an object.Only whenOrpheus’s song reaches an empty form of groundlessness canEurydice be brought to the surface.That is, determinationmust confront groundlessness of the pure empty form of timebefore a form of the determinable can rise to the surface.Thesub-representative transcendental field of groundlessness is onthe plane of the empty form of time, Aion.Immanence of theother must be an unmediated movement through which the infiniteinessential may be brought to the surface.But as soon asconscious presence (Chronos) closes around Eurydice as anessential property, Orpheus’s song of the inessential ceasesand Eurydice is lost.Otherness returns to sameness.Consciousthought does not reach the speech (Deleuze’s‘expression’) that is the ungrounding of sight(Deleuze’s ‘content’).Orpheus’s songmust cross the abyss through which inessential expression becomespossible.This speech is expression of nonrelationthat brings the other into inaccessible presence without commonmeasure.This speech across the void of Aion signifies noessence.If there is to be a void of otherness, seeing andspeaking (content and expression) must be a heterogeneousnonrelation of the void.It is Aion as present withoutthickness that nomadically distributes disparate intensivecouplings of singularity.It is that play of inessentialdifference across the void that Deleuze calls‘vice-diction’.

Therefore, Blanchot says there are twodimensions of the event that are coexisting and inseparable.First is that which is fulfilled in the actualization ofcorporeal bodies.According to this aspect, death isactualized on the personal level of the corporeal body.Thesecond is the counter-actualized potentialities of theincorporeal at the level of the empty form of time.Accordingto this aspect, death cannot be actualized.It is thecounter-actualization of the incorporeal.On thisincorporeal level, Aion is the abyss of time without present.It is impersonal and pre-individual singularities. It isthe neutrality of the pure event.There is no particular orgeneral, individual or collective, affirmation or negation.There is no opposition at all.‘To die’ issingular neutrality.All of being is said in thisinfinitive sense of death.Orpheus can bring Eurydice tothe surface only if his gaze dissolves into the void of death.

Despite interpretations by Hegeliancommentators, Nietzsche takes a non-dialectical path thatviolently ruptures the traditions of Western thought.Blanchotreflects on Nietzsche’s nihilism and his experience of theeternal return.According to both Deleuze and Blanchot,Nietzsche’s experience of the eternal return has nothing todo with philosophical tradition.This experience cannot bemeasured by the chronological time of ‘Chronos’.Theeternal return is transformation of time and value.Theempty form of time, ‘Aion’, is this transvaluation.Blanchot writes about Nietzsche’s overwhelming fear of hisexperience of the eternal return.It is nothing like anythought that came before.Whereas Nietzsche’s‘higher man’ totalized a whole of logos in a continuityof speech, the ‘overman’ is the becoming of the wholeof being that always changes in nature.The overman is nolonger limited by the time of Chronos.The overman has toreach the eternal return as transformation of time outside thepossibilities of Chronos.Speech becomes a fragmentary newlanguage of waiting across the void for an alreadythat transmutes all value.It is Deleuze’stransvaluation of disparate intensive difference.Being issaying – the eternal repetition of singular difference.But we reach this univocal event only when the sub-representativeplane of the empty form of time is included.The languageof the event is always out of place in relation to itself.Itis played as an unconscious dice game across the interval of thevoid.The void is the empty form of time that flies in pastand future directions at once.It is the slowness of“What is going to happen?” and the speed of “Whathappened?”The empty form gives rise to fragmentaryspeech of waiting across the void for the alreadythat transmutes value.It arises out of groundlessness thatconditions the intersection of two types of multiplicities.The disparate transcendental ground intersects with its ownuse of singular-universal perspective.

Nietzsche writes in aphorisms offragmentation, plurality, and dispersion.His fragmentaryspeech consists of partial objects that are never part of atotalizing unity, original or produced.Fragmentarylanguage does not judge, measure, or negate.It overcomesany unifying or totalizing whole.There is, with eachrepetition, constituent singular difference, never ageneral-totalizing contradiction.With each actualization,there is a temporary and fragile singular ‘use ofrepresentation’.Each singular use is a world ofperspective.These multiplicities of perspective cannot betotalized conceptually.Each actualized use dissolves intothe void, to return as a new singular perspective.Theintensive disparate difference of Nietzsche’s fragmentaryspeech, in crossing the void, changes in nature.It nevermaintains an origin.It never reaches a final form.Ithas nothing to do with a dialectical system of thought.

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Nietzsche uses fragmentary signs ofdisparate intensity that, in separating, change nature.Yetthis fragmentary speech is always said univocally as the whole ofsingular being, with each repetition.All difference isaffirmed as singular because all real difference is unique.With each division or augmentation of intensive degree, there isa new singularity of difference (Deleuze’s ‘inseparablevariation’).But all difference is said as samebecause all difference is singular.In whatever degree,difference in-itself is said as singularity of the wholeof being.But beyond actualized uses is the experience ofthe eternal return as counter-actualization that resists allintersection with the time of Chronos.The eternal returnis all difference said univocally as singularity of the wholechanging in nature with each repetition.Nihilism isimpossible.Affirmation refutes nihilism while affirmingit.This is not philosophy of logos that thinks theidentity of the whole and speaks in relations that return tounity.The eternal return is said as same, but it isnot.It is not subjectivity of thought, but being-itself,that is univocal.

Blanchot, like Deleuze, readsNietzsche’s nihilism to mean that the highest values aredead.God is dead.There are no values other thanwhat man invents.However, nihilism is not humanism.BothGod and Man are dissolved.There is not even human truth asa measure.Truth itself is at risk.This is a newdialectic of the real.There is no value in-itself.Authoritariantruth and value have dissolved.Nihilism opens the event tonew possibilities of value by crossing thresholds with eachrepetition of singular use.Still man knows nothing of this‘event’.Man is unaware of the power of thatsub-representative event that puts him already beyondself.Nietzsche’s nihilism is not nothingness inopposition to being.It is not negation of the negative.Nihilism is without any oppositional relations at all.Thereis not even opposition between affirmation and negation.Allis pure affirmation.There are multiplicities of actualizeduses that cannot be totalized.With the intersection of twotypes of multiplicities, will-to-power is liberated.Man isno longer limited by the time of Chronos.

In whatever degree of intensive difference,the whole of being is always said as a new measure ofsingularity.The whole of being is univocal.It issaid as really different singular-universal with each repetition.I take this to be what Blanchot expresses in ‘The MostProfound Question’.The movement of time is disparatedegrees of intensive coupling of new singularities.Everydivision or augmentation fills the whole of being as newsingular-universal.Being-itself, not a subject, isquestioned and does the questioning.Between question andanswer (between content and expression) is a nonrelation – arelation of otherness that is infinite waiting in the void ofAion.The questioning that questions the being of the wholeand changes its nature cannot be an abstract dialectical movementof generalized truth whose answer merely maintains its ownorigin.A dialectical system of thought never reaches themost profound question because it never reaches that void whichis the empty form of time, Aion.It never reaches the waitingthat is already a leap that transforms.The slownessof waiting (“what is going to happen?”) iscoupled with the speed of already (“whathappened?”) that changes nature.The void does notdetermine the generality of the particular but the universalityof each repetition of singular difference.There is eternalrepetition of difference in the void.Being-itselfeternally returns as all differentiation expressed assingularity of one universal with each return.Thisuniversal ‘whole’ must never be conceived as auniversal generality.It is not the many as unity ofone whole.Difference is said as the whole ofbeing, but it is ‘Entirely Other’ that never maintainsa same totalizing generality.

In traditional forms thought is the same asits speech – content resembles its expression.However,like Deleuze, Blanchot rejects that resemblance.There mustbe relation through the abyss of nonrelation – a nonrelationthrough the unknown and the incommensurable.Seeing andspeaking are heterogeneous.Thinking is the event of thevoid in-between seeing and speaking, content and expression.In crossing the void of the outside, thinking is the roll of thedice.It is the intensive coupling that creates newsingularities.The void of Aion is the place or non-placeof changing forces.When seeing and speaking are no longerhomogeneous, then they may reach heterogeneous forms ofexteriority.Then thinking crosses the void of the outsidewithout form.There is no dialectical synthesis orreconciliation.When contents (seeing) and expression(speaking) are no longer homogeneous, forces are opened to anoutside.Thinking is the dice-throw in a dispersion ofsingularities.The dice-throw is the nonrelation of beingand thought.

Whereas Blanchot writes that expressivespeech, rather than content mediated by light, is primary;Deleuze writes that seeing (content) and speaking (expression)are always already a singular coupling of inseparable variations.However, Deleuze and Blanchot both agree that seeing (content)and speaking (expression) are heterogeneous nonrelation.Theconcept of one has nothing to do with the concept of the other.Fragmentary speech does not double the same.It redoublesthe outside other.Speaking frees thinking from thevisibilities that traditionally subjugate thought.Writingdoes not give seeing and speaking a common measure.Wenever see one whole generality of everything.We see onlywithin the thresholds of a horizon of perception.Butspeech can transgress these thresholds.Speech, when it isfragmentary, is disorienting.Speech perverts sight.Perversionfrees sight from its limits.

Phenomenology, by showing a correlationbetween the object and intentional consciousness, presupposes astructured relation between the transcendental and the empirical,thereby still maintaining an identity of the subject in terms oflight.Structuralism also still maintains identity thatequalizes relations between successive states of a subject.However, what we see is deceptive.Light mediates through a“dialectical illusion”.But fragmentary writingis a refusal of the appearance of immediacy that light gives tosight.It is refusal of the mediation of light.Beingis not revealed by light.Being is saying, and it isunivocal.With being as univocal, thinking can go outsidewhat has always been thought to be possible.The eternalreturn is not doubling of the one.It is redoubling of theoutside other.Being has no common measure.There aremultiplicities of interpretation.There are no facts inthemselves.In Deleuze’s terms ‘sense’precedes any “use of representation” (LoS 144-7).Interpretation is neutral movement that has no prior object orsubject to which it is related.Fragmentary speech isexpression which disperses content.

Literature awaits a language whereexpression is not internally related to a visible content.Thislanguage does not conceal or reveal.It is the non-truth ofthe thing.It is saying without the coming to light ofseeing – a manifestation without giving itself to sight.Literature’s image is not the doubling of the object.Itis the folding or the intensive coupling that redoubles theoutside other.Time is the difference through which wespeak. But this time is not the time of presence.Justas Deleuze distinguishes between Chronos and Aion, so alsoBlanchot makes the distinction between the time of presence andtime of difference without presence.The void of Aion isthe absence or nonrelation of a work of literature.It isthe void that brings a ground for a ‘use ofrepresentation’ to the surface arising out of thegroundlessness of the void.

Time has no common measure.There areno facts in themselves.There are only multiplicities ofinterpretation.Interpretation is a movement of theneutrality of sense.Sense is same from the point of viewof quality, quantity, relation, and modality.Theneutrality of sense cannot mediate because it is outside allrelation.There are no negative relations of identity oropposition, unity or presence.There can be no exclusivedisjunctions.But the negative may itself be affirmedbecause there is no oppositional relation ofnegation/affirmation.There is only what Deleuze calls‘vice-diction’ that affirms everything as inessential.The text is the expressive world of disparate intensivefragmentation dispersed across the void that changes the natureof forms with each repetition.Fragmentary language ofliterature is expression which disperses content.Fragmentarylanguage has no meaning other than dispersal and rupture.Theremay be temporary uses of metaphor.However, literarytext does not speak of being by way of metaphor.Text isunivocality of the real.It is the expression of being asunivocal.

Literature is the fragmentary play in avoid.It is a coupling of disparate fragments without causeor purpose.It is the dice game as interweaving of signs asthey spatialize time into new uses of interpretation.Atemporary and fragile ground may rise to the surface because itfirst confronts the groundlessness of the empty form of time.This empty form is not an undifferentiated void.Itincludes all differentiation of disparate difference saidas one.Intensive signs express the play of chanceacross distances.There are new ruptures and fusions oftears.Difference is nonrelation of all relation.TheOutside is more distant then the external world of corporealthings.It is closer than an internal world of conscioussubjectivity.Every incorporeal difference of singularityfills the whole of being to a new degree of intensity with eachrepetition.Difference is not a doubling of the same.It is redoubling (in-between content and expression) of theoutside other.It is the folding or redoubling that isalways already outside itself and always inside its outside.Literary text is language that stammers and makes the imagetremble. The real is a whole without center – a bodywithout organs.

Blanchot says that traditional philosophy isa refusal of the ‘outside’ due to the fear of death.This refusal is the fear of the loss of relations that mediate atranscendent image.It is the denial of death that leads toan image of permanence and representational truth.Weconstruct an Image of Thought, an Image of Eternal Presence, bywhich we deny that we are mortal.But in so doing, we enact“the great refusal” – the refusal to encounter theimmediate immanence of singular death.This singular deathis closer than any interiority of consciousness and farther thanany exteriority of corporeal things.It is Blanchot’s‘limit-experience’ as radical questioning of‘self’.There is an excess of nothing that cannotbe put into actualization.It is counter-actualization.Limit-experience is loss of meaning and value that frees ustoward new possibilities.There is no dualistic oppositionbetween reason and the absurd.Limit-experience revealsnothing.It totalizes nothing.It is pure affirmationfree of all negation.It is thought that can’t begiven to a subject – the dice throw of radical change.The eternal return is limit-experience not lived.It is thedisinterested indifference of desire.It is forgettingbeyond memory.It is freedom from the presence of Chronos.The void is the eternal waiting attention of language suspendedbetween memory and absence of memory – forgetting andabsence of forgetting.

*The Infinite Conversation, byMaurice Blanchot, University of Minnesota Press, translated bySusan Hanson.