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  • The Image of the Absolute Novel:Blanchot, Mallarmé, and Aminadab
  • William S. Allen

What is perhaps most profoundly significant about Maurice Blanchot's writings, both fictional and critical, is that they appear to harbour a mode of ontological thought that arises from outside philosophy. This is not just a rethinking of the nature of literature but a way of thinking ontology more generally that proceeds from literature. That is, Blanchot seems to come to an understanding of the nature of things as such through his work on literary things. Consequently, his thought also has implications for ontology as a branch of philosophy since it arises from the ostensibly non-philosophical sphere of literature. To examine this hypothesis I will look at Blanchot's early critical writings and his second novel, Aminadab.

Although Aminadab is one of Blanchot's less widely-discussed works it is particularly important because in it he pursues, more forcefully and perhaps more effectively than in Thomas l'Obscur (his first novel), a thorough interrogation of the space of literature as an "imaginary" space, that is, a space of images. This is possible because Aminadab bears a consistent narrative, rather than the series of discrete episodes in Thomas l'Obscur, and as a result Blanchot is able for the first time to develop a narrative whose structure and space are fully integrated. It is this inter-relation that is the basis for his more condensed narratives or récits after the war and thus the writing of Aminadab represents a key development in his early works. As I will show in section one of this essay, a key impetus for Blanchot's attempt to write in this uniquely integrated manner was the challenge he saw issued by Mallarmé's idea of literature. Mallarmé was a pivotal figure for Blanchot's early [End Page 1098] writings because he saw that the peculiar nature and status of literature, as comprising a space of images that was absolute, was an issue of the greatest philosophical and ontological significance. Not only did this mean that literature should be treated as a serious mode of philosophical enquiry in itself but that the nature of literary space was singular in the extreme. What, Blanchot seems to have thought, are the implications of such an extremity, not just for literature, but in general?

Necessarily, such an extreme singularity would affect how we approach literature and how it relates to us and from this comes the idea of literature as absolutely indifferent, for Blanchot finds that the space of literature has its own existence, a "life" of its own, that will become formulated not just through Hegel's sentence about the life of the Spirit enduring death and maintaining itself in it (which is central to his 1947-48 essay "La littérature et le droit à la mort") but also as a survival, an impersonal living on or "afterlife" [survivre], that surpasses any biological concept of life. It is thus that literature becomes an alien, neutre force, absolute and "workless" [désoeuvrée], but through its effects on the imagination it is able to draw us into an uncertain relation to its indifference. The role of the imagination thus becomes critical, for it is by way of the imagination that the literary space of images makes itself known to us in its indifference.

As a consequence it is necessary to look at the status of the imagination more closely and it is very likely that Blanchot's understanding of it was influenced by Heidegger's reading of Kant (Heidegger §§ 19-23).1 If so, it would seem that two aspects of Heidegger's version of Kant have become significant for Blanchot: firstly, the role that the imagination plays in integrating or synthesising the manifold of sensory intuitions and the concepts of the understanding; and secondly, the notion of the image as an autonomous appearing, a presencing at a distance, that "looks" at us and which is both apprehended and schematised by the imagination. Key for Heidegger in this regard is the fact that this look is not of a pre-given object but is rather the mode of the object's appearance, since the imagination...

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