Heidegger and Language

FOURTEEN Heidegger with Blanchot: On the Way to Fragmentation

265 fourteen Heidegger with Blanchot: On the Way to Fragmentation Christopher Fynsk Maurice Blanchot never masked the importance of Heidegger’s thought for his own trajectory of thinking and writing. Nor did he dwell on a relation that grew increasingly indirect in the later years, and whose public face was devoted to questioning regarding Heidegger’s debt to the metaphysical tradition and an even more severe condemnation of Heidegger ’s political and ethical compromises. Taken in the context of an almost obligatory distancing of French thinkers from their Heideggerian legacy over the past three decades, this overt resistance has perhaps had the general effect of inhibiting sustained attention to Blanchot’s relation to Heidegger and to the question of how Blanchot’s thought of “le neutre” interrupts the Heideggerian motif of Ereignis and sends his thinking on a profoundly divergent path. How do we assess that divergence and to what exigencies for thought does it introduce us? The questions remain vital, and they are immense. Clearly the topic of language is of special importance for this question —for intrinsic reasons, of course, but also for the fact that Blanchot is one of a very small number of thinkers who engaged Heidegger’s thinking on this topic at a level commensurate with Heidegger’s own effort to think from language toward the limits of language (as designated with the motif of der Brauch).1 For this reason alone, Blanchot’s engagement with Heidegger, his astonishing accompaniment of a path of thinking from which he so markedly dissociated himself, is invaluable to those of us who still seek to open paths to (and from) Heidegger’s text. The difficulty, once again, is that the relation designated here somewhat 266 · Christopher Fynsk ironically as “accompaniment” remains so latent in the later works. Even Blanchot’s early text for Heidegger was marked by a singular indirection, and the indirection only grew in the subsequent years. Thus, one is constantlychallengedineveryefforttoestablisha connection,evenquiteapart fromissuesofauthorialintent.Andyet,theechoesandresonancesremain insistent. Even where Blanchot’s text appears indifferent to a possible linkage , relation seems to suggest itself. For example, when Blanchot evokes, inapparentreferencetohisownpathofthinking/writing,a long“cheminement ”inἀ e Step Not Beyond,andthenthematizesthis“cheminement”in an allegorical mode in a conversation that evokes rivers, a growing wasteland , and then a city of fear, it is very hard not to find in these pages a devastating response to key Heideggerian motifs.2 It might be argued that one does not need a reference to Heidegger to follow this course of the conversation, even if the turn it takes raises intriguing questions for Heidegger ’sthinkingaboutlanguage.But,canonesaythesameoftheconversation in ἀ e Infinite Conversation that ἀ e Step Not Beyond apparently takes over in a kind of reprise? ἀ e Infinite Conversation (to restore the text’s original title3 ) takes a course that brings what instigates it and constantly unsettles it—an event in/of language—to speech. If, as I would like tosuggest,thisfragmentedconversationtakesovera Heideggerianschema in its manner of being under way to language, can we ignore, as readers of Heidegger, as readers of Blanchot, the possible implication of this instance of accompaniment? This question seems all the more pertinent if we consider that the neutral relation thus brought to language engages the motif of releasement, while giving us this engagement itself to be thought along lines that perhaps evoke the Heideggerian schema of usage, der Brauch. The text’s manner of bringing language (a certain language) to language is so strong that an avoidance of the question of Blanchot’s relation to Heideggeris ,inthisinstance,anavoidanceofwhatthetextdemandsofus—at least “we” who have taken Heidegger seriously and find ourselves before an experience of language that does not just bring forth the strangeness of ourrelationtolanguage(“theneutral,theneutral,howstrangelythissounds for me” [IC xxi/XXII]) but also gives this relation as fundamentally disrupted . One might choose simply to leave aside such an experience with language. But one might also see it as a vital opening for thought. My purposeinthepagesthatfollowistoevokesomeofthequestionspresented by this opening. Heidegger with Blanchot · 267 I have quietly alluded to Heidegger’s famous conversation, “Conversation on a Country Path,”4 and it is from the rapid formulation of the notion of usage we find there that I would like to approach ἀ e Infinite Conversation. I will presume (throughout this essay) the reader’s familiarity with this brief text by Heidegger and simply focus on a lapidary formulation of the notion of usage that arrives late in the conversation...