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By the Board: Derrida Approaching Blanchot
- Fordham University Press
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101 6 By the Board Derrida Approaching Blanchot board n. . . . IV. A border, side, coast [OE bord; lost in ME and replaced by F. bord]. 11. The border or side of anything; a hem; an edge; a coast. Obs. exc. in seabord, sea-coast. V. A ship’s side [OE. bord: reinforced by OF]. 12. (Naut.) a. The side of a ship. b. by the board: (down) by the ship’s side, overboard, as to slip by the board. to come, go, etc. by the board: to fall overboard, to go for good and all, to be “carried away.” to try by the board: to try boarding. Also fig. Oxford English Dictionary aborder 1 vt (a) lieu to reach; personne to approach, come up to; sujet to tackle. (b) (Naut) (attaquer) to board; (heurter) to collide with. 2 vi (Naut) to land (dans, sur on). Collins Robert French-English English-French Dictionary, Second Edition All the paradoxes of the limit, the step [la marche] or the margin, multiply themselves when one determines them by the edges [en bords]. This word recurs often in his writings. Jacques Derrida, Parages This time, I decided to get on board. But how else does one get on board than by the board? How to approach the board, that is, the edge, the rim, the borderline, or the shore, a shore that is divided in its very outline? How to approach a text or a work? How to approach the text of the other or the other’s work? How to gain access to and then navigate one’s way around the texts of the other—in this case, those of Maurice Blanchot? Or, more simply, how to read Blanchot? But more generally, how not only to take on the other’s work but also to broach the topic or the subject of the other while writing on the texts of another, whose own writings have been some of the most acute, yet intractable, texts on the “relation to the other [rapport à l’autre]” 102 ■ Approaches in French letters? These are all questions for which Derrida seeks answers in the four essays collected in Parages.1 How to read Blanchot, then? What to do with a writer, critic, and journalist whose entire oeuvre has shown great resistance to didactic norms, summarization, and genre classifications, an author whose works leave us with no simple positions to interrogate, a writer whose writing cannot be reduced to themes and arguments to be taught and passed on to generations of students, a writing that does not lend itself easily to teaching?2 How to approach the work of a writer whose writing has displayed an uncanny awareness of how it is to be read, a writing that raises the question of its own status, reads itself, comments on itself, contains “instructions” on how it is to be read and interpreted? How to write about an author of “novels” (as Blanchot’s earlier literary output was labeled) and “narratives” (récits), who has also produced some of the most rigorous theoretical texts not just on works of literature but also on the act of writing itself and its strange temporality and space? How to give an account of a writer who is scrupulously attentive to the relation of different forms and genres of writing and is mindful of how they interpret and “read” each other? How to speak to or address someone, how to call out to him? How to reach the other, that is, the other shore? “Je cherchai, cette fois, à l’aborder.” I sought, this time, to approach him.3 Derrida cites this opening sentence of Blanchot’s Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas in his introduction to Parages, stating that if he were to choose a number of exergues for his four writing performances on Blanchot , this sentence would be one of them. The desire to use this phrase as an epigraph may be read as a telling sign of Derrida’s own efforts to write on and about Blanchot. By citing the first sentence of Blanchot’s 1953 récit many times throughout Parages, it is as if Derrida is announcing or giving notice about his decision to approach Blanchot’s work. It is as if he were saying to the reader: “I sought, this time, to broach the almost unapproachable territory that is Blanchot’s oeuvre. This time, I looked for a way to tackle the subject of Blanchot. This time, I looked for a...