By Christopher Fynsk
Writing, Maurice Blanchot taught us, isn't anything that's in one's strength. it really is, really, a look for a non-power that refuses mastery, order, and all confirmed authority. For Blanchot, this seek was once guided by way of an enigmatic exigency, an arresting rupture, and a promise of justice that required never-ending contestation of each usurping authority, an unending going out towards the other.
"The step/not beyond" ("le pas au-delà") names this exilic passage because it took shape in his influential later paintings, yet now not as a subject matter or proposal, seeing that its "step" calls for a transgression of discursive limits and any clutch afforded through the exertions of the unfavorable. therefore, to stick to "the step/not beyond" is to stick to a type of occasion in writing, to go into a circulation that's by no means fairly captured in any defining or narrating account.
Last Steps makes an attempt a convention of interpreting that honors the exilic exigency while it hazards drawing Blanchot's reflective writings and fragmentary narratives into the articulation of a examining. It brings to the fore Blanchot's unheard of contributions to modern concept at the ethico-political relation, language, and the event of human finitude. It bargains the main sustained interpretation of The Step now not past on hand, with attentive readings of a couple of significant texts, in addition to chapters on Levinas and Blanchot's relation to Judaism. Its trajectory of examining limns the that means of a question from The limitless dialog that suggests a gap and a novel confirmation instead of a closure: "How had he come to will the interruption of the discourse?"
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Extra info for Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot's Exilic Writing
Example text
Thus, beyond apology, and beyond any gift of the possibility of justice to the other, though together with these and as the condition of their possibility as gifts, the subject must say yes, for the other, to the most abyssal dimension of factical existence. The responsible subject must acquiesce to the seemingly irredeemable dimensions of existence for the ethical relation to be fulfilled. Even the il y a signifies, Levinas asserts. But he does not mean that it is made meaningful. Rather, the subject lets its powerlessness over this dimension of existence be (instead of recoiling from it in work), and bears this very powerlessness for and to the other.
He emphasizes that it is revealed only in the course of a history and through the exigency of response. Justifying the first of the three points addressed to Pasternak’s question, Blanchot points to the painful evidence offered by history: “If Judaism is destined to take on meaning for us, it is indeed by showing that, at whatever time, one must be ready to set out, because to leave (to go to the outside) is the exigency from which one cannot escape if one wants to maintain the possibility of a just relation” (IC 125/183).
This statement implies that the question of the human opens only in an event (this is a crucial point to which we must return), and it suggests that this event must be prepared. How am I to recognize the other before knowing who or what the other is? Levinas urges that teaching occurs in the sheer presence of autrui (the Torah is given in the light of a face to which acquiescence must inevitably be accorded, if only to be refused). ” Fully historical in its instantiation, but of the same temporal order, “being Jewish” would name the ground of that latter act.
