As readers we often feel the need to attempt to define the literature that we read and comprehend it fully. There is a huge range of literary theory making demands of us to interpret texts in different ways. However, for Blanchot, our attempts to do so are futile.
Blanchot is not, however, altogether against the categorization of literature, for example the separation of texts in accordance to genre or form, but he does believe that the act of doing so ultimately manifests itself as a distraction from the experience of reading. For Blanchot, our failed attempts of comprehension are due to an opacity that belongs fundamentally and intrinsically to a piece of literature, obscuring what it is and allowing it to evade definition. The more we try to interpret a work the more opaque it seems to become.
Each text works singularly and it is this singularity that allows literature to resist definition and to stand alone and autonomously, with each text adapting literature for its own use. Thus, Blanchot comes to an ‘anti-theory’ of literature: the essence of a literary work is that it has no essence; there is nothing that allows us to know what it is and therefore we cannot define it. This lack of definition is not a problem for Blanchot, rather it enables his somewhat paradoxical definition.
The meaning of a text, for Blanchot, does not come from the author or from literary theory. Instead the meaning comes from the independence of the work. Ignorance is fixed in the experience of reading and we should not use the generalizing and sweeping statements of literary theory in order to comprehend what is written. Instead, Blanchot argues, we should allow literature to exist autonomously and accept its fluidity and evasion of definition. We should embrace the ignorance we are faced with when reading literature; something that is intrinsically separate from our world.
Amber Timson N0274440
Thanks Amber. You have got right to the crux of Blanchot's idea and expressed it lucidly. No mean feat when dealing with Blanchot!! The one thing that struck me about the content of your post is the term 'ignorance'. In some sense, I think that this is particularly apt when thinking about Blanchot. When we read a text we want to be affected, we want the text to produce something in us that is meaningful, or set in context the events of our lives irrespective of how literary it is or not. To do this, is in a way to embrace a form of ignorance. We never really approach a text as if it is fully present to us, as if we know what is in it. When we read we read blindly in the hope that the text will elicit some form of meaningful illumination. In this way, we see the proximity between Socratic ignorance and Blanchot, the text is valuable in so far as it moves us from a state of ignorance to wonderment. The text is not created individually by us, but is something more opaque and mysterious that beckons or calls us to engage. This is why Blanchot always retained a proximity to Levinas, where the text puts us in a passive moment where we stand accused of our own ignorance. This is not judgemental, but a demand to see our lives within the context of what the text illuminates. This is why for Blanchot, the literary text is singular, transitive and always on the way to wisdom, to borrow Karl Jaspers terms.
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