The Infinite Conversation by Maurice Blanchot

The Infinite Conversation Reviews

• 
  Michael sinkofcabbages

  im guessing your already here because this is your thing. or at least searching out the influence of every major continental thinker of the second part of the twentieth century. well your right to look here at Blanchot. Stop all youre other searches and start with this book. In fact its great for beginer and profesor alike. You will always refer to this on your shelf wether your into philosophy, literature, or just a curious person who realizes that there are others who can "look" with intelligent emotion.
  Really a speed-bump for those who think they know how to observe.
• 
  Tarvo Varres

  ''Attention is impersonal. It is not the self that is attentive in attention; rather, with an extreme delicacy and through insensible, constant contacts, attention has always already detached me from myself, freeing me for the attention that I for an instant become.''
• 
  Alex Obrigewitsch

  What can I say about Blanchot?
  This review is daunting.
  
  This work is of utmost importance. Blanchot speaks to the texts of others, through the texts of others, through a plural speech: a saying that speaks of the impossible through what the work and its writer or thinker have called forth.
  
  Blanchot's ethics blossom in this collection. His relations with the other, with otherness, are so clearly, though of necessity obcurely, stated. These works also contain some of the best workings through of Blanchot's complex thoughts and terms.
  
  There is so much I have not said here. So much remains unsaid. This review is but a fragment of what I would express about this work. There is no whole, complete expression. It will ever be attempted again, differently.
  
  Read this work. Struggle through it. Think along its many detours. It is so very important, especially, in ways, for the world we are living in today.
  
  A citation, then, to express the attempt that this work, all of Blanchot's works, and all works, whether linguistic or otherwise, attempt:
  " naming the possible, responding to the impossible."
• 
  Hopkins Stanley

  The only real thing to say is after having digested so many of the post-modern philosophical Gods that I find myself in a quiet place with Maurice as I learn the notions of the gift, die Gabe und Das libidinöse Unendliche Gespräch or Das libidinöse Gespräch ohne Ende or Das libidinöse Unendlichkeitsgespräch.
  
  It’s all in this volume with it’s non-theoretical notions of Ethics that the Levinasian Academics are so busy searching for while never realize it’s really all about metaphysics and remembering to approach in civility and not kill thy neighbor’s conversation with me. It’s the binding gift of the Neuter in such simplicity…just read the book….
• 
  Liam

  ‘‘Writing, in this sense, in this direction in which it is not possible to maintain oneself alone, or even in the name of all without the tentative advances, the lapses, the turns and detours whose trace the texts here brought together bear (and their interest, I believe, lies in this) supposes a radical change of epoch: interruption, death itself or, to speak hyperbolically, "the end of history." Writing in this way passes through the advent of communism, recognized as the ultimate affirmation communism being still always beyond communism.’’(xi), ‘‘We no more have access to the everyday than we touch this moment of history that could represent, historically, the end of history’’(245), ‘‘When history turns, this movement of turning that implies even the suspension of history (in the name of a Utopian truth) also revokes 'the tradition of the new’’(398).
  
  ‘‘The table that separates them, an interval large enough that another person might consider himself their true interlocutor, the one for whom they would speak if they addressed themselves to him’’ (‘the absolute’), that reinvigorates wishing, ‘‘Have we not, since we met, been engaged together, bound to lend assistance to one another, as before the same arbiter’’(xvii), ‘‘The speech that bears the law’’(ibid), ‘‘Experiencing in weariness the same void, perhaps the same infinite’’(xix), ‘‘As though weariness kept him alive. For how long still? It is endless’’, ‘‘As once, in the sadness of a knowing night, he could have evoked the foreign spirit simply by modifying a few terms; now he is himself evoked by a simple change in the play of words’’(xxi), ‘‘In an enigmatic way the interdict presents itself also as interdicted, a regrettable exception, a breach opened in the circle; and no doubt it necessarily still belongs to the rule, if only as an anomaly, a hypocritical anomaly(...)What he had wanted was entirely different, a cold interruption, the rupture of the circle. And at once this had happened: the heart ceasing to beat, the eternal speaking drive stopping’’(xxiii).
  
  
  That capitalism (state-capitalism to ‘laissez faire’ range) cannot be ‘overturned’ acknowledged surreptitiously here:? ‘‘Since it demands more than reflection it is addressed not only to the mind, and yet the head is what is aimed at: one must respond, the stakes being no less than capital’’(18) when speaking of the Sphinx, the face of ‘woman’ (‘human, the given’) conjoined to repelling ‘otherness’ (harpy body, so encompasses/includes outside the human), ‘‘it reigns by the lure of its presence, which is the presence of something that should not be there in truth, that is not there and before which one cannot be, cannot abide, cannot hold oneself erect: the presence of an image that transforms you into the enigma of an image. The most profound question is such that it does not allow one to understand it; one can only repeat it, let it reverberate on a plane where it is not resolved but dissolved, returned to the void from which it arose. This is its solution: it dissipates in the very language that comprehends it’’(ibid), ‘‘A truly capital necessity’’(33).
  
  Contrary to ‘‘Deus absconditus: "the presence of the God that hides." This, in effect, is a sure point of departure for everyone for, unlike the Cogito, this principle gathers within itself absolute certitude and absolute incertitude, itself saying it is certain only in that it can only be uncertain’’(100), ‘I think therefore I am’ premises the ‘absolute incertitude/incongruity’ participating in a roaming discourse of ‘knowing absence’ etc, why cannot ‘Being’ reduced or ‘vaporize’ to an ‘ordinary’ ‘presence’?
  
  Chapters using/emphasising Heidegger (who is being excused here by Blanchot?: ‘‘Heidegger is essentially a writer, and therefore also responsible for a writing that is compromised (this is even one of the measures of his political responsibility)’’(Note 4, ‘Plural Speech’) as ‘the great 20th century writer’ & the continuation of the attribution of an entire philosophical lineage to Nietzsche, created by all said commentary upon, further inflates the idolization of ‘theorizers’ that didn’t really exist, did not warrant tying centuries of thought to their ‘profound origination(s)’. There is also a focus upon the ‘ ‘absence of presence’ that by its movement away, ‘turning away from’, which seems ‘pointless to state’ or pretend as changing any of the constitutive realities’ that is continued affirmation; because if ‘we’ change the topological model that has some fixed boundaries of the invisible-visible, to one that ‘sees through them’ or when something is moved away ‘we’ can say: ‘it has moved away, it can still be posited and/or is present’, ‘we’ do not need to care about spatial distance and time delay, deferral or ‘incompleteness’ of something at one ‘position’ or lingual ‘place’ doesn’t necessarily imply the ‘irreducible gap we must leap’ is there, since absence is needed for presence, the ‘discontinuity’ is not really discontinuity, ‘we’ can include the multiplicity of spaces contrary spaces ‘at once’ in a certain model/set/setting/’manner of seeing’, ‘this means’ ‘unity’ is not unified, that differance constitutes ‘what is given’, not at once [whichever certain frame of physis], that for thought ‘we’ conveniently associate as a ‘coherent system’. All of these ‘difficulties’ ‘seems to me’ a result of ‘universalizing’ discourse, & somewhat deliberate co-creation of problems that do not exist, can be reduced (to an ‘adequate’ tectonics of ‘bifurcated’ ‘partial’ translation), dissolving ‘phantoms’ or ‘spirits’ etc; ‘the left’ radical (non)‘break’ of subjectivity remains (problematical/ly).
  
  ‘‘Moreover, if there is this back and forth of words between us, we who are ourselves nothing but the necessity of this back and forth perhaps it is to avoid the arrest of a last word’’ - with this reference ‘turning back’ towards the ‘final rupture', ‘‘it awaits the silence that is proper to it to come to an end’’(390), ‘‘A plural speech; the speech that, giving a new meaning to plurality, would in turn receive from plurality the silent possibility: death finally lived’’(421), ‘‘A gap in the universe: nothing that was visible, nothing invisible. I suppose the first reader was engulfed by this non-absent absence’’(422), ‘‘The exigency to which I believe these texts, and with an obstinacy that today astonishes me, ceaselessly seek to respond, even unto the absence of the book they designate in vain’’(434).
  
• 
  Lukas

  Sve knjige imaju istu arhitekturu - naslovnicu, uvez, stranice - ali u sebi sadrže svjetove i poklone koji su veći samo od papira i tinte. Neke knjige imaju krila. Neke su konji koji s vama bježe. Neke su slagalice, kristali, zagonetke...
  
  Ova knjiga je labirint.
• 
  Larry Ggggggggggggggggggggggggg

  A difficult read, the history of literature as a series of dialogues between Blanchot and Heraclitus, Heidegger, Kafka, Bataille etc.
• 
  Claudia Keelan

  the whole is a fragment
• 
  Sean

  Dense. Opaque. Discouraging but with a warm heart hidden far beneath the surface.
• 
  Alice

  Wow.
• 
  Charles

  I don't pretend to have understood this, even after studying it again and again, but Blanchot's writing yields new rewards every time one sits down to another session with his every vital mind.