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Blanchot: A Metapoetic View
[written with Charles Stein]
[Originally published in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader (Station Hill Press: 1999, ed. George Quasha) as “Afterword: Publishing Blanchot in America—A Metapoetic View]
After two decades of publishing the writing of Maurice Blanchot, we find ourselves still standing at the threshold. Slowly—very slowly—we may be learning the meanings of our own commitments. The decision to publish Blanchot has seemed at times fully conscious, perhaps willful, and yet curiously receptive, something unforeseeable, indeed inseparable from (our sense of) the nature of the work itself, its precarious adventure on the edge. In many ways publishing this most mysterious of writers is hardly different from reading him: one is always at the beginning of knowing what it is one is doing. This is not a matter of doubting the importance—the “literary value”—of the work; quite the contrary, we only grow more certain that this is work of the first order. To read it is to be changed by it-each time one reads it. It makes little difference in this regard whether one is reading the same book over again or an entirely new work—“this unique reading, each time the first reading and each time the only reading” (to quote Blanchot's “Reading”). This work challenges, alters, opens the meaning of reading itself, and therefore of publishing, proclaiming, defining…. In this way it stands with the great transformative works of any tradition—we might choose the “Prophetic Books” of William Blake as our exemplar here—which are also beyond tradition, indeed, subversive of traditional force itself while carrying forward its vital current.
To see ourselves thus at the threshold—the limen—has encouraged us these twenty years to discover a certain humility before a grand task