Greetings,
I’m attaching the short text “Friendship,” written by Maurice Blanchot on the occasion of George Bataille’s death (1962), as a sort of “ancillary bundle” to accompany leek soup.
In a nutshell, what I think I’ve gleaned from my recent reading, in retracing the bond that links Bataille to friend Blanchot to friend Derrida to friend J-L Nancy—across the intertextual field delimited by Bataille’s Friendship (first half of Guilty), Blanchot’s “Friendship” and The Unavowable Community, Nancy’s The Inoperative Community and Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship—goes something like this: the “plasma of friendship” is Death, in the same way that the “plasma of community” is the Death of my Friend.
This line of inquiry into issues of friendship and community begins with Bataille and, like much of Bataille’s major work, emerges from the very heart of Nazi-occupied France (not to say Europe).
So, I guess the question for me is whether we can take Olson’s notion of “polis” as another word for “community.”
See you round the campfire.
a’
Andre -- Thanks for the forwarding of this piece on Friendship. A 41 year-old poet, Catherine Connolly, died on April 5, 2012 from cancer. She was a member of Rootdrinker Institute and a friend to local poets. I devoted most of the last issue of Rootdrinker's newsletter to the poems of memory and grief that poured out upon her passing. No one who lives has not loss. Some of the theme's of Maurise Blanchot's writing here resound in the poetry my friends wrote for Catherine. I wonder about the mutuality of these poems of death and tribute all being written independently of each other. The plasma of friendship?
ReplyDeleteI've begun reading Andre Spears' _Nexus of Evil_ and I'm digging it heavy and laughing from it's abundant FUN and sophisticated but ALWAYS THERE humour.
ReplyDeleteI will go into this another time, one day, in appropriately deserving depth, but I must say, CLOUDBURST has really opened me up to a greater and more expansive appreciation of poetries and poets that I was locked away from psychologically for decades. Oh, THIS being "locked away from . . . for decades" has been a (not terrible uncommon, I suppose)"Problem" for me that has been "resolving itself" bit by bit, anyhow, but AFTER CLOUDBURST, I have felt like "a new person," as it were (and as it IS), and the same following the beginning of reading Andre's "it's a Rush" _Nexus_! I.e., Cheers! And CHEER! (Okay, I'll chill, now. :) )