Promise and Threat: Blanchot in The Literary Absolute

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in Early German Romanticism. Translated by Phillip Barnard and Cheryl Lester.  Albany: State U of New York P, 1988.

For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, the text in which the modern concept of literature was first conceived is the early German Romantic journal, the Athenaeum, and in particular, in the fragments written by the circle of friends and lovers who gathered there.  For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, it is here in the Athenaeum Fragments that the Romantics set out to complete the project of the subject in a way that Kant specifically proscribed: by way of an aesthetic/substantial representation of the Idea of the subject (freedom) in art.  However, in the event of their working to complete in the genre of the fragment this Work to end all works, the Romantics end up “transcending” or radically unworkingthe very concept they set out fully to comprehend (in art).  Their effort sets the stage for the birth of the modern (subject-based) concept of literature.

For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, transcending any concept (freedom, history, God, etc.) means intensifying the contra-diction this concept invariably entails, stressing its tensile strength to the point of failure--until it fails.  Transcendence thereby opens thought onto that which metaphysical (presence-based) thinking excludes (by design.)  For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, in their writing of the Athenaeum Fragments, in their effort to complete the concept of the subject, the Romantics radically “incomplete” it: working to comprehend in art the highest of all ideas, freedom is “reconceived” in a way The Literary Absolute works to recapture: as désoeuvrement, or, as Nancy will later describe it in The Experience of Freedom, as “the freedom of existence to exist, to be ‘decided for being,” that is, to come to itself according to its own trandscendence” (29). Thus, for these authors, Romanticism is not an even that stands behind us by 200 years; rather, it remains in front of us as a possibility to be repeated.