Art perhaps pays the price by going [Celan says] beyond what is human, stepping into the realm which is turned toward the human, but uncanny - the realm where the monkey, the automatons and with them...oh, art, too seem to be at home. Art is estrangement, self-estrangement (causing self-forgetfulness) but also estrangement from the human. Art is uncanny in the sense of monstrous, the not quite or no longer human, the almost - or once-human. Art neither dreams nor creates, nor does it describe things either true or imaginary. What is true has no need for art; it is a plenum. Paraphrasing Heidegger, Blanchot says that the work of art is not any sort of thing at all; it is external to all categories. The work is not a work of mediation. In Heideggers idiom, its work is an event: es gibt. The work itself as remainder remains on the hither side of this event, outside the reach of the world. It exists, but not as what is given exists: call it existence that cannot be objectified - Heideggers notion of the work of art as alien and uncommunicative, external to the world, all ties to human beings severed as if from the start. Gerald L. Burns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Posted on: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 06:43:42 +0000
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