2009/10/21

the writing of disaster

Last witness, end of history, close of a period, turning point, crisis--or, end of (metaphysical) philosophy...But if (since there is no other way of putting this) a decisive historical change is announced in the phrase "the coming comes," making us come into our "most proper," or "own-most" (being), then one would have to be very naive not to think that the requirement to withdraw ceases from then on. And yet it is from then on that "withdraw" rules--more obscurely, more insistently...Why does writing--when we understand this movement as the change from one era to a different one, and when we think of it as the experience (the inexperience) of the disaster--always imply the words inscribed at the beginning of this "fragment," which, however, it revokes? It revokes them even if what they announce is announced as something new which has always already taken place, a radical change from which the present tense is excluded.
(Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 102)
And why the idea of the Messiah? Why the necessity of a just finish? Why can we not bear, why do we not desire that which is without end? The messianic hope--hope which is dread as well--is inevitable when history appears politically only as an arbitrary hubbub, a process deprived of meaning or direction. But if political thinking becomes messianic in its turn, this confusion, which removes the seriousness from the search for reason (intelligibility) in history--and also from the requirement of messianic thought (the realization of morality)--simply attests to a time so frightful, so dangerous, that any recourse appears justified.
(p. 117)
As the German expression has it, the last judgement is the youngest day, and it is a day surpassing all days. Not that judgment is reserved for the end of time. On the contrary, justice won't wait; it is to be done at every instant, to be realized all the time, and studied also (it is to be learned.) Every just act (are there any?) makes of its day the last day or -- as Kafka said -- the very last: a day no longer situated in the ordinary succession of days but one that makes of the most commonplace ordinary, the extraordinary.
(p. 143)

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