Nancy, Blanchot by Leslie Hill

Author:Leslie Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Blanchot then notes that Kofman too, at the end of her reading of Plato, had done exactly the same, similarly emphasising, in addition to “the only two Aphrodites known to Pausanias,” “the third Aphrodite, the Underworldly, who forms a unity with death,” but nevertheless — or, perhaps more accurately, for that very reason — remains “occulted by all the protagonists in the Symposium, except (indirectly) by Socrates.”[111]

There was, in other words, nothing mythic or mythopoeic in Blanchot’s invocation of chthonic Aphrodite in La Communauté inavouable. For if it was Pausanias, as Kofman points out, who insisted in the Symposium that there were two figures of Aphrodite, and two figures of love, the one celestial or spiritual (and limited to homosexual men) and the other common or physical (and practised by heterosexual men and women alike), it was with the clear implication that there could not then be a third variety beyond, between, or before the two others. On this point Pausanias’s words leave no room for doubt. “As we all know,” Plato has him declare, “Love and Aphrodite are inseparable. Now, if Aphrodite were uniform, so would Love be; but she is twofold and so, inevitably, Love is twofold too. The duality of Aphrodite is undeniable: one Aphrodite — the one we call Celestial — is older and has no mother, though her father is Uranus; the other, the younger one, is the daughter of Zeus and Dione, and is called Common.”[112] What, then, one may ask, was it that was at stake for Kofman and for Blanchot in their joint recovery of this third, more original or primordial Aphrodite who, while being neither Celestial nor Common, is nevertheless inseparable from her two sisterly doubles, even as she is almost entirely excluded, if not by Plato’s text, in any event by Platonism?

For Kofman, it was because chthonic or underworldly Aphrodite was the only one in fact adequately to bear witness to the demon-like, in‑between status of the infinitely finite beings that are humans, whose fate it is, prior to all amorous spiritual elevation and all desirous sexual intercourse, prior therefore to both figures of Love invoked by Pausanias, and prior to all creation or procreation, always to experience — without experiencing it as such — the impossibility of the possibility of dying, without which there would be no giving of infinite finitude. And so it is for Blanchot too when he goes on not only to speak of the various motifs in La Maladie de la mort that reprise, probably inadvertently on Duras’s part, but perhaps in accord with some deeper necessity, various of Aphrodite’s most elemental attributes (the sea crashing in the distance, its unfathomable depths and surging foam mirrored in the billowing sheets of the bedroom at night, the insuperable vulnerability of a sexual partner offering herself as an object only insofar as she is not an object, the exacting impasse of a singular, unmediated relation without relation), but also to address the eventless event of dying itself,

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