Necrogenealogy of sense: Hegel, Heidegger, Blanchot. Part 1

Texts of the French writer and thinker Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) open a disturbing and, as it may seem, nihilistic perspective,that can be designated as necrogenealogy of sense. The point of it is that the cadaverous is somehow inscribed in sense -or the sense is in some respect preceded by corpse. At first sight this idea seems rather extravagant, but, as it can be easily shown,necrogenealogy actually appears to be one of the topoi of modern Western thought. The necrogenealogical perspective rises from a quitetraditional problem of ties of negation and definition (and therefore meaning). For Hegel negativity proves to be the condition of possibilityof sense, and is being treated in two ways. Firstly, from the side of the substance or in general ontological way it is the selftranscendingfinitude of things, and their mortality in particular, that appears to be the origin of the universal, and therefore of the language.Secondly, from the side of the subject or in special ontological way (or even existentially) it is the immanent movement ofspirit which appropriates the general ontological shift, it is the being-for-self and freedom. But, however, Hegel attempts to sanction thedrama of death by including decay and putrefaction into the perspective of dialectical synthesis from both sides of the negativity. Heideggeralso, on the one hand, speaks of death as of the ownmost existential potentiality, and, on the other hand - of the unreadinessto-hand as of the source condition of constitution of worldhood, network of mutual references, and therefore language. Both perspectivesrefer to some primordial shift - to the uncanny of the existence (Unheimlichkeit) or to the disclosure of being as of nothing ofwhat exists. Both Hegel and Heidegger try to consider death mainly as an immanent possibility. In their thought, as well as in thethought of Nietzsche and in the existential philosophy even a sort of ethos of ownmost and free death is being constituted. Blanchotdescribes this ethical experience as a struggle for the right to death; however, he makes an emphasis on the duality of death, thusproblematizing the perspective of its existential appropriation. The origin of this duality lies in that trivial case that death deprives of thepossibility to die, turning out to be the other death - the never-ending dying as the impossibility of not to be. The linguistic sense forBlanchot is also being established by the process of negativity that is shifting things out from their being here and now. But there is certainexcessiveness in language in respect of the sense-giving negation, and this becomes evident in the language of literature. This excessivenessalso turns out to be a double impossibility - on the one hand, that of the subjection of the expression to sense, on the other -that of the eradication of sense. Just like the struggle for the right to death, this impossibility faces the ontological fact, which is theineffaceability of being, but also the imaginary - this bizarre play of presence and absence. This ontological fact is also being exposedby the analogy of image and remains, which will be mainly considered further.

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