A Study Of Maurice Blanchot’s Neutral Literary Theory

Blanchot’s literary space is complex.From the "extreme experience" of exploring the boundary of subject to the ethics of others,from the exploration of poetic language to the obscure experiment of language,Blanchot never stops asking "how literature is possible".But at the same time,Blanchot’s literary thought is consistent,and the main line of folding these scattered branches is the "Neutral" thought.This paper takes Blanchot’s concept of Neutral literature as the research object and aims to clarify Blanchot’s concept of Neutral and its expression in literary writing.The paper is divided into four chapters:The first chapter combs the origin of Blanchot’s neutral literary view.Following Blanchot’s literary criticism,we can see three distinct threads.The first is the influence of Mallarme’s theory of pure poetry on Blanchot’s view of literary language.From Mallarme’s construction of pure poetry,Blanchot developed the "Literary Space",which has neither personality nor intention to refer to,and emphasized the autonomy of language.The second is the influence of Heidegger’s theory of existence on Blanchot’s literary ontology.When discussing the origin of art works,Heidegger pointed out that art works exist in things,and it is the "earth" that cannot be penetrated by human eyes that emerges and shelters the works,hiding from thoughts and revealing the truth.Blanchot’s literary ontology emphasizes the dark quality of the "Earth" in the text,and the "Neutral" he advocates is also a copy of the "materiality of things" from a certain point of view.In addition,Heidegger’s emphasis on death "always belong to me" also provides coordinates for Blanchot’s death poetics,and the two constitute the discourse tension between "possible impossibility" and "impossible possibility".The third is the inspiration of Nietzsche’s thought of Eternal Return to Blanchot’s fragmentary writing,which also implies the discontinuous writing tradition from Heraclitus onwards.Influenced by this,Blanchot,on the one hand,pursued the fragmentary circuitry of language form,on the other hand,demanded that the content of the text be infinitely repeated without meaning in the fracture of meaning.The second chapter discusses the concept of neutral from two aspects: neutral as "non-specific" and "non-general".First,neutral as the non-specific breaks the closed and stable subject and moves towards the dark unknown outside the self.The first step to break the illusion of the subject is to put down the expanding self-consciousness and banish the self to the dark outside.Then,in the death of "I",we can meet the other who is a stranger.This other is an absolutely unknown non-object being and constitutes the relationship of desire with the subject.Secondly,the neutral,as the non-generic,rejects the convention of homogenization and preserves itself as the only being that holds the difference.Blanchot saw the danger of arbitrary violence and "tautology" in the identity,and emphasized that the subject should seek the possibility of coexistence in the neutral relationship,that is,in the dialogue,"name the possible,respond to the impossible",and let the being say what he says.The qualities of neutral are in contradiction to everyday language,and therefore neutral can only be expressed in poetic language.The third chapter mainly discusses the concrete manifestation of neutral writing from three aspects: writing subject,creation occurrence and text form.First of all,from the perspective of writing subject,the subject of neutral writing is the double absence of "I".On the one hand,the author gives up the right to speak to the impersonal "he"(il),who is always absent;on the other hand,the author gives up the right to control the works and puts himself in a passive writing state.Secondly,from the perspective of creation,neutral writing begins with external temptation.The author approaches the neutral representation of reality under the appeal of inspiration,that is,in the literary space,casting himself into the dark night like Orpheus,and bringing the work back to reality from the unknown song of the Sirens like Odysseus.In the process of inspiration capturing the writer,the author grasps the object as an image rather than an object,and preserves the "is" which has not been denied before the dialectical completion.Thirdly,from the perspective of text form,neutral text presents three characteristics: First,neutral text is discontinuous.Language appears in the text as a decentralized fragmented form,fighting against a single logic with multiplicity and difference.Secondly,the neutral text is incomplete.Writing is infinite in the constant escape of the text meaning,open to the unknown.Thirdly,neutral text has autonomy.Neutral writing is to be experienced,not read.It refuses to reduce itself to the author’s intention,and to reshape itself to the reader’s understanding.The fourth chapter mainly discusses the influence of Blanchot’s neutral literary view on Roland Barthes’ literary theory.Under the influence of Blanchot,Barthes put forward the Zero-Degree literary view and formed a unique neutral thought.On the issue of literary language,both of them emphasize the materiality of language.However,Blanchot focuses on the relationship between the writing subject "I" and "the other",while Barthes focused on the relationship between the author and language.On the question of neutral,if Blanchot’s neutral thought has undergone a change from ethics to literature,then Roland Barthes has experienced a return from literature to ethics.