Fault-erring: On the styles of margins (Blanchot/Heidegger)

Maria O’Connor
Vol 22, Number 1-2, p.99
Performativity-the aporias of writing; a pathway to remembering Being. In this paper the writer poses a (Derridian/deconstructive) question concerning the paradoxical nature of thinking identity in the singular, i.e., it is always in operation on the level of the multiple. Perhaps for many it is an obvious statement to make about identity and yet the writer seeks to probe the increasing dynamics of this question from the position of thinking identity transmitted via language; a process that involves both writing and reading (technological pursuits via their proximity to systems and structures of knowledge/disciplines; laws of genres). The key register and method here is textual play (or performative writing) that seeks to reflexively engage us in this question of identity via attention given to the existence of plural styles within a writer's (and reader's) activity. Here we conflate the styles (laws and motifs) of the literary-philosophical writer, Maurice Blanchot, to the philosopher Martin Heidegger with a central concern to reveal something about Heidegger's thinking lodged in his writing style(s) in his seminal essay \"The Question Concerning Technology\" (1977). This is an essay that is concerned centrally with our technological epoch and Heidegger's call to the remembrance of Being (the essence of humankind), through a precarious recognition of \"the essence of technology [which] is by no means anything technological\" (1977: 4) (one immediately gets a sense here of the paradoxical nature of Heidegger's thinking, with respect to identity per se, in his thought contained within this isolated and well-coined stylistic phrase). The allegiance (Blanchot/Heidegger and their proximal motifs of thought) also serves to bring emphasis to the distance between an ontological and ontic engagement (terms that are fully explored in the paper) in the act of reading any writer who celebrates thinking on the borderlines to reveal \"new\" questions chat lie within the fragments of unthought thought (throughout the inscribed history of humankind). Such proximity of thinking places further emphasis on how each writer refuses closure of any one style, or char writing, as its conditions of possibility, is the borderline crossings of styles (of identity).