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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Prior Knowledge Essential for Comprehension of this book,
By A Customer
This review is from: Proximity. Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication (Phaenomenologica) (Hardcover)
For over ten years I had been reading this book--attempting to grasp the vocabulary which is sometimes in French, (with no page of definitions) and sometimes in English. One's task is to first keep track of ideas presented in the first chapter, then with your deep and profound pre-knowledge of Levinas, Blanchot, and Bataille, you can try to ferret out what is the strange, echoing discussion all three of them had amongst and between their works. The premise is that they DID read each other and responded in their own works to each other, but only Libertson gained some intuition of what these correlations might be. An excellent effort, hard to understand, must love exotic French theory and Martinus Nijhoff books. European all the way.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rich and strange,
By Doreen Appleton (Scottsdale, Arizona) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Proximity. Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication (Phaenomenologica) (Hardcover)
Brilliant, eccentric, flying recklessly in the face of the critical and philosophical trends of its time, PROXIMITY is an analysis of individuation and difference that has no equal in the history of philosophy. Libertson, never heard of before or since, saw In Levinas, Blanchot and Bataille a nocturnal "involvement" which led him to his own bold conclusions about alterity as a condition of possibility of all separation or individuation. But he did not put this in terms of space, of form or structure like the thinkers of his time. Rather, he put it in the terms of force, of violence. The Other weighs on the Same from within the Same, crushing, suffocating, sucking the breath out of the separate being and at the same time giving it breath, giving it life. Libertson managed to derive this bizarre thematics from the writings of the three thinkers, quoting them copiously to support his arguments. Contradiction after contradiction, paradox after paradox, are compressed as though by a vise as Libertson endlessly repeats that the separate being can have no identity, but has an intense unicity. And the Other, imponderable, unseizable, approaches from within the Self itself. "I cannot approach it. It approaches me, and as it approaches, it creates me."
He praises Gilles Deleuze, and pauses for a withering footnote about Jacques Derrida's reading of Levinas. He characterizes Derrida as a Heidegerrian intellectualist unequipped for the challenges of Levinas. Few writers of the time would have dared such a broadside. Apparently Levinas and Blanchot were in close touch with Libertson during the writing of the book, and both were presented with copies of the Phaenomenologica hardcover. According to a brief note in Critique May 1985, Blanchot wrote to Libertson, "ce que vous dites répond si merveilleusement à ce qu'il faut penser qu'il faut encore douter que vous soyez compris." Libertson is a footnote in one of Levinas's articles. Beyond this he remains completely unknown, if he is still alive. Two years ago this writer was in the house where Blanchot lived for many years in Le Mesnil St. Denis, sixty miles from Paris. In the living room where Blanchot used to work is a bookshelf with a small shrine to Blanchot, lovingly kept by his adopted daughter. On the shelf is a cheap snapshot of Blanchot as an old man, a compendium of essays called LIRE BLANCHOT and -- a copy of PROXIMITY.
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