From the latter:
- "How could I avoid the platitude of a supposed academic metalanguage? It is very hard."
The question, isn't it. But was Derrida really "perfectly able to respond" to Blanchot? I wouldn't agree.
- "How does Beckett differ from Cixous, with whom Derrida would appear to share so much and yet on whom he was able to write so extensively? [...]an other in whom alterity threatens to reach degree zero.
...does sound a bit too grandiose, still. (And yet how could anyone answer a question positing such charged silence.)
- Adorno’s most developed theorization of literature (and of art more generally) is to be found in his unfinished and posthumously published Aesthetic Theory (1970), a work that he intended to dedicate to Beckett and in which art is consistently thought in terms of both aporia and alterity. If Beckett’s “radically darkened art” is, for Adorno, the only responsible form for the aesthetic to take in radically darkened times, then this is because Beckett’s works are, on the one hand, “realistic”—his “shabby, damaged world of images is the negative imprint of the administered world”13—while, on the other hand, they manage against all the odds to keep open that space from which an other, better future might arrive, a future characterized by Adorno as a not necessarily possible reconciliation (Versöhnung), by which he means the non-hostile coexistence of the non-identical. The apprehension of this radical other, this future that is perhaps beyond the possible, is, for Adorno, the experience of the “shudder” that is art...