Hossein Moradi

Language, Meaning and Spacing: Blanchot, Derrida and Kafka Hossein Moradi

The question of art including literature, language and being or meaning in Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida is raised in critique of Western metaphysical system of philosophy and art. Both Blanchot and Derrida attack Hegelian philosophy because its phenomenological approach of the knower (self) - known relationship destroys nature and human by silencing them and not letting their being comes out as it is. They give primacy to language (considered as literature) as the only thing which let being comes out infinitely unlike Hegel's totality of absolute knowledge. Thus, the question of literature becomes the question of being. Language is unable to give knowledge of the things outside in representing a thing. But language in Blonchot and Derrida?s view can have a new creative power. The implicit in the creative power of language is the creation of a distance between the meaning of an utterance and the utterance itself in order that writing becomes the space which no longer represents but lets everything appear as it is. Reading Kafka in this sense illustrates the act of going outside meaning through language. Anyone interested in literature in deconstruction sees a new Kafka.