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Abstract
Hölderlin is an important (not to say decisive) and recurrent reference in the critical work of Maurice Blanchot from his early literary article on Hölderlin in 1946 up to his later fragmentary writing in The Writing of the Disaster (L’Écriture du désastre, 1980). Hölderlin’s name is mentioned especially in connection with the epochal transformation of the sacred and the effects of this transformation on the poetic task, the literary work and the experience of writing. According to Blanchot, Hölderlin’s famous expression “Wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?” summarizes what is at stake in the epochal transformation of the sacred and expands the horizon of the experience of writing in modern times. The presence of Hölderlin in Blanchot’s work has been examined in relation to Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin by Leslie Hill (1997) and in relation to the refiguration of the sacred in France in the 20th century by Kevin Hart (2004). In this contribution, we intend to examine how and to what extent Blanchot re-inscribes Hölderlin in an aesthetic of estrangement. Estrangement is to be understood in a strong sense here: not only as an experience of being separated or disconnected (from a home, oneself, the other, the stranger, the gods) but also as an experience of being upset by something that divides, remains inaccessible, does not speak. We argue that in this perspective a line of thought can be retraced from the epochal transformation of the sacred (that Blanchot describes as a process of interiorization) to the discovery of what Blanchot calls “the outside” and to the exigency of fragmentary writing. By articulating this line of thought, we expect to gain better insight into the historical conditions and the formal features of an aesthetic of estrangement that follows from it.