Ellipsis is a difficult book. I love difficult books, well written ones, the difficulty rising up from the trajectory of the ideas themselves; difficulty that sends me into the books discussed, to get into the very texture of difficulty; difficulty that demands something of me by the strength of the clarified complexity being set to work. I loved this book.
I also loved this book because the back cover listed its author as "an independent scholar." There is work that has to be done outside the confines of the validation structures of the university. I feel Allen as a companion in the cold.
The trajectory through Holderlin, Heidegger and Blanchot cannot be more difficult. These writers mark out traces of our relation to what occurs by virtue of the ellipsis of language in ways not imagined in our conventional and traditional metaphysics. They go right at the place where language generates what can come to us as experience. And as with the eye of a hurricane (or trauma or deja vu, as Allen cites), that generativity has no "there" in its center; an absence can be surrounded in cycling repetitions, but penetrating that center has nothing to show of what comes. Ellipsis: "... for the word resist all possession, even its own. While it gives itself freely, what gives it is inaccessible, and so it remains outside our grasp and incomprehensible." Are we ready for the world that comes in such a way?
This is not a book for beginners in cutting edge thought. Brushes with and crushes on Holderlin and Blanchot are prerequisites. Encounter and battle with Heidegger (and coming to terms with his past) is a must. And not the Heidegger of Being and Time, but the Heidegger of Contributions... and Mindfulness, and the later writings on language.
My own longing asks for more on Blanchot as the pages and discourse toward him are cryptic and blindingly fast (as compared to the slow, considered expositions on Holderlin and Heidegger). But maybe such speed and cryptography are the only marks we have with Blanchot as we work through our embrace of his work. At least Allen goes there. (Reading Leslie Hill's Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, provides a good preparatory for Allen's speed read).
For those ready to do the work on this new language, beyond subject and object, in which truth nestles like the hedgehog, and which places the human endeavor at the precipice of what cannot be vouched safe, but only desired, this book is a worthy companion.
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