Extravagance

Abstract

Blanchot uses the word extravagance to mean the unworldliness of both love and literature—a wandering beyond the limits of the world. Extravagance is the standard English translation of Ludwig Binswanger's Verstiegenheit, which means a climbing to a perilous altitude from which one cannot rescue oneself. For Blanchot that peril is the space of literature and of love because it is an unteleological attentiveness to the other. This is not an attentiveness to meaning but to its fragility. Literature is the place of alterity and is most intense when it demands attention to that alterity rather than offering itself to interpretation. This is consistent with the costly signaling analyzed by evolutionary psychology.