Maurice Blanchot, 1907–2003

The Infinite Conversation:² with this title, belonging to one of his most imposing books, it might be possible to attempt to sum up emblematically the thinking of Maurice Blanchot: in truth, less a thinking than a stance or a gesture—that of a certain trust. Above all else, Blanchot trusts in the possibility of conversation [entretien]. What is maintained in the conversation (with another, with oneself, with the proper pursuit of the conversation) is the perpetually renewed relation between speech and the infinity of sense that constitutes its truth. Writing (literature) names this relation. It does not transcribe a testimony, it does not invent a fiction, it does not deliver a message: it traces the infinite journey of sense in so far as it absents itself. This self-absenting of sense is not negative, it is sense's chance and what is at stake in it as such. To 'write' means relentlessly to approach the limit of speech, that limit which speech alone touches and in touching it un-limits us (us speaking beings).

Blanchot was able to recognise in this the event of modernity: the evaporation of all transcendent other worlds and, by that token, of any secure division between 'literature' and experience or truth. He made it possible, within writing, to begin the task of giving a voice to that which of itself remains mute. To give a voice in this way is to 'keep watch over absent sense'.³ This is an attentive, careful, and affectionate kind of vigilance whose concern is for that reserve of absence by which truth is given: the experience inside us of the infinite outside us.

This experience is possible and necessary once the sacred books with their hermeneutics of existence are no longer. Literature—or writing—begins with the closing of such books. But it does not form any profane theology. It rejects all theology just as it does all atheism: all installation of any single Sense. 'Absence' in this case is merely a movement: an absenting. It is the constant passing of all speech into the infinite. 'The prodigious absent, absent from me and from everything, absent also for me. . .' to which Thomas the Obscure refers is not a being nor an instance, but the continual slippage of me beyond me, by which there comes, even as it still lies in wait, the 'pure feeling of his existence'.

This existence is not life as immediate affection and self-perpetuation, nor is it its death. The 'dying' ['mourir'] of which Blanchot speaks—which is in no way to be confused with the cessation of life, and which is, quite on the contrary, the living, or 'living-on', or 'sur-viving' invoked by Derrida when he was at his closest to Blanchot⁴—forms the movement of the ceaseless approach to absenting as true sense, destroying in it all trace of nihilism.

Such is the movement that, being written, can 'give to nothing, in its form of nothing, the form of something'.