Maurice Blanchot Quotes

A writer who writes, ''I am alone''... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.

Every artist is linked to a mistake with which he has a particular intimacy. All art draws its origin from an exceptional fault, each work is the implementation of this original fault, from which comes a risky plenitude and new light.

If nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little.

To see was terrifying, and to stop seeing tore me apart from my forehead to my throat.

But my silence is real. If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on.

There is between sleep and us something like a pact, a treaty with no secret clauses, and according to this convention it is agreed that, far from being a dangerous, bewitching force, sleep will become domesticated and serve as an instrument of our power to act. We surrender to sleep, but in the way that the master entrusts himself to the slave who serves him.

A story? No. No stories, never again.

با عجله خودم را از خودم محروم می‌کردم

But this is the rule, and there is no way to free oneself of it: as soon as the thought has arisen, it must be followed to the very end.

The central point of the work of art is the work as origin, the point which cannot be reached, yet the only one which is worth reaching.

I lean over you, your equal, offering you a mirror for your perfect nothingness, for your shadows which are neither light nor absence of light, for this void which contemplates. To all that which you are, and, for our language, are not, I add a consciousness. I make you experience your supreme identity as a relationship, I name you and define you. You become a delicious passivity.

Weak thoughts, weak desires: he felt their force.

The anonymous puts the name in place, leaves it empty, as if the name were there only to let itself be passed through because the name does not name, but is the non-unity and non-presence of the nameless.

We cannot do anything with an object that has no name.

I wanted to see something in full daylight; I was sated with the pleasure and comfort of the half light; I had the same desire for the daylight as for water and air. And if seeing was fire, I required the plenitude of fire, and if seeing would infect me with madness, I madly wanted that madness.

At the moment everything was being destroyed she had created that which was most difficult: she had not drawn something out of nothing (a meaningless act), but given to nothing, in its form of nothing, the form of something.

As reason returned to me, memory came with it, and I saw that even on the worst days, when I thought I was utterly and completely miserable, I was nevertheless, and nearly all the time, extremely happy. That gave me something to think about. The discovery was not a pleasant one. It seemed to me that I was losing a great deal. I asked myself, wasn't I sad, hadn't I felt my life breaking up? Yes, that had been true; but each minute, when I stayed without moving in a corner of the room, the cool of the night and the stability of the ground made me breathe and rest on gladness.

My being subsists only from a supreme point of view which is precisely incompatible with my point of view. The perspective in which I fade away for my eyes restores me as a complete image for the unreal eye to which I deny all images. A complete image with reference to a world devoid of image which imagines me in the absence of any imaginable figure. The being of a nonbeing of which I am the infinitely small negation which it instigates as its profound harmony. In the night shall I become the universe?

In each word, not words but the space that, appearing, disappearing, they designate as the moving space of their appearance and their disappearance. In each word, a response to the unexpressed, the refusal and attraction of the unexpressed.

To name the cat is, if you like, to make it into a non-cat, a cat that has ceased to exist, has ceased to be a living cat, but this does not mean one is making it into a dog, or even a non-dog.

I am not and I endure. An inexorable future stretches forth infinitely for this suppressed being. Hope turns in fear against time which drags it forward. All feelings gush out of themselves and come together, destroyed, abolished, in this feeling which molds me, makes me and unmakes me, causes me to feel, hideously, in a total absence of feeling, my reality in the shape of nothingness.

I think: there at the point where thought joins with me I am able to subtract myself from being, without diminishing, without changing, by means of a metamorphosis which saves me from myself, beyond any point of reference from which I might be seized. It is the property of my thought, not to assure me of existence (as all things do, as a stone does), but to assure me of being in nothingness itself, and to invite me not to be, in order te make me feel my marvelous absence. I think, said Thomas, and this visible, inexpressible, nonexistent Thomas I became meant that henceforth I was never there where I was, and there was not even anything mysterious about it. My existence became entirely that of an absent person who, in every act I performed, produced the same act and did not perform it.

And there is no question that we are preoccupied by dying. But why? It is because when we die, we leave behind not only the world but also death. That is the paradox of the last hour. Death works with us in the world; it is a power that humanizes nature, that raises existence to being, and it is within each one of us as our most human quality; it is death only in the world - man only knows death because he is man, and he is only man because he is death in the process of becoming. But to die is to shatter the world; it is the loss of person, the annihilation of the being; and so it is also the loss of death, the loss of what in it and for me made it death. As long as I live, I am a mortal man, but when I die, by ceasing to be man I also cease to be mortal, I am no longer capable of dying, and my impending death horrifies me because I see it as it is: no longer death, but the impossibility of dying.

The disaster... is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.

در دیگری تاریک بودم هیچ بو. دم برتر بودم

Literature professes to be important while at the same time considering itself an object of doubt. It confirms itself as it disparages itself. It seeks itself: this is more than it has a right to do, because literature may be one of those things which deserve to be found but not to be sought.

Art is not religion, 'it doesn't even lead to religion.' But in the time of distress which is ours, the time when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile, art is justified, for it is the intimacy of this distress: the effort to make manifest, through the image, the error of the imaginary, and eventually the ungraspable, forgotten truth which hides behind the error.

When Kafka allows a friend to understand that he writes because otherwise he would go mad, he knows that writing is madness already, his madness, a kind of vigilence, unrelated to any wakefulness save sleep's: insomnia. Madness against madness, then. But he believes that he masters the one by abandoning himself to it; the other frightens him, and is his fear; it tears through him, wounds and exalts him. It is as if he had to undergo all the force of an uninterruptable continuity, a tension at the edge of the insupportable which he speaks of with fear and not without a feeling of glory. For glory is the disaster.

Memory is freedom of the past. But what has no present will not accept the present of a memory either. Memory says of the event: it once was and now it will never be again. The irremediable character of what has no present, of what is not even there as having once been there, says: it never happened, never for a first time, and yet it starts over, again, again, infinitely. It is without end, without beginning. It is without a future.

Writing is not destined to leave traces, but to erase, by traces, all traces, to disappear in the fragmentary space of writing more definitely than one disappears in the tomb.

Between them, the fear, the fear shared in common, and, through the fear, the abyss of fear over which they join one another without being able to do so, dying, each alone, of fear.

A word may give me its meaning, but first it suppresses it. For me to be able to say, 'This woman' I must somehow take her flesh and blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost being - the very fact that it does not exist.

My sense of touch was floating six feet away from me; if anyone entered my room, I would cry out, but the knife was serenely cutting me up. Yes, I became a skeleton. At night my thinness would rise up before me to terrify me. As it came and went it insulted me, it tired me out; oh, I was certainly very tired.

I would prefer not to: this sentence speaks in the intimacy of our nights: negative preference, the negation that effaces preference and is effaced therein: the neutrality of that which is not among the things there are to do.

When language arrives at its own edge, what it finds is not a positivity that contradicts it, but the void that will efface it. Into that void it must go, consenting to come undone in the rumbling, in the immediate negation of what it says, in a silence that is not the intimacy of a secret but a pure outside where words endlessly unravel.

The intoxication of leaving himself, of slipping into the void, of dispersing himself in the thought of water, made him forget every discomfort. And even when the ideal sea which he was becoming ever more intimately had in turn become the real sea, in which he was virtually drowned, he was not moved as he should have been: of course, there was something intolerable about swimming this way, aimlessly, with a body which was of no use to him beyond thinking that he was swimming, but he also experienced a sense of relief, as if he had finally discovered the key to the situation, and, as far as he was concerned, it all came down to continuing his endless journey, with an absence of organism in an absence of sea.

Attendre, c'était attendre l'occasion. Et l'occasion ne venait qu'à l'instant dérobé à l'attente, l'instant où il n'est plus question d'attendre.

شما را دوست داشتن مفهوم مرگ بود.‏

The authentic answer is always the question’s vitality. It can close in around the question, but it does so in order to preserve the question by keeping it open.

• "Not you, not I: the forgetting will forget me in you, and the impersonal remembrance will efface me from that which remembers.

I feel myself dead – no; I feel myself, living, infinitely more dead than dead.

Even death is a power, a capacity. It is not a simple event that will happen to me, an objective and observable fact; here my power to be will cease, here I will no longer be able to be here. But death, insofar as it belongs to me and belongs to me alone, since no one can die my death in my stead or in my place, makes of this non-possibility, this impending future of mine, this relation to myself always open until my end, yet another power. Dying, I can still die, this is our sign as man.

If the sculptor uses stone and if the road builder also uses stone, the first uses it in a way that it is not used, consumed, negated by usage, but affirmed, revealed in its obscurity, as a road that leads only to itself.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking - and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

What if what has been said one time not only does not cease to be said but always recommences, and not only recommences but also imposes upon us the idea that nothing has ever truly begun, having from the beginning begun by beginning again.

How not to search that space where, for a time span lasting from dusk to dawn, two beings have no other reason to exist than to expose themselves totally to each other- totally, integrally, absolutely- so that their common solitude may appear not in front of their own eyes but in front of ours, yes, how not to look there and how not to rediscover "the negative community, the community of those who have no community"?

Death, in the human perspective, is not a given, it must be achieved. It is a task, one which we take up actively, one which becomes the source of our activity and mastery. Man dies, that is nothing. But man is, starting from his death. He ties himself tight to his death with a tie of which he is the judge. He makes his death; he makes himself mortal and in this way gives himself the power of a maker and gives to what he makes its meaning and its truth. The decision to be without being is possibility itself: the possibility of death.

One thing must be understood: I have said nothing extraordinary or even surprising. What is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of it.

La pression de la ville : de toutes parts. Les maisons ne sont pas là pour qu'on y demeure, mais pour qu'il y ait des rues et, dans les rues, le mouvement incessant de la ville.

They who were so important, who wanted to create the world, are dumbfounded; everything crumbles.

How long this lasted I can't imagine, it wasn't an imaginary time, it also didn’t belong to the time  of things that happen.

One thing must be understood : I have said nothing extraordinary or even surprising. What is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of it.

I call disaster what does not have the last limit: that which drags the last in the disaster.

He would never know what he knew. That was loneliness.

Whoever digs at verse must renounce all idols; he has to break with everything. He cannot have truth for his horizon, or the future as his element, for he has no right to hope. He has, on the contrary, to despair. Whoever delves into verse dies; he encounters his death as an abyss.

Reading is ignorant. It begins with what it reads and in this way discovers the force of a beginning. It is receiving and hearing, not the power to decipher and analyze, to go beyond by developing or to go back by laying bare; it does not comprehend (strictly speaking), it attends. A marvelous innocence.

As the German expression has it, the last judgement is the youngest day, and it is a day surpassing all days. Not that judgement is reserved for the end of time. On the contrary, justice won't wait; it is to be done at every instant, to be realized all the time, and studied also (it is to be learned). Every just act (are there any?) makes of its day the last day or - as Kafka said - the very last: a dat no longer situated in the ordinary succession of days but one that makes of the most commonplace ordinary, the extraordinary. He who has been the contemporary of the camps if forever a survivor: death will not make him die.

Thought, infinitesimal thought, calm thought, pain. Later, he asked himself how he had entered the calm. He couldn’t talk about it with himself. Only joy at feeling he was in harmony with the words: “Later, he ...

I went in; I closed the door. I sat down on the bed. Blackest space extended before me. I was not in this blackness, but at the edge of it, and I confess that it is terrifying. It is terrifying because there is something in it which scorns man and which man cannot endure without losing himself. But he must lose himself; and whoever resists will founder, and whoever goes forward will become this very blackness, this cold and dead and scornful thing in the very heart of which lives the infinite. This blackness stayed next to me, probably because of my fear: this fear was not the fear people know about, it did not break me, it did not pay any attention to me, but wandered around the room the way human things do. A great deal of patience is required if thought, when it has been driven down into the depths of the horrible, is to rise little by little and recognize us and look at us. But I still dreaded that look. A look is very different from what one might think, it has neither light nor expression nor force nor movement, it is silent, but from the heart of the strangeness its silence crosses worlds and the person who hears that silence is changed.

It was in this situation that she penetrated as a vague shape into the existence of Thomas. Everything there appeared desolate and mournful. Deserted shores where deeper and deeper absences, abandoned by the eternally departed sea after a magnificent shipwreck, gradually decomposed. She passed through strange dead cities where, rather than petrified shapes, mummified circumstances, she found a necropolis of movements, silences, voids; she hurled herself against the extraordinary sonority of nothingness which is made of the reverse of sound, and before her spread forth wondrous falls, dreamless sleep, the fading away which buries the dead in a life of dream, the death by which every man, even the weakest spirit, becomes spirit itself.

Dying means: you are dead already, in an immemorial past, of a death which was not yours, which you have thus neither known nor lived, but under the threat of which you believe you are called upon to live; you await it henceforth in the future, constructing a future to make it possible at last - possible as something that will take place and will belong to the realm of experience.

To write is, moreover, to withdraw language from the world, to detach it from what makes it a power according to which, when I speak, it is the world that declares itself, the clear light of day that develops through tasks undertaken, through action and time.

By her anguish; she made the sacrifice, full of strangeness, of her certainty that she existed, in order to give a sense to this nothingness of love which she had become. and thus, deep within her, already sealed, already dead, the most profound passion came to be.

We can never put enough distance between ourselves and what we love. To think that God is, is still to think of him as present; this is a thought according to our measure, destined only to console us. It is much more fitting to think that God is not, just as we must love him purely enough that we could be indifferent to the fact that he should not be. It is for this reason that the atheist is closer to God than the believer.

What does it remember? Itself, death as memory. An immense memory in which one dies. First to forget. To remember only where one remembers nothing. To forget: to remember everything as though by way of forgetting. There is a profoundly forgotten point from which every memory radiates. Everything is exalted in memory from something which is forgotten, an infinitesimal detail, a minuscule fissure into which it passes in its entirety.

Mon être ne subsiste que sous un point de vue suprême qui est justement incompatible avec mon point de vue. La perspective dans laquelle je m’évanouis à mes yeux, me restaure, image complète, pour l’œil irréel auquel j’interdis toute image. Image complète par rapport à un monde sans image qui me figure dans l’absence de toute figure imaginable. Être d’un non-être dont je suis l’infime négation qu’il suscite comme sa profonde harmonie. Dans la nuit deviendrais-je l’univers?

Kafka remarks, with surprise, with enchantment, that he has entered into literature as soon as he can substitute “He” for “I.” This is true, but the transformation is much more profound. The writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing.

On eût dit qu'en parlant un langage dont le caractère enfantin ne permettait pas qu'on le tînt pour un langage, elle donnait aux mots insignifiants l'aspect de mots incompréhensibles. Elle ne disait rien, mais ne rien dire était pour elle un mode d'expression trop significatif, au-dessous duquel elle réussissait à moins dire encore.

The feeling of the uselessness of what I am doing is linked to this other feeling that nothing is more serious.

Deux paroles étroitement serrées l'une contre l'autre, comme deux corps vivants, mais aux limites indécises.

Whoever wants to remember himself must entrust himself to forgetfulness, to the risk that absolute forgetfulness is, and the beautiful chance that memory then becomes.

Where he is, only being speaks—which means that language doesn’t speak any more, but is.

Bekleyiş, artık bekleyecek hiçbir şey olmadığında, bekleyişin sonu bile beklenmediğinde başlar. Bekleyiş ne beklediğini bilmez ve onu yıkar. Bekleyiş hiçbir şey beklemez.

The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact

I am destined to illuminate you by burning myself up.

A child is being killed." This silent passive, this dead eternity to which a temporal form of life must be given in order that we might separate ourselves from it by a murder--this companion, but of no one, whom we seek to particularise as an absence, that we might live upon his banishment, desire with the desire he has not, and speak through and against the world he does not utter--nothing (neither knowledge nor un-knowledge) can designate him, even if the simplest of sentences seems, in four or five words, to divulge him (a child is being killed.)

The awareness at each moment of what is intolerable in the world (tortures, oppression, unhappiness, hunger, the camps) is not tolerable: it bends, sinks, and he who exposes himself to it sinks with it. The awareness is not awareness in general. All knowledge of what everywhere is intolerable will at once lead knowledge astray. We live thus between straying and a half-sleep. To know this is already enough to stray.

We cannot recall our dreams, they cannot come back to us. If a dream comes – but what sort of coming is a dream's? Through what night does it make its way? If it comes to us, it does so only by way of forgetfulness, a forgetfulness which is not only censorship or simply repression. We dream without memory, in such a way that the dream of any particular night is no doubt a fragment of a response to an immemorial dying, barred by desire’s repetitiousness. There is no stop, there is no interval between dreaming and waking. In this sense, it is possible to say: never, dreamer, can you awake (nor, for that matter, are you able to be addressed thus, summoned). The dream is without end, waking is without beginning; neither one nor the other ever reaches itself. Only dialectical language relates them to each other in view of a truth.

The notion of characters, as the traditional form of the novel, is only one of the compromises by which the writer, drawn out of himself by literature in search of its essence, tries to salvage his relations with the world and himself.

In each word, not words but the space that, appearing, disappearing, they designate as the moving space of their appearance and their disappearance. In each word, a response to the unexpressed, the refusal and attraction of the unexpressed.

Lo que atrae al escritor, lo que hace vibrar al artista, no es directamen­te la obra, sino su búsqueda, el movimiento que conduce a ella, la aproximación de lo que hace posible a la obra: el arte, la literatura y lo que disimulan estas dos palabras. - El libro que vendrá. (p. 223)

Invisible and outside of being, it perceives me and sustains me in being. Itself, I perceive it, not in the vision I have of it, but in the vision and the knowledge it has of me. I am seen. Beneath this glance, I commit myself to a passivity which, rather than diminishing me, makes me real.

Attendre, se rendre attentif à ce qui fait de l'attente un acte neutre, enroulé sur soi, serré en cercles dont le plus intérieur et le plus extérieur coïncident, attention distraite en attente et jusqu'à l'inattendu. Attente, attente qui est le refus de rien attendre, calme étendue déroulée par les pas.

Do not forgive. Forgiveness accuses before it forgives. By accusing, by stating the injury, it makes the wrong irredeemable. It carries the blow all the way to culpability. Thus, all becomes irrepairable; giving and forgiving cease to be possible. For nothing saves innocence. Forgive me for forgiving you. The sole fault would be one of position: the one and only fault is to be "I,", for it is not identity that the Self in myself brings me. This self is merely a formal necessity: it simply serves to allow the infinite relation of Self to Other. Whence the temptation (the sole temptation) to become a subject again, instead of being exposed to subjectivity without any subject, the nudity of dying space. I cannot forgive -- forgiveness comes from others -- but I cannot be forgiven either, if forgiveness is what calls the "I" into question and demands that I give myself, that I subject myself to the lack of subjectivity. And if forgiveness comes from others, it only comes; there is never any certitude that it can arrive, because in it there is nothing of the (sacramental) power to determine. It can only delay in the element of indecision. In The Trail, one might think that the death scene constitutes the pardon, the end of the interminable; but there is no end, since Kafka specifies that shame survives, which is to say, the infinite itself, a mockery of life as life's beyond.

I have lost silence, and the regret I feel over that is immeasurable. I cannot describe the pain that invades a man once he has begun to speak. It is a motionless pain that is itself pledged to muteness; because of it, the unbreathable is the element I breathe. I have shut myself up in a room, alone, there is no one in the house, almost no one outside, but this solitude has itself begun to speak, and I must in turn speak about this speaking solitude, not in derision, but because a greater solitude hovers above it, and above that solitude, another still greater, and each, taking the spoken word in order to smother it and silence it, instead echoes it to infinity, and infinity becomes its echo.

There were no houses, no palace, no constructions of any sort; it was rather an immense sea, though the waters were invisible and the shore had disappeared. In this city, seated far from all things, sad last dream lost among the shadows, while the day faded and sobbing rose gently in the perspective of a strange horizon, Anne, like something which could not be represented, no longer a human being but simply a being, marvelously a being, among the mayflies and the falling suns, with the agonizing atoms, doomed species, wounded illnesses, ascended the course of waters where obscure origins floundered. She alas had no means of knowing where she arrived, but when the prolonged echoes of this enormous night were melting together into a dreary and vague unconsciousness, searching and wailing a wail which was like the tragic destruction of something nonliving, empty entities awoke and, like monsters constantly exchanging their absence of shape for other absences of shape and taming silence by terrible reminiscences of silence, they went out in a mysterious agony.

We can never put enough distance between ourselves and what we love. To think that God is, is still to think of him as present; this is a thought according to our measure, destined only to console us. It is much more fitting to think that God is not, just as we must love him purely enough that we could be indifferent to the fact that he should not be. It is for this reason that the atheist is closer to God than the believer.

Memory is freedom of the past. But what has no present will not accept the present of a memory either. Memory says of the event: it once was and now it will never be again. The irremediable character of what has no present, of what is not even there as having once been there, says: it never happened, never for a first time, and yet it starts over, again, again, infinitely. It is without end, without beginning. It is without a future.

Why are those who knew him, when they pass from the memory of a young man, sensitive and gay, to the work – novels and writings – surprised to pass into a nocturnal world, a world of cold torment, a world not without light but in which light blinds at the same time that it illuminates; gives hope, but makes hope the shadow of anguish and despair? Why is it that he who, in his work, passes from the objectivity of the narratives to the intimacy of the Diary, descends into a still darker night in which the cries of a lost man can be heard? Why does it seem that the closer one comes to his heart, the closer one comes to an unconsoled center from which a piercing flash sometimes bursts forth, an excess of pain, excess of joy? Who has the right to speak of Kafka without making this enigma heard, an enigma that speaks with the complexity, with the simplicity, of enigma?

Nothing calmer than that, a visible circle of calm-and yet, something that immediately made me see something else, not so calm, a calm not soothed, shivering, as though it hadn’t reached the point from which there is no longer any return, as though it wasn’t free, yet, from all faces, still desired one, feared being separated from it: sometimes giving me the feeling of wandering desperately around the face, sometimes the hope of drawing near it, the certainty of recapturing it, of having recaptured it, an unforgettable impression of its unity with the face, even though the face itself remains invisible, a marvelous unity, sensed as a happiness, a piece of luck that dispersed shadows, that went beyond the day, something for which one was prepared to sacrifice everything, a thrilling resemblance, the thrill of the unique, a force of a desire that again and again and again recaptures what it once held-but what is happening? resemblance does not cease to be present behind everything, it even imposes itself, becomes more majestic, I divine it as I have never seen it, it is the moving reflection of all space, and the smile also affirms its immensity, affirms the majesty of this resemblance which is almost too vast, the smile seems to lose itself in the resemblance and through the smile the resemblance seems to become a resemblance that strays, without resemblance.

L’obscurité submergeait tout, il n’y avait aucun espoir d’en traverser les ombres, mais on en atteignait la réalité dans une relation dont l’intimité était bouleversante. Sa première observation fut qu’il pouvait encore se servir de son corps, en particulier de ses yeux ; ce n’était pas qu’il vit quelque chose, mais ce qu’il regardait, à la longue le mettait en rapport avec une masse nocturne qu’il percevait vaguement comme étant lui-même et dans laquelle il baignait.

If it were enough for him to be fragile, patient, passive, if the fear (the fear provoked by nothing), the ancient fear that reigns over the city pushing the figures in front of it, that passes in him like the past of his fear, the fear he does not feel, were enough to make him even more fragile, well beyond the consciousness of fragility in which he always holds himself back, but, even though the sentence, in interrupting itself gives him only the interruption of a sentence that does not end, even so, fragile patience, in the horizon of the fear that beseiges it, testifies only to a resort to fragility, even there where it makes thought mad in making it fragile, thoughtless.

Where I am alone, I am not there; no one is there, but the impersonal is: the outside, as that which prevents, precedes, and dissolves the possibility of any personal relation. Someone is the faceless third person, the They of which everybody and anybody is part, but who is part of it? Never anyone in particular, never you and I. Nobody is part of the They. “They” belongs to a region which cannot be brought to light, not because it hides some secret alien to any revelation or even because it is radically obscure, but because it transforms everything which has access to it, even light, into anonymous, impersonal being, the Nontrue, the Nonreal yet always there. The They is, in this respect, what appears up very close when someone dies.2

Mientras nadaba, se abandonaba a una especie de ensueño en el que se confundía con el mar. La embriaguez de salir de sí, de deslizarse en el vacío, de dispersarse en el pensamiento del agua, le hacía olvidar toda inquietud. E incluso cuando aquel mar ideal con el que se fundía cada vez más intimamente se convirtió a su vez en el verdadero mar en que él estaba como ahogado, no se sobresaltó todo lo que debería: había sin duda algo de insoportable en nadar así, a la aventura, con un cuerpo que le servía unicamente para pensar que nadaba; pero experimentaba también un alivio, como si por fin hubiese descubierto la clave de la situación y no tuviese más que continuar, con una ausencia de organismo en una ausencia de mar, su interminable viaje.

Boundless misfortune, the resounding gift of the gods, marks the point where language begins; but the limit of death opens before language, or rather within language, an infinite space. Before the imminence of death, language rushes forth, but it also starts again, tells of itself, discovers the story of the story and the possibility that this interpenetration might never end. Headed toward death, language turns back upon itself; it encounters something like a mirror; and to stop this death which would stop it, it possesses but a single power-that of giving birth to its own image in a play of mirrors that has no limits. From the depths of the mirror where it sets out to arrive anew at the point where it started (at death), but so as finally to escape death, another language can be heard - the image of actual language, but as a minuscule, interior, and virtual model

Această promovare a filosofiei, devenită atotputernică în lumea noastră şi cursul însuşi al destinului nostru, nu poate decât să coincidă cu dispariţia sa, anunţând, cel puţin, începutul aşezării ei în pământ. Această moarte a filosofiei, iată ce i-ar aparţine epocii noastre filosofice. Ea nu datează din 1917, nici măcar din 1857, anul în care Marx, ca printr-un tur de forţă al unui venetic, ar fi operat răsturnarea sistemului. De un secol şi jumătate, sub acest nume, ca şi sub numele lui Hegel, al lui Nietzsche sau al lui Heidegger, filosofia însăşi îşi afirmă sau îşi dă propriul sfârşit, fie că îl înţelege ca pe desăvârşirea unei ştiinţe absolute, fie ca suprimare teoretică legată de realizarea ei practică, mişcare nihilistă în care se prăbuşesc valorile, sau, în fine, ca împlinire a metafizicii, semn precursor pentru o altă posibilitate, diferită, care nu are încă un nume. Iată amurgul care, de acum înainte, îl va însoţi pe fiecare gânditor, straniu moment funebru, pe care spiritul filosofic îl celebrează într-o exaltare, de altminteri, adeseori voioasă, conducându-şi funeraliile lente, pe parcursul cărora speră că, într-un fel sau altul, va obţine resurecţia, reînvierea. Şi, bineînţeles, o asemenea aşteptare, criză şi sărbătoare a negativităţii, experienţă împinsă până la capăt pentru a afla cine rezistă, nu atinge numai filosofia.

Les chemins et les travaux de l'esprit qui tentent l'impossible sont des sujets de médiation inépuisables. On admire les fruits visibles de son art, mais on ne cesse de songer aux opérations qui n'ont abouti à rien de visible et dont tout l'acte a été dans une absence impénétrable et pure. Là le poète a vraiment saisi l'absolu et il a espéré l'exprimer en quelques mots, par un prodige de combinaisons soustraites au hasard.

In each word, not words but the space that, appearing, disappearing, they designate as the moving space of their appearance and their disappearance. In each word, a response to the unexpressed, the refusal and attraction of the unexpressed.

Izgubivši tišinu, žaljenje koje zbog toga osećam je neizmerno. Ne mogu ni opisati kakva beda obuzima čoveka koji je jednom uzeo reč.

¿Está sucediendo? No, no no está sucediendo. Y sin embargo hay algo que está por venir. En la espera, cualquier llegada contiene y abandona. MAURICE BLANCHOT

Quand tout est dit, ce qui reste à dire est le désastre, ruine de parole, défaillance par l’écriture, rumeur qui murmure : ce qui reste sans reste.

Concentration camps, annihilation camps, emblems wherein the invisible has made itself visible forever. All the distinctive features of a civilization are revealed or laid bare (“Work liberates,” “rehabilitation through work”). Work, in societies where, indeed, it is highly valued as the materialist process whereby the worker takes power, becomes the ultimate punishment: no longer is it just a matter of exploitation or of surplus-value; labor becomes the point at which all value comes to pieces and the “producer,” far from reproducing at least his labor force, is no longer even the reproducer of his life. For work has ceased to be his way of living and has become his way of dying. Work, death: equivalents. And the workplace is everywhere; worktime is all the time. When oppression is absolute, there is no more leisure, no more “free time.” Sleep is supervised. The meaning of work is then the destruction of work in and through work. But what if, as it has happened in certain commandos, labor consists of carrying stones at top speed from one spot and piling them up in another, and then in bringing them back at the run to the starring point (Langbein at Auschwitz; the same episode in the Gulag; Solzhenitsyn)? Then, no act of sabotage can cancel work, for its annulment is work’s own very purpose. And yet labor remains a meaning: it tends not only to destroy the worker, but more immediately to occupy, to harness and control him and at the same time perhaps to give him an awareness that to produce and not to produce amount to the same – that the one and the other alike are work – yet thereby it also makes the worker, whom it reduces to naught, aware that the society expressed in the labor camp is what he must struggle against even as he dies, even as he survives (lives on despite everything, beneath everything, beyond everything). Such survival is (also) immediate death, immediate acceptance of death in the refusal to die (I will not kill myself, because that would please them; thus I kill myself opposing them, I remain alive despite them).

Knowledge which goes so far as to accept horror in order to know it, reveals the horror of knowledge, its squalor, the discrete complicity which mantains it in a relation with the most insupportable aspects of power. I think of that young prisoner of Auschwitz (he had suffered the worst, led his family to the crematorium, hanged himself; after being saved at the last moment – how can one say that: saved? – he was exempted from contact with dead bodies, but when the SS shot someone, he was obliged to hold the victim’s head so that the bullet could be more easily lodged in the neck). When asked how he could bear this, he is supposed to have answered that he “observed the comportment of men before death.” I will not believe it. As Lewental, whose notes were found buried near a crematorium, wrote to us, “The truth was always more atrocious, more tragic than what will be said about it.” Saved at the last minute, the young man of whom I speak was forced to live that last instant again and each time to live it once more, frustrated every time of his own death and made to exchange it every time for the death of all. His response (“I observed the comportment of men…”) was not a response; he could not respond. What remains for us to recognize in this account is that when he was faced with an impossible question, he could find no other alibi than the search for knowledge, the so-called dignity of knowledge: that ultimate propriety which we believe will be accorded us by knowledge. And how, in fact, can one accept not to know? We read books on Auschwitz. The wish of all, in the camps, the last wish: know what happened, do not forget, and at the same time never will you know.

The essence of literature is to escape any essential determination, or any affirmation which stabilises or even realises it: it is never already there; it is always to be found or to be reinvented.

There are also two times: Aion and Chronos.12 Much of Deleuze’s book builds on the work of Maurice Blanchot—so much so that it would not be an overstatement to say that The Logic of Sense is a formalization and systematization of much of Blanchot’s thought, even though at times it leaves the context of that thought altogether.13 This is above all true in relation to the two readings of time. Throughout The Space of Literature and The Book to Come, Blanchot describes two kinds of time.14 First,

Something in the question necessarily exceeds the power of questioning; but this does not mean that there are too many secrets in the world that provoke questions: it is rather the contrary. When being is finally without question, when the whole becomes socially or institutionally realized, at that time and in an unbearable manner, the excess of questioning with respect to the power of questioning will make itself felt for the bearer of the question: the question will be felt as the impossibility of questioning. In the profound question, impossibility questions.

Aprende tú a pensar con dolor.

Elle passa par d'étranges cités mortes où, au lieu de formes pétrifiées, de circonstances momifiées, elle rencontra une nécropole de mouvements, de silences, de vides ; elle se heurta à l'extraordinaire sonorité du néant qui est faite de l'envers du son et, devant elle, s'étendirent des chutes admirables, le sommeil sans rêve, l'évanouissement qui ensevelit les morts dans une vie de songe, la mort par laquelle tout homme, même l'esprit le plus faible, devient l'esprit même.

Moments mystérieux pendant lesquels, privée de tout courage et incapable de mouvement, elle semblait ne rien faire, alors qu'accomplissant un travail infini, elle ne cessait de descendre jeter par-dessus bord pensées de vivante, pensées de morte pour se creuser en elle un asile d'extrême silence.

Povera camera, sei mai stata abitata? Come fa freddo qui, come ti abito poco. Ci sto forse per cancellare tutte le tracce del mio soggiorno? Di nuovo, di nuovo, camminando e rimanendo sempre qui, un altro paese, altre città, altre strade, lo stesso paese.

Thomas demeura à lire dans sa chambre. Il était assis, les mains jointes au-dessus de son front, les pouces appuyés contre la racine des cheveux, si absorbé qu'il ne faisait pas un mouvement lorsqu'on ouvrait la porte. Ceux qui entraient, voyant son livre toujours ouvert aux mêmes pages, pensaient qu'il feignait de lire. Il lisait. Il lisait avec une minutie et une attention insurpassables. Il était, auprès de chaque signe, dans la situation où se trouve le mâle quand la mante religieuse va le dévorer. L'un et l'autre se regardaient. Les mots, issus d'un livre qui prenait une puissance mortelle, exerçaient sur le regard qui les touchait un attrait doux et paisible. Chacun d'eux, comme un œil à demi fermé, laissait entrer le regard trop vif qu'en d'autres circonstances il n'eût pas souffert.

В тот момент, когда можно было подумать, что она взяла надо мною верх, она была неоспоримо мертва. Ибо умереть — вот в чем заключалась ее уловка, чтобы дать ничто тело. В то время, когда все разрушалось, она создала самое что ни на есть трудное, причем не извлекла нечто из ничто, деяние безрезультатное, а придала ничто в форме ничто форму чего-то. Акт невидения вполне обрел теперь свой глаз. Тишина, настоящая тишина, та, что не состоит из смолкнувших слов, из возможных мыслей, обрела голос. Ее лицо, от мгновения к мгновению все более прекрасное, созидало ее отсутствие. Ничто в ней не служило основой ни для какой реальности. Тогда-то, поскольку вместе исчезли ее история и история ее смерти и некому больше было на свете назвать Анну, она и достигла момента, когда ничто обретает бессмертие, когда то, что перестало быть, входит в лишенное мысли сновидение. Это и в самом деле была ночь.

¿Escribir será, en el libro, volverse legible para todos y, para sí mismo, indescifrable?

One's thinking about me makes me feel this self; one's not thinking about me leaves me in this self that exceeds me."-"At least disappear in this thought.

The journal represents the series of reference points which a writer establishes in order to keep track of himself when he begins to suspect the dangerous metamorphosis to which he is exposed. It is a route that remains viable; it is something like a watchman’s walkway upon ramparts: parallel to, overlooking, and sometimes skirting around the other path—the one where to stray is the endless task. Here true things are still spoken of.

Le photographe Hessling, ancien étudiant du Bauhaus, faisait la guerre, en 1943, dans les armées de son pays. La nuit de Noël, au village de Novimgorod, tous les habitants reçurent l'ordre de sortir dans la neige et de chanter leurs cantiques à la lueur des flambeaux tandis que les SS crucifiaient une jeune femme sur la porte de l'église. Son agonie dura la nuit entière. Au lever du jour, la beauté surnaturelle de son visage était inondée de sourire et de larmes. Hessling s'approcha, s'agenouilla et, comme elle semblait dire oui, il la photographia. Peu après, il était exécuté à Kiev comme anti-nazi, traître à l'Allemagne. Il avait eu le temps de remettre son négatif à Wolfgang Borchert. Hessling savait qu'aucune photographie dans le monde ne pouvait être comparée à celle-ci. Il fit promettre à Borchert de la développer au retour de la guerre, de la regarder, puis de la jeter dans l'Elbe, afin que jamais, dans aucun musée, on ne pût s'arrêter et contempler cette crucifixion. Même avec des larmes. C'est peut-être en pensant à cela que Maurice Blanchot, beaucoup plus tard, note dans L'écriture du désastre : "Il y a une limite où l'exercice d'un art, quel qu'il soit, devient une insulte au malheur. Autoportrait en lecteur (page 60)

Arnoult of course thinks that the silence of Rimbaud is the half-glimpsed, half-borne curse of the man who surpassed the allowed limits and who loses language at the very moment that he has something to reveal. That is, in fact, all that one can ever say about the abdication of a poet. The more he grasps the essence of what he is, the more he is threatened with losing it. He obeys night; he wants to be night himself, and at the same time he continues to assert, through language, his faithfulness to day. This compromise has value only through the union of tendencies that make it impossible. Catastrophe must keep watch for perfection, the solidity of the poetic work to have meaning. If the poet expresses himself in the language of clear communication, it is because he is engaged in the obscurity that at every instant risks snatching away from him the communication of all things, and if he is master of the powers that make him the richest man, it is because he touches a tragic point of destitution where he may succumb to madness. These remarks must be recalled in any poetic situation, but one must realize that by themselves they explain nothing. They presuppose what they manifest, and by a generalized mythology they describe day, night, whatever poetic experience encounters only as the most particular ordeal, the one least suited to comparisons and exchanges. It will always be absurd and, in any case, sterile to try to understand the madness of Nietzsche through the madness of Hölderlin, the madness of Hölderlin through the suicide of Nerval, the suicide of Nerval through the silence of Rimbaud. That there was a kind of common necessity in these events that anecdotal history wants to use to explain them from without, that Nietzsche's madness is born from the heart of his reason and as its ultimate demand, that Nerval's death is the effect of his existence lived poetically, that Rimbaud's speech asks to be heard, the last echo of the unspeakable, beneath the silence that sacrifices it -- these manifestations of night leave us nothing but a quick flash of light after which we remain in the illusion of real knowledge, far from a truly enlightened awareness.

Waiting is the awaiting of presence that is not given in waiting, presence that is led, however, to the simple play of presence by wait­ing that withdraws from presence everything that is present it.

They were both dreamed only by the one they would have liked to be for each other.

He sensed that this thought was not actually common to them, but rather that they would be in common only in this thought.

Not you, not I: the forgetting will forget me in you, and the impersonal remembrance will efface me from that which remembers.

+ Since when had he started to wait? Since he had made himself free for waiting by losing the desire for particular things, including the desire for the end of things. Waiting begins when there is nothing more to wait for, not even the end of waiting. Waiting is unaware of and destroys that which awaits. Waiting awaits nothing. Whatever the importance of the object of waiting may be, it is always infinitely surpassed by the movement of waiting. Waiting renders all things equally important, equally vain. In order to wait for the slightest thing, we have at our disposal an infinite capacity for waiting that seems inexhaustible.

Never disappointed, not for lack of disappointment, but because of disappointment’s always being insufficient. There is no solitude if it does not disrupt solitude, the better to expose the solitary to the multiple outside. He is not excluded, but like someone who would no longer enter anywhere. Detached from everything, including detachment. Infinite-limited, is it you? “I” die before being born. In search neither of the place, nor of the formula. Learn to think with pain. Let us share eternity in order to make it transitory. Fragment: beyond fracturing, or bursting, the patience of pure impatience, the little by little suddenly. -The Writing of the Disaster,

Midnight falls when the dice are cast, but one can only cast the dice at Midnight.

On voit que Marcel Bealu se sert des images du sommeil pour nous mettre aux prises avec le sentiment d'énigme qui est pour quelques-uns le sentiment fondamental de l'existence. (p. 594)

Each time, Thomas was thrust back into the depths of his being by the very words which had haunted him and which he was pursuing as his nightmare and the explanation of his nightmare. He found that he was ever more empty, ever heavier; he no longer moved without infinite fatigue. His body, after so many struggles, became entirely opaque, and to those who looked at it, it gave the peaceful impression of sleep, though it had not ceased to be awake.

To paraphrase Maurice Blanchot, it [24/7] is both of and after the disaster, characterized by the empty sky, in which no star or sign is visible, in which one's bearings are lost and orientation is impossible. p.17

the writer never reads his work. It is, for him, illegible, a secret. He cannot linger in its presence. It is a secret because he is separated from it. However, his inability to read the work is not a purely negative phenomenon. It is, rather, the writer’s only real relation to what we call the work.

C'est la propriété de ma pensée, non de m'assurer de l'existence, comme toutes les choses, comme la pierre, mais de m'assurer de l'être dans le néant même et de me convier à n'être pas pour me faire sentir alors mon admirable absence.

The tone is not the writer’s voice, but the intimacy of the silence he imposes upon the word. This implies that the silence is still his—what remains of him in the discretion that sets him aside. The tone makes great writers, but perhaps the work is indifferent to what makes them great.

Then literature has the glorious solitude of reason, that rarefied life at the heart of the whole which would require resolution and courage if this reason were not in fact the stability of an ordered aristocratic society; that is, the noble satisfaction of a part of society which concentrates the whole within itself by isolating itself well above what sustains it.

They do not think of death, having no other relation but with death.

The infinite nature of the work, seen thus, is just the mind’s infiniteness. The mind wants to fulfill itself in a single work, instead of realizing itself in an infinity of works and in history’s ongoing movement. But Valéry was by no means a hero. He found it good to talk about everything, to write on everything: thus the scattered totality of the world distracted him from the unique and rigorous totality of the work, from which he amiably let himself be diverted. The etc. hid behind the diversity of thoughts and subjects. However, the work—the work of art, the literary work—is neither finished nor unfinished: it is. What it says is exclusively this: that it is—and nothing more.

Bağışlamayın. Bağışlama, bağışlamadan önce suçlar; suçlayarak,kusuru [suçu] olumlayarak, onu geri alınamaz kılar, vurmayı (coup) suçluluğa (culpabilité) kadar götürür; böylece artık hiçbir şey onarılamaz, verme ve bağışlama olanaklı olmaktan çıkar. Yalnızca masumiyeti bağışla. Seni bağışladığım için beni bağışla.

Ona yüzmesi için bir vücut veren suyun içinde, akıntıya kapılan bir gemi gibi bir kıyıdan ötekine yalpalaması gerekti. Çıkış yolu neydi? Kolu olan dalga tarafından sürüklenmemek için mücadele etmek mi? Sulara gömülmek mi? Kendi içinde acı acı boğulmak mı? Durma vaktinin geldiği kesindi, ama bir umudu daha vardı; yeniden canlanan derinliğinin bağrında yeni bir imkan bulmuşçasına yeniden yüzdü. Yüzgeçlerden yoksun canavar, yüzüyordu.

Çıksaydın düşerdin belki, çıkmadığına bilemezsin" der bir dost, Blanchot da ekliyor ve diyor ki; Asıl düşüş o anda başlar. Kendini yok eden düşüş, daha saf bir hiçlik tarafından sürekli tüketilen hiçlik. Ama Anne, bu son sınırda, girişimindeki çılgınlığı bilincine vardı. Kendinden yok ettiğini sandığı her şeyi bir bütün halinde yeniden bulduğuna emin oldu. Bu nihai kendine dalış anında, düşüncesinin en derin yerinde bir düşünceyi tanıdı; Anne olduğunun, yaşayan, sarışın ve -ne korkunç- zeki Anne olduğunun sefil düşüncesini. İmgeler onu yoğuruyor, doğuruyor, üretiyorlardı. Bir vücudu oldu kendinden bin kat daha güzel, bin kat daha vücut olan vücudu; görünür haldeydi. Bununla en bozulmaz maddeden çıkıp etrafa yayılıyordu. Olmayan düşüncenin bağrındaki üstün kayaydı, ufalanabilir azotsuz topraktı, bununla Adem bile meydana getirilemezdi; bu en kaba, en çirkin vücutla, bu çamurdan vücutla, kusmayı istiyor oluşunun, kendine düşen dışkı payını harikulade yokluğa taşıyarak, kusuyor oluşunun bu bayağı fikriyle, iletilemez olana çarpıp nihayet intikamını alacaktı. Tam o sırada duyulmamış olanın bağrında kulak tırmalayıcı bir ses çınladı, o da kudurmuş bir sesle Anne, Anne diye haykırmaya başladı. Kayıtsızlığın bağrında, Thomas'ya olan tüm tutkusuyla, tüm nefretiyle, tüm sevgisiyle bir meşale gibi bir anda yandı. Muzaffer bir varlık gibi hiçliğin bağrına giriverdi ve kendisini ceset, özümlenemez hiçlik, hâlâ varolan ve artık varolmayan Anne, Thomas'ın düşüncesiyle edilen son alay olarak hiçliğe atıldı

Չի կրնար իրեն` զիս մեռցուցած ըլլալու տխրութիւնը պատճառել:

Իմ մասիս` ոչ մէկ խօսք: Հասկցայ թէ որքան դառնացած էր լսելով, որ համաձայն էի անձնասպանութեան գաղափարին հետ: Այդ համաձայնութիւնը իհարկէ աններելի էր, մինչև իսկ` անպարկեշտ, քանի որ, երբ այդ մասին լրջօրէն խորհիմ, ինչպէս ըրի հետգային, կ'անդրադառնամ որ կը բխէր այն գաղափարէն թէ հիւանդութիւնը երբեք պիտի չյաղթէր իրեն: Չափէն աւելի կը պայքարէր: Շատոնց պէտք է մեռած ըլլար, եւ ոչ միայն չէր մեռած, այլ շարունակած էր ապրիլ, սիրել, խնդալ, քաղաքին մէջ շրջիլ, մէկու մը նման` որուն չի կրնար հասնիլ հիւանդութիւնը:

Ճիշտ է, որ ես ալ տակաւին հետդ խօսելու պէտքը կը զգամ, ինչպէս դէմքի մը որ դիմացս ըլլար, հոն` հորիզոնին վրայ: Անտեսանելի դէմք: Այդ դէմքին, միշտ աւելի անտեսանելի դեմքին տարածութիւնը, և մեր միջեւ` անդորրութիւնը: Կարծես մեռած ըլլայի ես այդ յիշելուս համար, ցանկութիւնը եւ յիշատակը կարելի եղածին չափ հեռու փոխադրելու համար: Արդեօք մարդ պիտի ուզէր մեռնի՞լ `բան մը յիշելու համար: Արդեօք դուն այդ յիշատակին մտերմութի՞ւնն ես: Արդեօք ես պետք է խօսիմ որպէսզի գաս եւ ճիշտ դիմացս կայնիս: Եւ դուն արդեօք պէտքը չե՞ս զգար վերջին անգամ մը, անդորրութեան կողքին այդ բարակ ու դէմքը ըլլալու: Գերազանց կարելիություն` մեծ խոհին եւ մեծ ստութեան կողմէ նայուելու: Կարծեմ այդ է որ մեզ, երկուքս ալ փորձութեան կը մատնէ` զիս` որ դուն ըլլաս դէմք մը, ինչ որ տեսանելի է դեմքի մը մէջ, եւ քեզ` որ նորէն դէմք մը ըլլաս ինձ համար, մտածում մը ըլլաս եւ սակայն դէմք մը: Ցանկութիւնը գիշերուան մէջ տեսանելի ըլլալու, որպէսզի գիշերը անտեսանելիօրէն ջնջուի:

...բայց կը խնդրեմ ամէն բանէ վեր`որ չբանան ինչ որ փակ է: Կ'ուզեմ որ փճացնեն ամէն ինչ, առանց գիտնալու թե ինչ է իրենց փճացուցածը, իրաւ սիրոյ անգիտութեամբ ու ինքնաաբուխ շարժումով:

As long as I live, I am a mortal man, but when I die, by ceasing to be a man I also cease to be mortal, I am no longer capable of dying, and my impending death horrifies me because I see it as it is: no longer death but the impossibility of dying.

Men are weak. They accomplish the worst only by remaining unaware of it until they grow accustomed to it and find themselves justified by the "greatness" of rigorous discipline and the orders of an irresistible leader.

Mis kõige enam lugemist ohustab, on see: lugeja reaalsus, tema isiksus, pretensioonikus ja põikpäisus loetu ees aina iseendaks jääda - inimeseks, kes üldiselt teab, kuidas lugeda. Lugeda luuletust ei tähenda lugeda lihtsalt järjekordset luuletust, see ei tähenda isegi sisenemist luule olemusse selle luuletuse kaudu. Luuletuse lugemine on see luuletus ise, mis ennast lugemises kinnitab.

Con su fábula de la mantis religiosa Lacan se está refiriendo a una escena de Thomas el Oscuro, de Maurice Blanchot, en la que se describe al protagonista como un lector obsesionado al que las palabras devoran como si fueran una mantis religiosa. Leer significa ser mirado: Estaba, ante cada signo, en la situación en que se encuentra el macho cuando la mantis religiosa está a punto de devorarlo. Se observaban mutuamente (L’un et l’autre se regardaient). […] Thomas se deslizó, pues, por aquellos pasillos, indefenso, hasta que fue sorprendido por la intimidad de la palabra. No era para alarmarse todavía, al contrario, era un momento casi agradable que le hubiera gustado prolongar. […] Se veía con placer en aquel ojo que lo veía.52

L’Etranger was printed in France on May 19, 1942, in an edition of 4,400 copies. This was as large as initial printings of works by established authors, like Queneau’s Pierrot mon ami and Gide’s Théâtre. Other new Gallimard books by the playwright Jacques Audiberti, the critic Maurice Blanchot, and the essayist Marcel Jouhandeau, had much lower printings. But a new mystery by Georges Simenon had a printing of 11,000 copies, and Saint-Exupéry’s aviation memoirs, Pilote de guerre, 22,000. Camus could not inscribe copies to journalists in the French publishing tradition, nor could he see copies in bookstores or read the first reviews in newspapers. Gaston had decided to put L’Etranger on sale without waiting for the essay, whose proofs Paulhan was correcting, minus the controversial pages on Kafka.

Why does it cost me so much strength? Why must I devote myself to something that costs me so much, without respite, without wanting it, without expecting anything from it?

Still, "I" am sad in others more than in myself, sad not to be able to lighten this sadness and perhaps to call lack of communication what is still only the inertia of a self that undoes itself and maintains itself in its failure.

Only time itself, during which negation becomes our power, permits the “unity of contraries.” In time’s absence what is new renews nothing; what is present is not contemporary; what is present presents nothing, but represents itself and belongs henceforth and always to return. It isn’t, but comes back again.

I think: there at the point where thought joins with me I am able to subtract myself from being, without diminishing, without changing, by means of a metamorphosis which saves me from myself, beyond any point of reference from which I might be seized. It is the property of my thought, not to assure me of existence (as all things do, as a stone does), but to assure me of being in nothingness itself, and to invite me not to be, in order to make me feel my marvelous absence. I think, said Thomas, and this visible, inexpressible, nonexistent Thomas I became meant that henceforth I was never there where I was, and there was not even anything mysterious about it. My existence became entirely that of an absent person who, in every act I performed, produced the same act and did not perform it.

Whoever is fascinated doesn't see, properly speaking, what he sees. Rather, it touches him in an immediate proximity; it seizes and ceaselessly draws him close, even though it leaves him absolutely at a distance. Fascination is fundamentally linked to neutral, impersonal presence, to the indeterminate They, the immense, faceless Someone. Fascination is the relation the gaze entertains -- a relation which is itself neutral and impersonal -- with sightless, shapeless depth, the absence one sees because it is blinding.