It was summer [1964]; Roger and I had come to spend the day in Paris, and, after visiting a museum, had decided to go to the cinema. Suddenly, on the opposite pavement, we saw Blanchot with a woman. We immediately crossed the street to greet them—the cinema was, moreover, located on that very pavement. But when we were almost face to face, he passed by, they passed by, and went into the cinema. We were bewildered. The very next day, a letter from Blanchot arrived:
“You were for me like two friendly figures in a dream, and it was beautiful that I could greet you without quite being able to reach you, and thus without breaking the unattainable nature of the dream—this, for a moment, in the vast, anonymous daylight of the street.”
The film we had seen, together, apart: Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence.
from an interview with Jacqueline Laporte in Cahier Maurice Blanchot from L'Herne.
Though he read scholarship seriously and was eventually appointed a professor at the University of Buenos Aires, he never studied at university himself and was aware of the scholarly failings of some of his own published work. Borges worked better with dreams and poems than with rigorous systems, but that did not keep him from admiring the beauty of systems—or of noticing how they collapse or the madness they engender.
The reason why religions attach themselves to books is because of something about the book, not because of something about the religion. So that the book appears to contain ourselves and yet is not the same as ourselves, so it has a kind of mirror process around it, around what consciousness might be, what being might be. Which at the same time is not spelt out for us; it’s a relationship that we sense without being able to understand completely, and I think in that sense every book contains a kind of mystery, both as you open it because you don’t yet know what it’s going to contain, but also as you read it because the process of understanding is itself in some way a mysterious process of transference. And again the book provides a sort of physical symbol and metaphor for all of that. But it’s more than a question of language as communication, or language as meaning, or truth or what ever it might be. It’s odd to say it’s more than that but I think it is more than that. We sense that the truth might be there, within it, but we also sense that we don’t know quite how we get from us to that truth. And there is always that sense of residue and mystery about that transaction or trajectory.
Everything in St. Gallen’s medieval library seemed to exist at the border between reality and fiction, but it was all real, immensely real, which didn’t stop me remembering that the visible was still very much a hangover of the invisble.
from Montevideo by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott.
It is important to observe that the order of Blanchot’s narratives is not merely chronological. Each succeeding work is concerned exclusively with a moment lying outside of time, a moment that is essentially impossible, and which recurs like an obsession throughout all of Blanchot’s work: the moment following my death, when I am dead yet able somehow to look back on my final moment, and which Blanchot sums up in the words, “we have forgotten to die.”
from Space and Beyond, an essay on L'attente l'oubli (Awaiting Oblivion) by Michael Holland
I envision a style: a style that would be beautiful, that someone will invent some day, ten years or ten centuries from now, one that would be rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped with a flame: a style that would pierce your idea like a dagger, and on which your thought would sail easily ahead over a smooth surface, like a skiff before a good tail wind. Prose was born yesterday: you have to keep that in mind. Verse is the form par excellence of ancient literatures. All possible prosodic variations have been discovered; but that is far from being the case with prose.
Flaubert to Louise Colet, quoted by Michael Fried in Flaubert’s “Gueuloir”.
A writer is lost as soon as his audience exists. The genius escapes this by existing before his time, which is to say, before his audience can exist, and by existing, kill him. An artist that is understood is subhuman.
The reading in Freiburg was an exceptional success: 1,200 people who listened to me with bated breath for an hour, then, having applauded me for a long time, they listened to me again for another fifteen minutes.
Heidegger had come up to me—The day after my reading I was, with M. Neumann, Elmar’s friend, in Heidegger’s hut in the Black Forest. Then there was, in the car, a grave dialogue, with clear words from me. M. Neumann, who was the witness of it, told me afterward that, for him, this conversation had something epoch-making about it.
There are people who will go on to claim that the audience is silencing or even “censoring” Klaus by shouting him down, but I think that Klaus is not speaking so much as parroting the senescent propaganda of Staatsräson, the version of history that floats undisturbed through the technocratic ventilation systems, a malevolent spirit seeking new host bodies.
The traces of errancy are certainly prodding. They stir something up that cannot be integrated into the logical understanding of truth. Irrespective of the question as to whether Heidegger’s judgment about modernity is right, to see the thinker fall appears to be a unique drama. Today, no thinker falls anymore. [89]
Note 89: Could it be that Jürgen Habermas’ corpus will be one of the first in which simply nothing at all prodding can be found anymore? Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Adorno, Sartre, Arendt, Derrida, Nancy, Badiou, even Gadamer, everywhere one stumbles upon dissonances. Normalization takes hold. The philosophy of the future – integration brought to completion.
from Freedom to Fail: Heidegger’s Anarchy by Peter Trawny.
Mastery consists in the power to stop writing, to interrupt what is being written, thereby restoring to the present instant its rights, its decisive trenchancy.
Heidegger’s thought betrays what the philosopher was: the final and probably most vehement obstructer of modernity. The Schwarze Hefte are nothing other than the wild attempt to combat the project of the “disenchantment of the world” by any philosophical and non-philosophical means available. And the Second World War more and more turned out to actually be a line of demarcation behind which everything that Heidegger loved, that in which and from which he lived, disappeared irretrievably.
What disappeared is a world that even today still tenaciously defends its survival. Homeland, border, earth, poetry, place, community, ambiance, all of that can no longer raise any claims within technicity’s universal transit space.
from Freedom to Fail: Heidegger’s Anarchy by Peter Trawny.
The beginning of Western thought is not the same as its origin. The beginning is, rather, the veil that conceals the origin – indeed an unavoidable veil. If that is the situation, then oblivion shows itself in a different light. The origin keeps itself concealed in a different light. The origin keeps itself concealed in the beginning.
Derrida…did not like literature. However, he read philosophy in a literary manner. He respected Genet, to whom he gave everything. But I never could get him to read Lispector or Bernhard. Celan, yes, but Celan is not literature, it is pain.