Maurice Blanchot

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“A story? No. No stories, never again.”

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

“شما را دوست داشتن مفهوم مرگ بود.‏”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Weak thoughts, weak desires: he felt their force.”

“Această promovare a filosofiei, devenită atotputernică în lumeanoastră şi cursul însuşi al destinului nostru, nu poate decât săcoincidă cu dispariţia sa, anunţând, cel puţin, începutul aşezării eiîn pământ. Această moarte a filosofiei, iată ce i-ar aparţine epociinoastre filosofice. Ea nu datează din 1917, nici măcar din 1857, anulîn care Marx, ca printr-un tur de forţă al unui venetic, ar fi operatrăsturnarea sistemului. De un secol şi jumătate, sub acest nume, ca şisub numele lui Hegel, al lui Nietzsche sau al lui Heidegger, filosofiaînsăşi îşi afirmă sau îşi dă propriul sfârşit, fie că îl înţelege cape desăvârşirea unei ştiinţe absolute, fie ca suprimare teoreticălegată de realizarea ei practică, mişcare nihilistă în care seprăbuşesc valorile, sau, în fine, ca împlinire a metafizicii, semnprecursor pentru o altă posibilitate, diferită, care nu are încă unnume. Iată amurgul care, de acum înainte, îl va însoţi pe fiecaregânditor, straniu moment funebru, pe care spiritul filosofic îlcelebrează într-o exaltare, de altminteri, adeseori voioasă,conducându-şi funeraliile lente, pe parcursul cărora speră că, într-unfel sau altul, va obţine resurecţia, reînvierea. Şi, bineînţeles, oasemenea aşteptare, criză şi sărbătoare a negativităţii, experienţăîmpinsă până la capăt pentru a afla cine rezistă, nu atinge numaifilosofia.”

“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.”

“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.”