Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchotwas a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on post-structuralist philosophers such as Jacques Derrida...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth22 September 1907
CountryFrance
leaving ruins disaster
The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.
authority bring cannot cease echo incessant oneself order silence since speaking speech writers-and-writing
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.
writing limits possibility
The disaster... is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.
real writing memorial
The Journal is not essentially a confession, a story about oneself. It is a Memorial. What does the writer have to remember? Himself, who he is when he is not writing, when he is living his daily life, when he is alive and real, and not dying and without truth.
writing order echoes
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.
secret faces face-to-face
A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.
ideas what-if doe
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.
strength law secret
The less manifest the work, the stronger: as though a secret law demanded it always be hidden in what it shows, thus showing what must remain hidden, only showing it, in the end, by dissimulation.
eye night views
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?
people proud lovers
Lovers of painting and lovers of music are people who openly display their preference like a delectable ailment that isolates them and makes them proud.
art mistake light
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.
doubt important literature
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.
real silence littles
But my silence is real. If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on.
desire weak force
Weak thoughts, weak desires: he felt their force.