Dante’s experience of Beatrice was an experience of the miraculous and divine – of something that is beyond all finite experience of objects and that cannot be adequately expressed in reductively objectivizing terms. This is why Dante had need of a subjective language, the language of lyric, which, apart from what it says about any specific objective referent or content, expresses feeling by…
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation, and it seems truest when it eschews artistic devices of any sort whatsoever. from The Secret Heart of the Clock by Elias Canetti.
The ‘scandal’ and the importance of the wall is that, in the concrete oppression that it embodies, it is essentially abstract and that it thus reminds us – we who forget this constantly – that abstraction is not simply a faulty mode of thought or an apparently impoverished form of language but rather our world, the one we live and think in on a daily basis. from the essay…
Plato: For of death no one has knowledge , and Paul Celan: No one witnesses for the witness . Nevertheless, we always choose a companion: not for ourselves, but for something inside us, away from us, that asks us to be absent from ourselves to cross the line we can never reach. The companion, lost in advance, is henceforth the loss in our place. from The Last One to Speak by Maurice Blanchot,…
ln vain do we extend our view into the heavens, and pry into the entrails of the earth, in vain do we consult the writings of learned men, and trace the dark footsteps of antiquity. We need only draw the curtain of words to behold the fairest tree of knowledge, whose fruit is excellent, and within the reach of our hand. Berkeley, from A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
I repudiate all reviews. To me a reviewer is just as loathsome as a streetwalking assistant barber who comes running with the shaving water which is used for all customers and fumbles about my face with his clammy fingers. – from Kierkegaard’s journals
Now Granta, or more precisely the Commonwealth Prize ecosystem with which it is associated, appears to have been fooled by AI-generated prose. The issue is not whether detection software can “prove” machine authorship. The issue is aesthetic. Several readers and editors apparently encountered prose displaying classic LLM characteristics—semantic over-resolution at sentence level,…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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. EM Cioran, 30 December 1964
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…
