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Review [published June 2004]
Maurice Blanchot: Nowhere Without No
Stephen Mitchelmore
Not half way through the year but already a book has
come along that, at the end, I will say: this is it – the
book of the year.
I am aware that there is something desperate about
such a pronouncement. It reveals a need to fulfil empty
time with an evasive monument. That is the nature of
monuments after all. The bigger the monument the
more it evades – hence the respect given to a new 800
page novel spanning generations, the collected works
of a writer or a definitive biography of a tyrant. Yet the
book I’m holding is a fragile 53 pages and is published
by a small press in Sydney, Australia.
Nowhere Without No is, ironically, a collection of 13
memorials by translators, academics and poets (sometimes
a combination of all three) in honour of Maurice
Blanchot, the French novelist and philosopher, who
died in February 2003, aged 95.
The introduction by editor Kevin Hart explains the
title. It comes from Rilke’s eighth Duino Elegy in which
the poet writes of “a space that has been freed from
ordinary time” as experienced by children, animals and
the dead:
BUY Maurice Blanchot books online from and
It is always world
and never nowhere without no:
that pureness, that unwatched, which one
breathes and
endlessly knows and never wants. But a child
might lose himself inside the quiet and become
shaken. Or someone dies and is.
For near to death one sees that death no more
and stares ahead, perhaps with a beast’s huge
glance.
Blanchot’s gift is to reveal to us how literature is also
nowhere without no. His work pursues writing to where
it disappears into this space, as it separates itself from
the reader and writer. Hart reminds us that Blanchot
wrote (in the third person) of his own experience of this
separation as he faced a firing squad in 1944. Waiting
to die, there was:
“a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of
beatitude (nothing happy, however) – sovereign elation?
[…] In this place, I will not try to analyse. He
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