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ment line by line yet summary is resisted. “Somehow
the experience of reading had to take place moment by
moment”. This resistance, she finds, is experienced by
most other readers. It is not a criticism.
Charlotte Mandell – translator of The Work Of Fire
and The Book To Come – recalls how she felt a need
to write to Blanchot to thank him for the silence in his
words – for the revelation of the space. Her gratitude
then is not for the man himself but for his absence,
such is the perversity of his gift. Mandell doesn’t say
whether he replied – though others report replies of
exceptional courtesy and concern. Only Jacques Derrida
– in the address given at the cremation – tells of
the man himself: brief meetings in a university office
throughout which Blanchot wore a gentle smile, and
then breathless on the phone toward the end. He seems
ghostly even in life.
One wonders how much this effacement contributes
to the unique aura of his works? Not much, if the attempts
to imitate him are any guide. The poet Jacques
Dupin writes that in Blanchot’s fragmentary writing:
“his speech yielded a conductive wire of an extreme
delicacy in search of the ultimate meaning, that which
was well beyond one’s grasp and which indicated
from very high up how to pass over the precipices,
how to master the turbulence and the proliferation,
of the forces of dislocation that exhaust the text, that
strangle the voice.”
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While Blanchot’s prose can be said to be poetic –
and Dupin is surely right to detect a “demanding poet”
behind the prose – it is not flighty and impressionistic.
The silence of the words is achieved by the extreme patience
and attention to the weight of words – a patience
frequently expressed in doubt. Blanchot’s disciples
have a remarkable confidence to use key word and
oxymorons that appear throughout Blanchot’s work
– passivity, sovereign relation, forgetfulness without
memory, the impossible real, motionless retreat, purposiveness
without purpose – in the assumption that they
automatically plumb the depths as they do in Blanchot.
Curiously, they don’t. As Blanchot himself wrote: “Desire
of writing, writing of desire. Desire of knowledge,
knowledge of desire. Let us not believe that we have
said anything at all with these reversals.”
The merit of Nowhere Without No is that, unlike so
much Blanchot-related material, it doesn’t strain to
say too much. Such is the silence brought by death
perhaps. The latter also means the distance between
the author and his work is foregrounded, if only in the
reader’s mind.
Michael Holland emphasises the distance in a remarkable,
two-page analysis of science fiction. The
genre, he says, necessarily “hangs back from thinking
the totality of what it projects – which is to say
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