Maurice Blanchot: Literature like a Question

Abstract

Questioning about literature exceeds the limits of literary criticism and becomes a philosophical inquire. But this is possible just if one agrees that between philosophy and literature there are more convergences than clear boundaries. Writing is one of those common points where, precisely, Maurice Blanchot places the emphasis of his work of writing about the writing itself; because the inquire about literature is made while writing, while being exposed to the impossible experience of writing that questions the work’s and author’s notion; since literature is no more than the search for its own absent center, its nonessence and the origin’s absence. Questioning about literature is to undertake and infinite search that won’t find definitive answers, is an anonymous experience to which does not underlay the figure of an author or a subject, because literary space is the outside in which incessantly disappearance and language dispersion reigns; but in spite of that, is the space of writing.