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Maurice Blanchot Biography

Maurice Blanchot

Maurice Blanchot (French: [blɑ̃ʃo]; 22 September 1907 – 20 February 2003) was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on post-structuralist philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.

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Maurice Blanchot Quotes

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.

Echo, Echoes, Oneself, Order, Way, Writing

A story? No. No stories, never again.

Stories, Story

There is between sleep and us something like a pact, a treaty with no secret clauses, and according to this convention it is agreed that, far from being a dangerous, bewitching force, sleep will become domesticated and serve as an instrument of our power to act. We surrender to sleep, but in the way that the master entrusts himself to the slave who serves him.

According, Dangerous, Insomnia, Like, Secret, Sleep

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.

Confirms, Disparages, Doubt, Important, Literature

If nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little.

Everything, Littles, Nothing, Stills, Substituted, Too Much

I wanted to see something in full daylight; I was sated with the pleasure and comfort of the half light; I had the same desire for the daylight as for water and air. And if seeing was fire, I required the plenitude of fire, and if seeing would infect me with madness, I madly wanted that madness.

Air, Fire, Half, Light, Water

The disaster. . . is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.

Limit, Limits, Possibility, Writing

But my silence is real. If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on.

Farther, Littles, Real, Silence

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.

Doe, Having, Ideas, Imposes, Recommences, What If

Express only that which cannot be expressed. Leave it unexpressed)

Express, Expressed, Leave, Unexpressed

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.

Art, Implementation, Light, Mistake, Risky

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?

Eye, Figure, Harmony, Night, Precisely, Views

To see was terrifying, and to stop seeing tore me apart from my forehead to my throat.

Forehead, Foreheads, Seeing, Throat, Tore

Weak thoughts, weak desires: he felt their force.

Desire, Desires, Felt, Force, Weak

I lean over you, your equal, offering you a mirror for your perfect nothingness, for your shadows which are neither light nor absence of light, for this void which contemplates. To all that which you are, and, for our language, are not, I add a consciousness. I make you experience your supreme identity as a relationship, I name you and define you. You become a delicious passivity.

Contemplates, Light, Mirrors, Offering, Perfect, Relationship