The Writer

A few passages from Ann Smock’s translation of Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster:

The writer, his biography: he died; lived and died.

The mortal leap of the writer without which he would not write is necessarily an illusion to the extent that, in order really to be accomplished, it must not take place.

Whoever writes is exiled from writing, which is the country – his own – where he is not a prophet.

‘Optimists write badly’ (Valéry). But pessimists do not write.

The writer, daytime insomniac.

Granted, to write is to renounce being in command of oneself, or having any proper name, and at the same time it is not to renounce, but to announce, welcoming without recognition the absent. Or it is to be in relation, through words in their absence, with what one cannot remember – a witness to the unencountered, answerable not only for the void in the subject, but for the subject as a void, its disappearance in the imminence of a death which has already taken place, out of place, any place at all.

To keep still, preserving silence: that is what, all unknowing, we all want to do, writing.

To live without a lifetime – likewise, to die forsaken by death…. To write elicits such enigmatic propositions.

How absurd it would be to address this question to the writer: are you a writer through and through? In everything you are, have yourself become writing – vital and activating? This would be to condemn the writer to death or foolishly to deliver his funeral eulogy.

What happens through writing is not of the order of things that happen. But in that case, who permits you to claim that anything like writing ever does happen? Or is it that writing is not such that it need ever happen?