[C]riticism prepares the way for a different and unforeseeable affirmation, thus making it ‘one of the most difficult but important tasks of our time’ (LS 6). Why, Blanchot asks, can the work not speak for itself? Why between the reader and the work, between history and the work, is this strange hybrid figure of the critic imposed? Criticism, having no reality of its own, disappears in the affirmation of what is otherwise silent in the work; the accomplishment of criticism is signalled by its disappearance as the mediated becomes the immediate – here Blanchot seems close to Heidegger who is referenced in the early pages of his response – but any such relation to the immediate is impossible and both criticism and literature are perpetually turned outwards:

this sort of sudden distance, in which the completed work is reflected and which the critic is called upon to gauge, is only the last metamorphosis of the opening which is the work in its genesis, what one might call its essential non-coincidence with itself, everything that continuously makes it possible-impossible. All that criticism does, then, is represent and follow outside what, from within, as torn affirmation, infinite insecurity [inquiétude], conflict (and in all other forms), does not cease to be present as a living reserve of emptiness, of space, of error, or, better yet, as the power that belongs to literature to make itself while always maintaining itself in lack [en défaut]. 

The domain of literature cannot be stabilised because there is no outside point from which to delimit the parameters of the work. The lack that allows the work and criticism to proliferate offers the possibility of moving beyond metaphysical representation towards this torn affirmation, torn because erring between the yes and the no, between the inside and the outside, contesting all limits, including those of literature.

Holly Langstaff, Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot