“He perceived all the strangeness there was in being observed by a word as if
by a living thing, and not simply by one word, but by all the words that were in
that word, by all those that went with it and in turn contained other words, like
a possession of angels opening out to the infinite to the very eye of the absolute."
Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure
Anyone familiar with his critical work will recognise a lovely echo here of many of his deep interests in literature. What do words do when they are given a weight beyond their concept forming capacity? When their materiality is recognised and given space? One of his early, and enduring, beliefs was that ordinary language negated what it described because it replaced the actuality of the thing with a general concept: the living tree is called a tree and it immediately loses its particularity to a concept. In literature, however, where the materiality, texture, cadence, etc, of words is given weight then the substitution of thing for concept is partly broken. Instead of the word negating the actuality of the thing and replacing it with a positive concept, literature causes a word to negate the thing
and resist that usual forming of the concept: a double absence. Some new space is formed where the words take on a new meaning, or life, in relation to the words around them and the form of the work. The encounter with the work—reading—is an encounter with the particular space this work creates and one that is always unique because of that quality of texture that is so particular.