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Plato: For of death no one has knowledge, and Paul Celan: No one witnesses for the witness. Nevertheless, we always choose a companion: not for ourselves, but for something inside us, away from us, that asks us to be absent from ourselves to cross the line we can never reach. The companion, lost in advance, is henceforth the loss in our place. from The Last One to Speak by Maurice Blanchot, translated by Joseph Simas.

ln vain do we extend our view into the heavens, and pry into the entrails of the earth, in vain do we consult the writings of learned men, and trace the dark footsteps of antiquity. We need only draw the curtain of words to behold the fairest tree of knowledge, whose fruit is excellent, and within the reach of our hand. Berkeley, from A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

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I repudiate all reviews. To me a reviewer is just as loathsome as a streetwalking assistant barber who comes running with the shaving water which is used for all customers and fumbles about my face with his clammy fingers.

– from Kierkegaard's journals

On 25 June, the literary world celebrates the 100th anniversary of poet Ingeborg Bachmann’s birth. This documentary tells the story of how B

Now Granta, or more precisely the Commonwealth Prize ecosystem with which it is associated, appears to have been fooled by AI-generated prose. The issue is not whether detection software can "prove" machine authorship. The issue is aesthetic. Several readers and editors apparently encountered prose displaying classic LLM characteristics—semantic over-resolution at sentence level, lyrical excess without governing pressure, figurative autonomy detached from structural necessity—and accepted these peculiarities as "voice." Publishers still love literature to a degree, but increasingly in the manner that politicians once possessed "convictions": as vestigial accessories attached to managerial careers. from The Novel Is Dead. This Time It's for Real by Will Self

It was summer [1964]; Roger and I had come to spend the day in Paris, and, after visiting a museum, had decided to go to the cinema. Suddenly, on the opposite pavement, we saw Blanchot with a woman. We immediately crossed the street to greet them—the cinema was, moreover, located on that very pavement. But when we were almost face to face, he passed by, they passed by, and went into the cinema. We were bewildered. The very next day, a letter from Blanchot arrived: "You were for me like two friendly figures in a dream, and it was beautiful that I could greet you without quite being able to reach you, and thus without breaking the unattainable nature of the dream—this, for a moment, in the vast, anonymous daylight of the street." The film we had seen, together, apart: Ingmar Bergman's The Silence.

from an interview with Jacqueline Laporte in Cahier Maurice Blanchot from L'Herne.

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Though he read scholarship seriously and was eventually appointed a professor at the University of Buenos Aires, he never studied at university himself and was aware of the scholarly failings of some of his own published work. Borges worked better with dreams and poems than with rigorous systems, but that did not keep him from admiring the beauty of systems—or of noticing how they collapse or the madness they engender.

From Jorge Luis Borges' Medieval Aesthetics of Failure by Irina Dumitrescu

The reason why religions attach themselves to books is because of something about the book, not because of something about the religion. So that the book appears to contain ourselves and yet is not the same as ourselves, so it has a kind of mirror process around it, around what consciousness might be, what being might be. Which at the same time is not spelt out for us; it's a relationship that we sense without being able to understand completely, and I think in that sense every book contains a kind of mystery, both as you open it because you don't yet know what it's going to contain, but also as you read it because the process of understanding is itself in some way a mysterious process of transference. And again the book provides a sort of physical symbol and metaphor for all of that. But it's more than a question of language as communication, or language as meaning, or truth or what ever it might be. It's odd to say it's more than that but I think it is more than that. We sense that the truth might be there, within it, but we also sense that we don't know quite how we get from us to that truth. And there is always that sense of residue and mystery about that transaction or trajectory. Dr Brian Cummings on the Chasing Leviathan podcast.

Everything in St. Gallen's medieval library seemed to exist at the border between reality and fiction, but it was all real, immensely real, which didn't stop me remembering that the visible was still very much a hangover of the invisble.

from Montevideo by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott.

It is important to observe that the order of Blanchot's narratives is not merely chronological. Each succeeding work is concerned exclusively with a moment lying outside of time, a moment that is essentially impossible, and which recurs like an obsession throughout all of Blanchot's work: the moment following my death, when I am dead yet able somehow to look back on my final moment, and which Blanchot sums up in the words, "we have forgotten to die." from Space and Beyond, an essay on L'attente l'oubli (Awaiting Oblivion) by Michael Holland

I envision a style: a style that would be beautiful, that someone will invent some day, ten years or ten centuries from now, one that would be rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped with a flame: a style that would pierce your idea like a dagger, and on which your thought would sail easily ahead over a smooth surface, like a skiff before a good tail wind. Prose was born yesterday: you have to keep that in mind. Verse is the form par excellence of ancient literatures. All possible prosodic variations have been discovered; but that is far from being the case with prose. Flaubert to Louise Colet, quoted by Michael Fried in Flaubert's "Gueuloir".

A writer is lost as soon as his audience exists. The genius escapes this by existing before his time, which is to say, before his audience can exist, and by existing, kill him. An artist that is understood is subhuman.

EM Cioran, 30 December 1964

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The reading in Freiburg was an exceptional success: 1,200 people who listened to me with bated breath for an hour, then, having applauded me for a long time, they listened to me again for another fifteen minutes. Heidegger had come up to me—The day after my reading I was, with M. Neumann, Elmar's friend, in Heidegger's hut in the Black Forest. Then there was, in the car, a grave dialogue, with clear words from me. M. Neumann, who was the witness of it, told me afterward that, for him, this conversation had something epoch-making about it. Paul Celan, 2 August 1967, in Letters to Gisèle.

There are people who will go on to claim that the audience is silencing or even "censoring" Klaus by shouting him down, but I think that Klaus is not speaking so much as parroting the senescent propaganda of Staatsräson, the version of history that floats undisturbed through the technocratic ventilation systems, a malevolent spirit seeking new host bodies.

from How Gaza Broke the Art World, by David Velasco

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