Maurice Blanchot: Awaiting Oblivion

They both searched for poverty in language. On this point, they agreed. For her there were always too many words and one word too many, as well as overly rich word that spoke excessively. Although she was apparently not very learned, she always seemed to prefer abstract words, which evoked nothing. Wasn't she trying, and he along with her, to create for herself at the heart of this story a shelter so as to protect herself from something that the story also helped attract? There where moments when he believed this and sentences that made him believe this.

Perhaps, by proposing this story to him, she wanted only to destroy in him the will to express himself, to which she sought, at the same time to reduce him.

Translated by John Gregg