Friday, September 14, 2007

nothing is more foreign to the tree

"Mallarme does not want "to include, upon the subtle paper... the intrinsic and dense wood of trees." But nothing is more foreign to the tree than the word tree, as it is used nonetheless by everyday language. A word which does not name anything, which does not represent anything, which does not outlast itself in any way, a word which is not even a word and which disappears marvelously altogether and at once in its usage: what could be more worthy of the essential and closer to silence? True, it "serves." Apparently that makes all the difference. We are used to it, it is usual, useful. Through it we are in the world: it refers us back to the life of the world where goals speak and the concern to achieve them once and for all is the rule. Granted, this crude word is a pure nothing, nothingness itself. But it is nothingness in action: that which acts, labours, constructs. It is the pure silence of the negative which culminates in the noisy feverishness of tasks."


Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p39/40.