Cirrus@Austlit

'Writing is pure loss, for Maurice Blanchot, and the only way to comprehend the loss inherent in the act of writing is to write, and in doing that to seek nothing but “the ceaselessness of the return, effect of disastrous instability” (Blanchot 1980, 89). This is a difficult notion for the young writer, immature in her approach, naïve in her own ideas of success and failure: her own capacity. she does not come at writing merely to write, but to say something. To have said something. To speak. so pre-occupied is she with her private need to speak that she hardly knows what she says, half the time. she writes because: she knows if she doesn’t she’ll die.' 

 (Publication abstract)