Home 9 Passage 9 Literary Phenomenology

In a sense, every word kills and becomes the death of the object it tries to represent. That is because the word becomes the substitution of the object. Even the subtlest poem destroys what it names. For this reason, Blanchot says that the perfect book would have no words. The perfect book would be “blank” since it tries to preserve what it can only destroy if it tried to represent it in language. Perhaps this is why writing can be so difficult. The author becomes tacitly aware that language kills whatever it touches. The result is the terrible realization that it is impossible to truly “say” something. The writer desires to capture meaning in words. But the words constantly substitute themselves, destroy the things that they are meant to bring into presence. And yet, at times, in a moment of transcendental bliss, the writer may experience the privilege of the gaze of Orpheus: the gaze that has penetrated the dark and momentarily has glanced to the other side. Writing that searches for the inception of meaning, therefore, can be a profoundly unsettling experience. In the space of the text we witness the birth of meaning and the death of meaning—or perhaps inceptual meaning becomes indistinguishable from the dark.