100th Anniversary of Blanchot's Birth

This Space has a translation of Jean-Luc Nancy’s tribute to Maurice Blanchot on the 100th anniversary of his birth:

The Infinite Conversation: This title – one of the most striking of all his works – we could take as an emblem of Maurice Blanchot’s thinking. Not so much thinking, really, as a stance or gesture: a confidence. Above all, Blanchot has confidence in the possibility of the conversation. What is undertaken in the conversation (with another, with oneself, with the very pursuit of conversation) is the ever-renewed relationship of speech to the infinity of meaning that shapes its truth.

Writing (literature) names this relationship. It does not transcribe a testimony, it does not invent a fiction, it does not deliver a message: it traces the infinite journey of meaning as it absents itself. This absenting is not negative; it shapes the chance and challenge of meaning itself. “To write” means continuously to approach the limit of speech, the limit that speech alone designates, whose designation makes us (speakers) unlimited.