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Marie-Chantal Killeen. Essai sur l’indicible: Jabès, Blanchot, Duras. Siant-Denis: P. U. de Vincennes, 2004 [Book review]
journal contribution
posted on 2017-05-21, 03:51 authored by Paul SheehanReviewing L’Innomable in 1953, Maurice Blanchot conjectured: What is the void that becomes speech in the open intimacy of the one who dis-appears into it? The Unnamable, he suggests, is a being without being who can neither live nor die, cannot cease or begin, the empty place in which the listlessness of an empty speech speaks, one that with great diffi-culty regains a porous and agonizing I (BC 210, 213). The paradox of the title deepens still further given that, roughly since Heidegger, the unnam-able and its surrogates the unspeakable, the unthinkable, the inexpressi-ble, and, by extension, the abject, the irremediable, the impossible have become potent philosophical themes.