Emergence from silence
My copy arrived in February 2003, so Mark Cohen's review of The Book to Come, Charlotte Mandell's translation of Maurice Blanchot's Le Livre ? venir, is fairly late. But as the book itself is a collection of essays published in 1959, time is not of great import. It's an informative and stimulating review, if a little patronising. Words that stood out to me where: insurgent, limn, and syntagmatic. Also, this conversation-stopping summary:
The basic trope governing the Blanchottian ontology of literature in The Book to Come might be called the recursive future and can be described in a simple equation: x = not-yet x. The equation works in both directions, both as a logical and as a temporal description. The being of x is only truly grasped as not yet existing. Any attempt (the result of what Blanchot calls 'impatience') to finish something and achieve it once and for all means that one will fail to do so. Only by realizing that it would be impossible does one do justice to it. This leaves us with the approach to the object and the experience of approaching. The whole linear apparatus of plan, execution, and goal is no longer applicable. The future of a book armed with this consciousness is not in its worldly future - who will read it, the world it will create, the imitators it will spawn, its place in literary history -but the reiteration of its quest to become literature, which is, paradoxically, a search for its original moment of emergence from the silence.
