Category Archives: Writing

One of these days I’m really gonna blow up, I tell X. One of these days when I come across a psychopath, when I come across one of those scumbags who can’t tell right from wrong, I’m gonna do something bad, really bad. You realise what you’re doing, writing these things down, says X. You think you’re anonymous? I don’t care, I say. Sure you don’t, he says, you don’t know very much. And you don’t understand what you’ve done to me, I say, you don’t know and you don’t seem to care, you’re one of them. That’s nice, he says. No it’s not, I say.

Do you have any empathy? I ask X. Do you? Why do you always side with them over me? Why? Listen to yourself, X says. I am, I say. Then you should know, he says.

The unknown is neutral, a neuter. The unknown is neither object nor subject. This means that to think the unknown is in no way to propose it as ‘the not yet known’, the object of a knowledge still to come, any more than it would be to go beyond it as ‘the absolutely unknowable’, a subject of pure transcendence, refusing itself to all manner of knowledge and expression. On the contrary, let us (perhaps arbitrarily) propose that in research – where poetry and thought affirm themselves in a space that is proper to them, separate, inseparable – the unknown is at stake; on condition, however, that it be explicitly stated that this research relates to the unknown as unknown. A phrase all the same disconcerting, since it proposes to ‘relate’ the unknown inasmuch as it is unknown. In other words, we are supposing a relation in which the unknown world would be affirmed, made manifest, even exhibited: disclosed – and under what aspect? – precisely in that which keeps it unknown. In this relation, then, the unknown would be disclosed in that which leaves it under cover. Is this a contradiction? In effect.

– Blanchot, ‘René Char and the Thought of the Neutral’ (in The Infinite Conversation, tr. S. Hanson)

Long periods of unthinking impotence. Or of thinking that is only the longing to think. Too busy feeling dispersed by everything and nothing to be of any use, especially to yourself. In such moods concentration is a dream, a cell deep under ground.

– Frenet