There are two reasons why listening to Kevin Hart's interview on the Hermitix podcast, and reading his new collection and The Dark Gaze for the second time, has helped me to recognise what I have forgotten, missed, misconst…
The question opening Maurice Blanchot’s essay The Experience of Proust* has always drawn me back, not to secure a yes or a no, but to keep the question of pure narrative open in its initial uncertainty, perhaps, rather, in its i…
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us , says Kafka in the famous letter. I wondered what this might mean as the 'books of the year' lists began to appear last month. Imagine if each contributor constraine…
Sarah Kofman wrote nearly thirty books between 1970 and her suicide in 1994. The majority have not been translated into English and those that have include titles on Kant, Nietzsche and Freud, which is enough to demonstrate rang…
But where has art led us? To a time before the world, before the beginning. It has cast us out of our power to begin and to end; it has turned us toward the outside where there is no intimacy, no place to rest. It has led us int…
In 1986, the New Musical Express described Maurice Blanchot's The Madness of the Day as a '14-page micro novel' rather than a short story, or even a récit , the form Blanchot had redefined. Thirty years later, the c…
"My compulsion to write does not occlude the uselessness of filling pages with words" writes Fernando Sdrigotti . "I know that what I do is pointless, one more message in a bottle in a moment when everyone else aro…