ABSTRACT
In The Space of Literature Blanchot makes much of the distinctions between the book and the work and between writing and reading, sometimes seeming to map the latter distinction on to the former. The writer writes a book, while the reader reads the work; a book is never the work and the writer never a reader. But although it is in its being read that the book can be said to become a work, a correct formulation of that becoming should already have introduced the work. ‘Reading simply “makes” the book, the work, become a work.’1 That the making here is not a matter of production and that reading cannot accordingly be seen as a productive activity is borne out by the first occurrence of the word ‘work’ in this sentence suggesting that it is not a straightforward matter of first a book and then a work but rather that despite the writer’s exile from the work the first word does not fall to reading. Reading does not solicit the work. Any solicitation ‘can only come from the work itself’.2 The work, the result of the transition and that for the sake of which there is a transition, already pre-empts any straightforward presentation of the transition. From the first there is the work to the extent that, from the first, the writer belongs to what does not belong to the writer. This indifference to the writer on the part of the work is
taken by the writer to be evidence that the work is as yet unfinished. It is heard as an obligation to continue writing. But it is a call to an impossible task, an attempt to finish the interminable and to give an original personal voice to what is essentially anonymous. The work, Blanchot says, ‘closes in around [the writer’s] absence as the impersonal, anonymous affirmation that it is-and nothing more’. A presentiment of this situation-the not yet of the work as the being of the work rather than the accident of its remaining unfinished-is given to the writer ‘in the impression of a strange worklessness (désœuvrement)’3 In making ‘the book, the work, become a work’ reading affirms the being of the work and so confirms the writer’s predicament. From the first the work unworks itself. Everything here from the writer’s unrealizable project, his always being bound to a forthcoming work, to the reader’s affirmation prior to all interpretation, and the transition itself, is somehow of the work. And amongst all of Blanchot’s most difficult constructions these three words will for a while be the hardest to read.
