ABSTRACT
The singularity of literature is an event of reading, an infinitely variable moment of encounter between writer and reader constituted by distance and rupture. This chapter examines this notion of literature as a singular encounter first of all via a brief exploration of Jean-Luc Nancy's thinking around literature, community and singular-plurality, because Nancy precisely attempts to evoke in detail the disrupted relation created by the literary encounter and to begin to suggest what this relation means for a conception of literary form. Nancy's 'literary communism' refers repeatedly to the 'voice' of the literary text, but this is in no way the voice of an identifiable individual, of the author as knowable subject. Assia Djebar's work 'theorizes' literature, then, as communication withdrawn. The essays in the collection Ces voix qui m'assiegent repeatedly express this resistance to the notion of literature as the communication of a message and present the literary voice as necessarily interrupted, suspended, partially opaque.
