ABSTRACT
Literature begins, Blanchot says, when it becomes a question, when the language of a work becomes literature in a question about language itself.1 This question concerns the source of literature’s ambiguity: its ‘origin’ in an irreducible ‘double meaning’ that is not a movement between irreconcilable meanings, but between meaning and a ‘meaning of meaning’ that is itself irreducibly ambiguous, material and ideal, neither material nor ideal: a ‘point of instability’, a’power of metamorphosis’, an ‘imminence of change’ (pp. 61-2/330-1) that gives itself in language beyond either the meaning language takes on, or its ‘reality’.
