ABSTRACT
Blanchot is, after all, known primarily for his engagement with literature and not music and, crucially, this engagement draws heavily on visual metaphor. For instance, Blanchot regularly likens the entry into the region of literature to a plunge into subterranean darkness where the reader will gaze upon the dead, like Orpheus. The nature of this relationship, and the capacity of music to diverge from culture and history, is precisely what Vivian Liska circles in “From Dialectics to the Diabolical.” Leslie Anne Boldt considers the parallelism between Blanchot’s work and twentieth-century composition and sonic experimentations. In her article “The Call of the Disaster at the Borderland of Silence,” she firstly explores what she describes as the crisis of ocularcentrism and the role sound plays across Blanchot’s works. After establishing the role of sound at the point of disaster, she then considers how various musical works similarly approach a limit where the listener encounters a barely distinguishable difference between silence and sound.
