ABSTRACT
Blanchot figures and complicates this play in numerous ways – first by displacing it into vision and image, and then, by way of the image, into a generalized call transmitted no less in the banality of public speech than in the literary voice that would somehow emerge from it. The purpose of the epigraph above is to indicate from the outset this displacement from image to sound, or to a silence that strangely sounds. In this sentence, silence is something attributed to a gaze, a look, it is what makes of a look the site of something both ungraspable and ineluctable, but it is thereby also, oddly, something to be heard: he who hears the silence of a gaze becomes other. This passage is traversed by the types of sonic images through which Blanchot attempts to figure the strange travail of literary space.
