Barrytown/StationHill Publishing

This work takes the form of a conversation, an interview. An obsessive questioning back and forth builds up Blanchot’s narrative, with its sense末shared with Kafka’s famous “doorkeeper” parable末that behind each question lies the spooky possibility of a further, more imposing, more insoluble question. Thematically, powerlessness, inertia, insufficient speech, weariness, falling, faltering末everything tied to a negative or nonexistent value in ordinary discourse末is given value here by its being articulated, moved into writing and thought. What’s insignificant or worthless gathers weight through its troubling persistence, its failure to disappear. The “endless” conversation of Blanchot’s writing turns “fiction” toward an experience of listening末a far cry from the storytelling most fiction (still) takes itself to be.