Foucault | Blanchot Quotes

“When language arrives at its own edge, what it finds is not a positivity that contradicts it, but the void that will efface it. Into that void it must go, consenting to come undone in the rumbling, in the immediate negation of what it says, in a silence that is not the intimacy of a secret but a pure outside where words endlessly unravel.”
― Michel Foucault, Foucault | Blanchot: Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside, and Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him

“Boundless misfortune, the resounding gift of the gods, marks the point where language begins; but the limit of death opens before language, or rather within language, an infinite space. Before the imminence of death, language rushes forth, but it also starts again, tells of itself, discovers the story of the story and the possibility that this interpenetration might never end. Headed toward death, language turns back upon itself; it encounters something like a mirror; and to stop this death which would stop it, it possesses but a single power-that of giving birth to its own image in a play of mirrors that has no limits. From the depths of the mirror where it sets out to arrive anew at the point where it started (at death), but so as finally to escape death, another language can be heard - the image of actual language, but as a minuscule, interior, and virtual model”
― Michel Foucault, Foucault | Blanchot: Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside, and Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him