Faux Pas Quotes

“The feeling of the uselessness of what I am doing is linked to this other feeling that nothing is more serious.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Faux Pas

“Arnoult of course thinks that the silence of Rimbaud is the half-glimpsed, half-borne curse of the man who surpassed the allowed limits and who loses language at the very moment that he has something to reveal. That is, in fact, all that one can ever say about the abdication of a poet. The more he grasps the essence of what he is, the more he is threatened with losing it. He obeys night; he wants to be night himself, and at the same time he continues to assert, through language, his faithfulness to day. This compromise has value only through the union of tendencies that make it impossible. Catastrophe must keep watch for perfection, the solidity of the poetic work to have meaning. If the poet expresses himself in the language of clear communication, it is because he is engaged in the obscurity that at every instant risks snatching away from him the communication of all things, and if he is master of the powers that make him the richest man, it is because he touches a tragic point of destitution where he may succumb to madness. These remarks must be recalled in any poetic situation, but one must realize that by themselves they explain nothing. They presuppose what they manifest, and by a generalized mythology they describe day, night, whatever poetic experience encounters only as the most particular ordeal, the one least suited to comparisons and exchanges. It will always be absurd and, in any case, sterile to try to understand the madness of Nietzsche through the madness of Hölderlin, the madness of Hölderlin through the suicide of Nerval, the suicide of Nerval through the silence of Rimbaud. That there was a kind of common necessity in these events that anecdotal history wants to use to explain them from without, that Nietzsche's madness is born from the heart of his reason and as its ultimate demand, that Nerval's death is the effect of his existence lived poetically, that Rimbaud's speech asks to be heard, the last echo of the unspeakable, beneath the silence that sacrifices it -- these manifestations of night leave us nothing but a quick flash of light after which we remain in the illusion of real knowledge, far from a truly enlightened awareness.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Faux Pas