A
word names a thing, but it not that thing; rather, it is the absence of the
thing. As Mallarmé famously
writes about the flower.
I say: a flower! and outside the oblivion to which my voice relegates any shape, insofar as it is something other than the calyx, there arises musically, as the very idea and delicate, the one absent from every bouquet.
So words have a way of maintaining the
absence of something they name without at the same time as negating them. When
Blanchot says that in literature the word 'cat' does not mean cat, he does not mean that it is something
else, rather it isn't anything at all. What it denotes is ambiguous and
indistinct, and this is what happens to language generally in literature. When
I say that what it denotes is ambiguous, I do not mean that it has a ambiguous
denotation, which can, in a second moment, be made clear and distinct, but that
ambiguity ruins its denotation. The consequence of this is devastating. It would mean that every interpretation is false. There can be no truth of literature. As soon as we say literature means this (and for 'this' substitute any interpretation that stands outside of the text, like, for example, Kafka's The Trial is about modern alienation), then we have betrayed its unsettling absence. I imagine literature as a rat eating away at the heart of sense.
