Plato: For of death no one has knowledge, and Paul Celan: No one witnesses for the witness. Nevertheless, we always choose a companion: not for ourselves, but for something inside us, away from us, that asks us to be absent from ourselves to cross the line we can never reach. The companion, lost in advance, is henceforth the loss in our place.
from The Last One to Speak by Maurice Blanchot, translated by Joseph Simas.
ln vain do we extend our view into the heavens, and pry into the entrails of the earth, in vain do we consult the writings of learned men, and trace the dark footsteps of antiquity. We need only draw the curtain of words to behold the fairest tree of knowledge, whose fruit is excellent, and within the reach of our hand.
Berkeley, from A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
I repudiate all reviews. To me a reviewer is just as loathsome as a streetwalking assistant barber who comes running with the shaving water which is used for all customers and fumbles about my face with his clammy fingers.
– from Kierkegaard’s journals
Now Granta, or more precisely the Commonwealth Prize ecosystem with which it is associated, appears to have been fooled by AI-generated prose. The issue is not whether detection software can “prove” machine authorship. The issue is aesthetic. Several readers and editors apparently encountered prose displaying classic LLM characteristics—semantic over-resolution at sentence level, lyrical excess without governing pressure, figurative autonomy detached from structural necessity—and accepted these peculiarities as “voice.”
Publishers still love literature to a degree, but increasingly in the manner that politicians once possessed “convictions”: as vestigial accessories attached to managerial careers.
from The Novel Is Dead. This Time It’s for Real by Will Self
It was summer [1964]; Roger and I had come to spend the day in Paris, and, after visiting a museum, had decided to go to the cinema. Suddenly, on the opposite pavement, we saw Blanchot with a woman. We immediately crossed the street to greet them—the cinema was, moreover, located on that very pavement. But when we were almost face to face, he passed by, they passed by, and went into the cinema. We were bewildered. The very next day, a letter from Blanchot arrived:
“You were for me like two friendly figures in a dream, and it was beautiful that I could greet you without quite being able to reach you, and thus without breaking the unattainable nature of the dream—this, for a moment, in the vast, anonymous daylight of the street.”
The film we had seen, together, apart: Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence.
from an interview with Jacqueline Laporte in Cahier Maurice Blanchot from L'Herne.
Though he read scholarship seriously and was eventually appointed a professor at the University of Buenos Aires, he never studied at university himself and was aware of the scholarly failings of some of his own published work. Borges worked better with dreams and poems than with rigorous systems, but that did not keep him from admiring the beauty of systems—or of noticing how they collapse or the madness they engender.
From Jorge Luis Borges’ Medieval Aesthetics of Failure by Irina Dumitrescu
The reason why religions attach themselves to books is because of something about the book, not because of something about the religion. So that the book appears to contain ourselves and yet is not the same as ourselves, so it has a kind of mirror process around it, around what consciousness might be, what being might be. Which at the same time is not spelt out for us; it’s a relationship that we sense without being able to understand completely, and I think in that sense every book contains a kind of mystery, both as you open it because you don’t yet know what it’s going to contain, but also as you read it because the process of understanding is itself in some way a mysterious process of transference. And again the book provides a sort of physical symbol and metaphor for all of that. But it’s more than a question of language as communication, or language as meaning, or truth or what ever it might be. It’s odd to say it’s more than that but I think it is more than that. We sense that the truth might be there, within it, but we also sense that we don’t know quite how we get from us to that truth. And there is always that sense of residue and mystery about that transaction or trajectory.
Dr Brian Cummings on the Chasing Leviathan podcast.