ABSTRACT
To misdirect the writing-act toward the pale limit of its own impossibility, toward its veiled outside and culmination in silence: such is the unwavering yet surreptitious goal of Blanchot’s critical interlocking with textuality, one that dares to build itself upon the enigmatic position that “there is no silence if not written: broken reserve, a deep cut in the possibility of any cut at all.” 2 Part I, then, will attempt to unravel such a statement toward its farthest points, casting itself across a series of conceptual planes and thereby analyzing the poetics of the unspoken as creation, experience, the encounter with impossibility, the duality of immediacy and abstraction, the paradox of presence and absence, the edge of language, the disaster, the trace, and the open-endedness of the abyss. For it is here, within this treading through silent depths, that the poetic imagination perhaps might come to confer itself, if even for the impermanence of an instant, to another infi nite unknown.
