A Voice from Elsewhere

Reflections on the enigma and secret of "literature."

A Voice from Elsewhere represents one of Maurice Blanchot's most important reflections on the enigma and secret of "literature." The essays here bear down on the necessity and impossibility of witnessing what literature transmits, and-like Beckett and Kafka-on what one might call the "default" of language, the tenuous border that binds writing and silence to each other. In addition to considerations of René Char, Paul Celan, and Michel Foucault, Blanchot offers a sustained encounter with the poems of Louis-René des Forêts and, throughout, a unique and important concentration on music-on the lyre and the lyric, meter and measure-which poetry in particular brings before us.