We think not the distant, but the close that measures it

We believe that we think the strange and the foreign, but in reality we never think anything but the familiar; we think not the distant, but the close that measures it. And so again, when we speak of impossibility, it is possibility alone that, providing it with a reference, already sarcastically brings impossibility under its rule.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) p. 44

All speech is violence

All speech is violence, a violence all the more formidable for being secret and the secret center of violence; a violence that is already exerted upon what the word names and that it can name only by withdrawing presence from it – a sign, as we have seen, that death speaks (the death that is power) when I speak. At the same time, we well know that when we are having words we are not fighting. Language is the undertaking through which violence agrees not to be open, but secret, agrees to forgo spending itself in a brutal action in order to reserve itself for a more powerful mastery, henceforth no longer affirming itself, but nonetheless at the heart of all affirmation.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) p. 42

True hope is an affirmation of the improbable and a wait for what is

Hope is to be reinvented. Would this mean that what this hope aims at is to be obtained through invention, a beautiful utopian future, or through the splendor of the imaginary that certain romantics are said to have had as their horizon? Not at all. The hope that passes by way of the ideal – the lofty heavens of the idea, the beauty of names, the abstract salvation of the concept – is a weak hope. Hope is true hope insofar as it aspires to give us, in the future of a promise, what is. What is is presence. But hope is only hope. There is hope when, far from any present grasp, far from any immediate possession, it relates to what is always yet to come, and perhaps will never come; hope says the hoped-for coming of what exists as yet only in hope. The more distant or difficult the object of hope is, the more profound and close to its destiny as hope is the hope that affirms it: I hope little when what I hope for is almost at hand. Hope bespeaks the possibility of what escapes the realm of the possible; at the limit, it is relation recaptured where relation is lost. Hope is most profound when it withdraws from and deprives itself of all manifest hope. But at the same time we must not hope, as in a dream, for a chimerical fiction. It is against this that the new hope appoints itself. Hoping not for the probable, which cannot be the measure of what there is to be hoped for, and hoping not for the fiction of the unreal, true hope – the unhoped for of all hope – is an affirmation of the improbable and a wait for what is.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) pp. 40-41

Speaking is not seeing

– Words are suspended; this suspension is a very delicate oscillation, a trembling that never leaves them still.
– And yet, they are also immobile.
– Yes, of an immobility that moves more than anything moving. Disorientation is at work in speech through a passion for wandering that has no bounds. Thus it happens that, in speaking, we depart from all direction and all path, as though we had crossed the line.
– But speech has its own way, it provides a path. We are not led astray in it, or at most only in relation to the regularly traveled routes.
– Even more than that perhaps: it is as though we were turned away from the visible, without being turned back round toward the invisible. I don't know whether what I am saying here says anything. But nevertheless it is simple. Speaking is not seeing. Speaking frees thought from the optical imperative that in the Western tradition, for thousands of years, has subjugated our approach to things, and induced us to think under the guaranty of light or under the threat of its absence. I'll let you count all the words through which it is suggested that, to speak truly, one must think according to the measure of the eye.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) p. 27

Language lends itself to the movement of stealing and turning away

Speech is this turning. Speech is the place of dispersion, disarranging and disarranging itself, dispersing and dispersing itself beyond all measure. For the speech that sets into flight, preserves in this very flight the movement of stealing away that is not content with desperate or even panic flight, and thus retains the power of stealing away from it.
[...]
Naturally, when this speech becomes petrified in a watchword, "flight" simply ends and everything returns to order. But flight can also, even while maintaining itself as an infinite power of dispersal, recapture in itself this more essential movement of stealing and turning away that originates in speech as detour. This detour is equally irreducible to affirmation and to negation, to question and to response; it precedes all these modes, speaking before them and as though in turning away from all speech. Even if it tends to determine itself as a power to say no, particularly in the movements that manifest themselves in revolt, this no that challenges all constituted power also challenges the power to say no, designating it as what is not founded in a power, as irreducible to any power and, by virtue of this, unfounded. Language lends itself to the movement of stealing and turning away – it watches over it, preserves it, loses itself there and confirms itself there. In this we sense why the essential speech of detour, the "poetry" in the turn of writing, is also a speech wherein time turns, saying time as a turning, the turning that sometimes turns in a visible manner into revolution.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) p. 23

Contradiction does not represent a decisive separation

Two opposites, beacuse they are simply opposed, are still too close to one another – contradiction does not represent a decisive separation: two enemies are already bound in a relation of unity, while the difference between the "unknown" and the familiar is infinite. Therefore, in the dialectical form, the moment of synthesis and reconciliation always ends by predominating.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) p. 8