“Not to write – what a long way there is to go before arriving at that point, and it is never sure; it is never either a recompense or a punishment. One must just write, in uncertainty and in necessity. Not writing is among the effects of writing; it is something like a sign of passivity, a means of expression at grief’s disposal. How many efforts are required in order not to write – in order that, writing, I not write. In spite of everything. And finally I cease writing, in an ultimate moment of concession – not in despair, but as if this were the unhoped for: the favour the disaster grants. Unsatisfied and unsatisfiable desire, yet by no means negative. There is nothing negative in ‘not to write’; it is intensity without mastery, without sovereignty, the obsessiveness of the utterly passive.” (Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster)
