Nobody home

My entire life seems to have disappeared in a movement of seeking that is perhaps the experience of writing, the responsibility for which I try to bear, poorly but absolutely.

Maurice Blanchot, letter to Elio Vittorini, 1963.

The 'scandal' and the importance of the [Berlin] wall is that, in the concrete oppression that it embodies, it is essentially abstract and that it thus reminds us – we who forget this constantly – that abstraction is not simply a faulty mode of thought or an apparently impoverished form of language but rather our world, the one we live and think in on a daily basis.

"Berlin", 1964.

Both in Political Writings (1953-1993).