of Resonance

While you're not here, please do check out my new Tumblr blog of Resonance.

It was begun last week as a repository for quotations that demand release while leaving this space uncluttered but for reviews and other, longer posts. The title, by the way, completes what may have been this blog's fuller title taken from a passage in "What is the Purpose of Criticism?", Blanchot's preface to his book Lautréamont and Sade which, six and a half years ago, seemed ideal for my first solo blog.

Critical discourse is this space of resonance within which the unspoken, indefinite reality of the work is momentarily transformed and circumscribed into words. And as such, due to the fact that it claims modestly and obstinately to be nothing, criticism ceases being distinguished from the creative discourse of which it would be the necessary actualization or, metaphorically speaking, the epiphany.

As a blog goes on, unable to rest in the spurious unity of a book and always in danger of collapsing for want of a conclusion, I want to look forward with the help of perhaps the one quotation on the new blog of which I feel a commentary is demanded yet in its absence may well establish This Space's renewed purpose in this nether time: to distinguish between fiction of rhetorical interest or power and novels which, as we read, "enact a desperate movement in the inner reaches of one's being".