Maurice Blanchot

Introduction

However, the work - the work of art, the literary work - is neither finished nor unfinished: it is. What it says is exclusively this: that it is -- and nothing more. Beyond that it is nothing. Whoever wants to make it express more finds nothing, finds that it expresses nothing. He whose life depends upon the work, either because he is a writer or because he is a reader, belongs to the solitude of that which expresses nothing except the word being: the word which language shelters by hiding it, or causes to appear when language itself disappears into the silent void of the work. - from The Space of Literature

Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003), novelist and literary critic, was one of the first intellectuals in France to be interested in questions of language and meaning, and he was an important influence on French postmodernist thought. For Blanchot, "literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question" (Literature and the Right to Death).