Marie-Chantal Killeen. Essai sur l’indicible: Jabès, Blanchot, Duras. Siant-Denis: P. U. de Vincennes, 2004 [Book review]

Reviewing L’Innomable in 1953, Maurice Blanchot conjectured: “What is the void that becomes speech in the open intimacy of the one who dis-appears into it?” The Unnamable, he suggests, is “a being without being who can neither live nor die, cannot cease or begin, the empty place in which the listlessness of an empty speech speaks, one that with great diffi-culty regains a porous and agonizing I” (BC 210, 213). The paradox of the title deepens still further given that, roughly since Heidegger, the unnam-able and its surrogates – the unspeakable, the unthinkable, the inexpressi-ble, and, by extension, the abject, the irremediable, the impossible – have become potent philosophical themes.