“Counter-time”: A Non-dialectical Temporality in the Works of Maurice Blanchot

At first, most evidently writing (écriture) is that in which there is nobody behind the words. In the written text, Blanchot emphasises, there is nobody who can explain the text, who can explain the meaning of a written text.3 We know at least since Plato that, in contrast with the conversation, the author is missing from the written words, just as the exact manifestation of a meaning is missing too.4 So the written text is not the presentation or even the re-presentation of a meaning, and it is not the representation of the intention of an author either. That is why for Blanchot the text is characterised by a fundamental absence: the absent meaning and the absent author.