Abstract

There is a brief passage that stands as preface to Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature, in which the author claims: “a book, even a fragmentary one, has a centre which attracts it. This centre is not fixed, but is displaced by the pressure of the book and circumstances of its composition. Yet it is also a fixed centre which, if it is genuine, displaces itself, while remaining the same and becoming always more central, more hidden, more uncertain, more imperious” . I will argue that this elusive, ever displaced centre can be considered a space not only in a conceptual sense, but in a properly architectural sense. This paper will contend that Blanchot’s conceptual work on the space of literature lingers in an uncomfortable proximity to that space we conventionally name “architecture.” What I will examine below is what Blanchot himself has identified as a “spatial movement that is in relation with the becoming of writing” , such that we forge a passage to and fro between at least two different registers of space