his universe articulates only that which is in excess of everything, the essential nothing on whose basis everything can appear and be produced within language; and the voice of Maurice Blanchot reminds us, with the insistence of profundity, that this excess is the very possibility of writing and of literary inspiration in general. Only pure absence—not the absence of this or that, but the absence of everything in which all presence is announced—can inspire, in other words, can work, and then make one work. The pure book naturally turns toward the eastern edge of this absence which, beyond or within the prodigiousness of all wealth, is its first and proper co