Hors de soi
Outside One’s Self

Summary/Abstract: From narratives to their contemporary critical essays, the Blanchotian experience of space appears at first as that of an unlocalizable outside, where any subject capable of experiencing it gets lost. Nevertheless, such an impossibility is spatially endured and thematized through writing, according to a meaning of spatiality that has to be apprehended, no longer as an extent, but as that nocturnal depth which would be the intensive origin of it, far below the a priori scope of possible experience. Therefore we can account for an experience of space as pure intensity, before any subjective appropriation of places and, all the more, any territorial rationalization. Thus, the wandering one finds oneself destined to by such a « space of literature » – an essentially disoriented and literally crazed space – depends on a double movement: on the one hand, the collapse, in a pure outside, of the subject of possible experience, on the other hand, because of that dis-subjectivation itself, the access, out of oneself, to a real experience of space as an intensive power – no longer lived but living, relating life itself to the forces which transform it incessantly and open it to the impossible.

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