Blanchot on Dreams and Writing

The Experience of Writing, “Impossibility,” and the Dream

Blanchot reaches for an experience in his reflections upon writing. In his “critical” works—his reflections upon the writing of others—Blanchot will speak of L’expérience de Mallarmé or L’expérience d’Igitur, L’expérience de Proust and L’expérience de Lautréamont.1 This “experience” is neither the extra-textual experience of a subject placed at the origin of writing nor the experience of a written object conceived as the product of the work of such a subject. Blanchot’s “experience”—l’expérience de Blanchot—is the experience of writing understood, itself, as experience. Consequently, Blanchot’s reflections on the “experiences” of other writers entangle themselves thoroughly in the reflexive webbing of the experience of the experience of writing.2