“A book, even a fragmentary one, has a center which attracts it. This center is not fixed, but is displaced by the pressure of the book and circumstances of its composition. Yet it is also a fixed center which, if it is genuine, displaces itself, while remaining the same and becoming always more central, more hidden, more uncertain and more imperious. He who writes the book writes it out of desire for this center and out of ignorance. The feeling of having touched it can very well be only the illusion of having reached it.”
-Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature
In Reading the Remove of Literature (Information as Material, 2006), Nick Thurston has erased the text of the English translation of Maurice Blanchot’s seminal work, L’espace littéraire (The Space of Literature), while at the same time preserving his own marginalia, resetting them in almost the exact typeface of Blanchot’s text.
In Partially Removing the Remove of Literature, Thurston’s marginalia have been partially erased. Only the non-verbal, diagrammatic traces – the underlinings and arrows, circles and asterisks – remain, printed one atop another, collapsing each chapter into the space of a single page. The chapters’ running titles, reprinted at the top of each page, offer the sole clue as to what Blanchot once wrote, and Thurston once read and annotated.
Kristen Mueller
Partially Removing the Remove of Literature
Text insert by Annette Gilbert
& So Berlin, February 2014
28 pages, inkjet, hand-bound, 21 x 15,5 cm
Numbered edition of 200