void

Salvador Dalí - Les Chants de Maldoror, 1934

Extract from Maurice Blanchot – The Experience of Lautréamont:

Reading Maldoror is a vertigo. This vertigo seems to be the effect of an acceleration of movement that, just like the encircling of fire, at the centre of which we find ourselves, provides the impression of a flamboyant void or of an inert and somber plenitude. Sometimes we see ourselves at the heart of an exceptionally active, sarcastic consciousness that it is hardly possible to fault. Sometimes this omnipresent agility, this whirlwind of lightning bolts, this storm overloaded with meaning, no longer offers the idea of a spirit in any way, but of a lumbering, blind instinct, of a dense thing, of this tenacious heaviness, proper to the body that undoes itself and to substances seized by death. These two impressions are superimposed; they necessarily go together. They give the reader a drunkenness that races to its fall and an inertia docile at his stagnation. In these conditions, how could he have the desire, and the means, to regain enough equilibrium to discern where he is falling? He proceeds and he sinks. Therein is his commentary.