centrality. A favorite mise-en-scène in a Blanchot story is the
dire meditation in an empty room, undertaken by a faceless
character left alone with the pain of memories. Blanchot’s
stripped-down writings evoke an “essential nothing,” “the blind
origin of the work in its darkness” ( 8 ). “Only pure absence,”Der-
rida judges from the case of Blanchot, “can inspire”( 8 ).
Derrida goes on in “Force and Signification” to enlist two
more writers in his campaign against structuralism. He cites
the “book about nothing” dreamt of by Flaubert: a text of total
purity in which radical emptiness would define the place of lit-
erature. And Derrida adds for good measure Artaud’s stark
confession. Artaud remarked, “I made my debut in literature
by writing books in order to say I could write nothing at all”
( 8 ). The push toward expression is anguished, terrifying, be-
cause it begins and ends in nothing.
For Artaud himself, artistic expression finished in mad-
ness and utter isolation. Derrida devotes an entire essay in
Writing and Differenceto the primitive manner of Artaud,
who, he writes, believed in “the metaphysics of flesh which de-
termines Being as life” ( 179 ). Artaud exhibited his howling
body to an audience ready to savor his avant-garde theatrics,
his fits of onstage frenzy. But Derrida is a creature of the study,
not the theatre; and finally, Artaud is of limited use for him.
(In 1998 , however, Derrida, about to give a talk on Artaud’s
drawings at a conference held at Irvine and encountering a
malfunctioning microphone, decided to shriek his lecture to a
bewildered audience of six hundred people: his homage to
Artaud.)
In “Force and Signification,” Derrida depends on Blan-
chot, Flaubert, and Artaud for his image of writing as an apoc-
alyptic and challenging endeavor. He explains that the provo-
cation of such writing, unlike the word of the creator God in
118 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology