Every artist is linked to a mistake with which he has a particular intimate relation. There is the mistake of Homer, of Shakespeare β which is perhaps, for both, the fact of not existing. Every art draws its origin from an exceptional fault, every work is the implementation of this original fault, from which come to us a new light and a risky conception of plenitude.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that mistakes are integral to the artistic process and can lead to profound creativity.
Maurice Blanchot emphasizes the idea that every artist has a deep connection to their mistakes, which can often serve as the source of their creative work. He argues that art emerges from these 'original faults,' suggesting that rather than seeing mistakes as setbacks, they should be recognized as essential components that contribute to the development of new ideas and artistic expressions. This perspective invites a re-evaluation of failure and imperfection as vital to the richness of artistic creation.
In practice
An artist could use this quote to express how their creative process involves learning from past errors.
I lean over you, your equal, offering you a mirror for your perfect nothingness, for your shadows which are neither light nor absence of light, for this void which contemplates. To all that which you are, and, for our language, are not, I add a consciousness. I make you experience your supreme identity as a relationship, I name you and define you. You become a delicious passivity.
To see was terrifying, and to stop seeing tore me apart from my forehead to my throat.
If nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little.
A writer who writes, ''I am alone''... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.
People tell me they open my e-mails first, because they aren't demands and you don't need to reply. They're simply for pleasure.
In other words, the unique value of the "authentic" work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
I feel a lot of pressure when I'm writing because I know, you know, if they looked at a synopsis of the book, what they read could only confirm all the stereotypes that they have about us and about people like us.
I nearly always write β just as I nearly always breathe.
I think there's a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.
The music had to be rooted, and yet had to branch out,like the wild imagination of a child.
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