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| Blanchot (left) with his friend, Levinas (right) |
Maurice Blanchot, L'Amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 328:
Friendship, this relationship without dependency, without scenes, yet full of life's simplicity, implies an acknowledgement of mutual strangeness that does not allow us to speak of our friends but only to them, not turn them into subjects of conversation (or articles) but the movement of understanding by which, when speaking to us, even in situation of greatest familiarity, they reserve an infinite distance, which is the fundamental separation by which that which separates becomes relation.
