What Is There to Say?

Ann Smock is a professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Double Dealing. She translated Maurice Blanchot's The Space of Literature and The Writing of the Disaster, as well as Sarah Kofman's Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, all published by the University of Nebraska Press.

"With a crisp and moving musical clarity Ann Smock allows these writers—Maurice Blanchot, Herman Melville, Marguerite Duras, Louis-René des Forêts, Jean Paulhan, Samuel Beckett—each of them, all of them, together and separately, to speak among themselves and to us."—Denis Hollier, editor of A New History of French Literature "[Smock] takes us to the edge of the experience that conjoins speech and silence, and makes of that which exceeds speech the truly said. 'Talk which says nothing' is understood here, with rigor and feeling, as 'talk which says the nothing,' the nothing which we share and which shares us, like death, birth, love, desire, anguish and our confidence in speech itself, the silent secret which we never stop exchanging and proclaiming."—Jean-Luc Nancy, author of The Inoperative Community "What Is There to Say? has a great deal to say on the topics of, contemporary problems of, discussions about, and solutions to, writing, speech, and language. She is at once subtle and learned: the book is a delight."—Mary Ann Caws, editor of Manifesto: A Century of Isms "[Smock] writes wisely and wittily, without pedantry and with disarming clarity and simplicity. Her book is a critical gem and a boon to all who are interested in recent French philosophical and aesthetic thought and the extraordinary body of writing it has given rise to."—Ross Chambers, author of Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author "Smock is able to open these texts up like paper flowers, making them more accessible to readers but without imposing one-dimensional readings on them."—Eric Prieto, L'Esprit Createur