Our anxiety … does not come only from this emptiness from which, we are told, human reality would emerge only to fall back; it comes from the fear that even this refuge might be taken away from us, that nothingness might not be there, that nothingness might just be more existence. Since we cannot depart from existence, this existence is unfinished, it cannot be lived fully — and our struggle to live is a blind struggle that does not know it is struggling to die and gets mired in a potential that grows ever poorer. Our salvation is in death, but our hope is to live. It follows that we are never saved and also never despairing, and it is in some way our hope that makes us lost, it is hope that is the sign of our despair, so that despair also has a liberating quality and leads us to hope.
Maurice Blanchot, “Reading Kafka”
