The space of the unfamiliar and already known

Blanchot opens spaces in language, in reading, and in thinking that are terrifying for being at once of the nature of things we should have known, and utterly unfamiliar. These are spaces that were always just outside what we know, spaces before which we find ourselves utterly insecure...

And because it is where we are most insecure and the matters before us most unfamiliar that thinking is at its most exciting...

In the space of the unfamiliar and already known, we find the memory of a shattered present, an immemorial silence.

(MacKendrick, 2001)