" A child is being killed." This silent passive, this dead eternity to which a temporal form of life must be given in order that we might separate ourselves from it by a murder--this companion, but of no one, whom we seek to particularise as an absence, that we might live upon his banishment, desire with the desire he has not, and speak through and against the world he does not utter--nothing (neither knowledge nor un-knowledge) can designate him, even if the simplest of sentences seems, in four or five words, to divulge him (a child is being killed.) "

― Maurice Blanchot , The Writing of the Disaster