Noted: Maurice Blanchot

From the essay "Idle Speech", found in Friendship (translation Elizabeth Rottenberg):

In the end, once the work is finished, the one who has finished it finds himself expelled from it, thrown outside it, and thereafter incapable of finding access to it--no longer having, moreover, any desire to accede to it. It is only during the task of realization, when the power of reading is still completely internal to the work in progress, that the author--who still does not exist--can split himself off from himself into a reader yet to come, and can seek to confirm, through the indirect means of this hidden witness, what the movement of the words would be if grasped by another, who would still only be himself--that is, neither one nor the other, but only the truth of the splitting.