Maurice Blanchot wrote somewhere that Nietzsche doesn’t content himself with calling up the Stygian night.

The desire for this thing called a Stygian night distracts me from my reading. Now that the thing has been named, I want the Stygian night so I can know what Niestzsche is forsaking.

**Max Ernst. *The Marriage of Heaven and Earth* (1962)**

Why do optical, light-related metaphors predominate when we speak of existence?

"Why this imperialism of light?" Maurice Blanchot asks as he prepares to ignore mythology, science, physics, and human history to focus on the phenomenology of light.

"Light illuminates – this means that light hides itself: this is its malicious trait."

Light discloses things and presents itself as an immediate presence "without disclosing what makes it manifest," in Blanchot’s words.

On a side note—-which may or may not be related, Blanchot does not write particularly well about Bataille. He doesn’t ‘shed light’, so to speak, on Bataille’s thinking. One senses this is because he is writing for him rather than to him; he admires him, they are friends – and it is odd how this turns intimacy into a sort of game that fumbles around not quite getting to a point. Never sharpening the words enough to point anywhere.