Contrary to what phenomenology — which is always phenomenology of perception — has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.
“Every writer, every artist is acquainted with the moment at which he is cast out and apparently excluded by the work in progress. The work holds him off, the circle in which he no longer has access to himself has closed, yet he is enclosed therein because the work, unfinished, will not let him go. Strength does not fail him; this is not a moment of sterility or fatigue, unless, as may well be the case, fatigue itself is simply the form this exclusion takes. This ordeal is awesome. What the author sees is a cold immobility from which he cannot turn away, but near which he cannot linger. It is like an enclave, a preserve within space, airless and without light, where a part of himself, and, more than that, his truth, his solitary truth, suffocates in an incomprehensible separation.”
Maurice Blanchot | The Space of Literature