“Let us recall that, in modern literature, the preoccupation with a profoundly continuous speech is what first gave rise—with Lautréamont, with Proust, then with surrealism, then with Joyce—to works that were manifestly scandalous.  An excess of continuity unsettles the reader, and unsettles the reader’s habits of regular comprehension… the mind, with its measured and methodical gait, cannot stand up to the immediate intrusion of the totality of the real (a real that is precisely the impossible continuity of the “real” and the “imaginary”).  Yes, as always, the surrealist ambition helps us a good deal in understanding what is at stake in this play.  Automatic writing would assure the immediate communication of what is.  It not only assures it—in its substantial continuity, automatic writing is the aboslute continuity of wha tis.  It is this imaginarily; a marvvelous search for immediation. … But one discerns as well the postulate that would appear to correspond tos uch an aspiring to absolute continuity: that reality itself—the ground of thigs, the “what is” in its essential depth—should be absolutely continuous.  A postulate as ancient as thought.

This is the great Parmenidean sphere of Being, it is Einstein’s model of the universe.  From which it would follow that it is only the modalities of our knowing, the structure of our senses, of our instruments and the forms of our mathematical and non-mathematical languages, that force us to tear or to cut up this beautiful seamless tunic.  But what does this mean?  That one must see in discontinuity a sign of the adversity of understanding and analytic comprehension, and, more generally, an imperfection in the human structure, a mark of our finitude?  Or should we dare an entirely different and very troubling conclusion that might be formulated in this way: why should not man, supposing that the discontinuous is proper to him and is his work, reveal that the ground of things—to which he must surely in some way belong—has as much to do with the demand of discontinuity as it does with that of unity?  A troubling and an obscure conclusion that we will immediately try to make more precise bya dding the following.  When we speak of man as a non-unitary possibility, this does not mean that there would remain in him some brute existence, some obscure nature irreducible to unity and to the labor of dialectics: this is out of the question here.  It means that, through man, that is, not through him but through the knowledge he bears, and first of all through the exigency of speech that is in advance always already written, it may be that an entirely different relation announces itself—a relation that challenges the notion of being as continuity or as a unity or gathering of beings; a relation what would except itself from the problematic of being and would pose  a question that is not one of being.  Thus, in this questioning, we would leave dialectics, but also ontology.”

- from The Infinite Conversation, section 1.1, by Maurice Blanchot, tr. Susan Hanson