When I speak of ‘the end of the book’, or better ‘the absence of the book’, I do not mean to allude to developments in the audiovisual means of communication with which so many experts are concerned [dissemination as the end of the book]. If one ceased publishing books in favour of communication by voice, image, or machine, this would in no way change the reality of what is called the ‘book’; on the contrary, language, like speech, would thereby affirm all the more its predominance and its certitude of a possible truth. In other words, the Book always indicates an order that submits to unity, a system of notions in which are affirmed the primacy of speech over writing, of thought over language, and the promise of a communication that would one day be immediate and transparent.
Now it may be that writing requires the abandonment of all these principles, that is to say, the end and also the coming to completion of everything that guarantees our culture – not so that we might in idyllic fashion turn back, but rather so we might go beyond, that is, to the limit, in order to attempt to break the circle, the circle of circles: the totality of the concepts that founds history, that develops in history, and whose development history is [on the completion, exhaustion of these concepts, see Nancy here] . Writing, in this sense – in this direction in which it is not possible to maintain oneself alone, or even in the name of all without the tentative advances, the lapses, the turns and detours whose trace the texts here brought together bear (and their interest, I believe, lies in this) – supposes a radical change of epoch: interruption, death itself – or, to speak hyperbolically, ‘the end of history’. Writing in this way passes through the advent of communism, recognised as the ultimate affirmation – communism being still always beyond communism. Writing thus becomes a terrible responsibility. Invisibly, writing is called upon to undo the discourse in which, however unhappy we believe ourselves to be, we who have it at our disposal remain comfortably installed. From this point of view writing is the greatest violence, for it transgresses the law, every law, and also its own. (the infinite conversation, note)