SCIENTIST: Then we can’t really describe what we have named.

TEACHER: Any description would reify it.

SCHOLAR: Nevertheless it lets itself be named, and being named it can be thought about…

TEACHER: …only if thinking is no longer re-presenting.

SCIENTIST: But then what else should it be?

TEACHER: Perhaps we now are close to being released into the nature of thinking…

SCHOLAR: …through waiting for its nature.

TEACHER: Waiting, all right; but never awaiting, for awaiting already links itself with re-presenting and what is re-presented.

SCHOLAR: Waiting, however, lets go of that; or rather I should say that waiting lets re-presenting entirely alone. It really has no object.

SCIENTIST: Yet if we wait we always wait for something.

SCHOLAR: Certainly, but as soon as we re-present to ourselves and fix upon that for which we wait, we really wait no longer.

TEACHER: In waiting we leave open what we are waiting for.

SCHOLAR: Why?

TEACHER: Because waiting releases itself into openness…

SCHOLAR: …into the expanse of distance…

TEACHER: …in whose nearness it finds the abiding in which it remains.

(Extract from Blanchot’s L’attente l’oubli (1963) in The Infinite Conversation)