Rupture designates the rupture with established presences. It serves notice on co-operation with firm realities whether they be positive (plainly legitimating) or negative (plainly negating). The rupture is already rupture with this positive-negative model, rupture with plain affirmation as well as with plain negation in order finally to break even with the dialectical reconciliation which Hegelianism is (and we know just how little Hegel was an Hegelian). The rupture breaks the all too plain thinking of reconciliation. It overstrains consensual reason. The rupture is an “interruption which suspends our relationship to the laws and established values” (Maurice Blanchot). It suspends valid realities in favour of opening up to something radically new. It implies the willingness to receive the unknown as such. Without being unreceptive for the danger of such a blind reception of the indeterminate, Blanchot does not hesitate to appraise the ramifications of such a gesture which is unprotectedness itself. The interruption of the well-known and established works for a future which is still nameless, without a face. That is the meaning of interruption: to be the opening to the space of an indeterminacy which, instead of enclosing the subject in its phantasms or illusory Utopias, is a transcendence of the subject to the ontological inconsistency of its realities. That is the critical function of the rupture, this opening to inconsistency which includes a kind of traversal of phantasms, the epoché of valid meaning. The rupture breaks with the dominating models of meaning by making the subject familiar with the instability of meaning; it extends the subject to the dimension of meaninglessness. Without contact to this exterior to meaning, the subject would be nothing other than an operator of established meanings and of the economies steering them. The experience of rupture leads the subject to the margins of its world insofar as we understand by world the system of the subject’s evidence, certainties and opinions. The suspending power of rupture includes this shattering of evidence that forces the subject in the midst of the existing to look beyond the existing into the dimension of invisibility itself. For it is obvious that there is no beyond to the world, no beyond to the zone of visibility and touchability which is the space of the subject’s experience. Even hopes and dreams and ideal projections belong to this world, are of this world, are immanent to it. The ontological difficulty in thinking the rupture lies in the necessity of thinking this rupture as a rupture in immanence, as a fissure belonging to immanence itself. An implicit transcendence? A transcendence which is none, or which is nothing other than the inconsistency of immanence, a transcendence which does not point or tempt into a second world, but rather shows up this one and only world in its expansive inconclusiveness and contingency. Let us not forget that Blanchot’s ontology remains indebted to Levinas, to the “extreme responsibility”, as he says himself, of the unprotected opening of the subject to the dimension of the other as the dimension of uncontrollable contingency. The rupture breaks through the wall of interiority in order to allow the subject to “step outside itself”. Blanchot denotes the rupture with Marx’s vision of an alienation coming to an end which appears as the “exit from religion, the family and the state”. That is the “appeal to an exterior which is neither another world nor a world behind”. Here the confrontational harshness of the rupture appears which affirms a contact with the exterior in the here-and-now of a unique situation which is the situation or life of the subject whose ontological narcissism is interrupted by this contact. Touching the exterior humbles the narcissistic desire for self-enclosure, drives the subject beyond itself in order to affirm this self-transcendence as its essence, ‘essence’ of a subject without essence as long as one understands by the subject’s essence a stable entity or nature, a kind of transcendental guarantee. Blanchot says it as undistortedly as possible: the rupture which is expressed as an exemplary action bears a violence within itself which is the violence of explosion. The exemplary action that interrupts power and all the certainties controlled by it is necessarily “violent” in responding to the established, no longer accepted power and violence, but without being reactive. The response of the rupture tears by tearing power, by tearing away the veil of all certainties toward the space of a future about which it itself cannot know how it will look. It is a matter of opening the future which means leading, with unconditional resistance, the power of tradition and the authority of the existing to their limits, to the point of their implicit inconstancy where they deconstruct themselves.