This appeared on The New York Times‘s Opinionator blog on 27 February 2013. It featured in The Stone, a column devoted to philosophy moderated by Simon Critchley:

Reading the Unreadable
So many books, so little time. Who doesn’t feel the anxiety of it all? In a post at The Guardian’s Books blog, Andrew Gallix moves from a meditation on the phenomenon of the “failed or forgotten” writer, to the deliberate unreadability of the “conceptual writing” championed by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith, to the inevitability of the “blank book” prophesied by Kierkegaard. Gallix wonders whether this kind of literary elusivity isn’t ultimately a gift; he claims, following Hegel, that “words give us the world by taking it away.”