Maurice Blanchot on Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities' (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften)

The man without particularities, who does not want to recognise himself in the person he is, for whom all the traits that particularise him make him nothing in particular, never close to what is closest to him, never foreign to what is exterior to him, chooses to be this way because of an ideal of freedom, but also because he lives in a world - the modern world, our world - in which particular deeds are always about to be lost in the impersonal conjuncture of relationship, of which they mark only the temporary intersection. In the world, the world of great cities and great collective masses, it is immaterial whether something has truly taken place and in what historical event we suppose ourselves to be actors and witnesses.

'Musil', The Book to Come, Maurice Blanchot, p.138