If the idea of the blank (or the empty, or the silent, or the apophatic) is impossible (albeit a necessary impossibility in all its forms, and more, referred to previously) then a closer approximation would be a severing of connections, a cutting off, a jettisoning even as that somehow seems impossible as well. At the very least a disconnection while still connected. (The most extreme instance of such disconnection/connection is explored in an essay by Nicola Masciandaro, Beheading and The Impossible: “Beheading severs the space around it, producing in its before the presence of something that already has/can never happen and in its after the presence of something that did not/never stops happening. [….] One way or another, the severed head keeps speaking to its self-otherness, producing a discourse unlike any other, as a token of the reality perceived only through the transcendence of human discourse.”[….] “Inevitably, the severed head stays ahead, bleeding, glowing, calling from within this living dream to play fast and loose with ours, to speak its secret. Beheading is impossible.” )
One is also reminded of the Lyotard essay, “Can Thought Go On Without a Body?” significantly enough, in the book entitled The Inhuman, wherein techno-science, that is, thought, creates its own body since the two are inseparable, a paradoxical dance that can only begin (always over again) with a blank-which-is-a clearing, which has been filled and then obliterated (or disremembered) by the body in all its forms: “In what we call thinking the mind isn’t ‘directed’ but suspended. You don’t give it rules. You teach it to receive. You don’t clear the ground to build unobstructed: you make a little clearing where the penumbra of an almost-given will be able to enter and modify its contour. [….] …the suffering of thinking is a suffering of time.”
But…how does that temporal suffering manifest itself in the blank? And what pathologies / evolutionary paths does it lead to?