Is this simply another way of affirming no ideas (poetics) but in things (poems)? Yes, to a certain extent. Yet, as we know, things are not that simple. Ideas are things, and while I understand the conceptual differences that obtain between ideas (concepts) and things (matter), I take seriously the implications of a phenomenological and pragmatic understanding of the world, that the differences between how we perceive and what we perceive tend to blur, tend to become entangled. “Concerns” coalesce into “concepts” which, in turn, materialize as “poems.” Yet, the very fact of a concern often (if not always) implies a prior set of concepts, tenets, etc. Motivating all of these, while always finding itself motivated from birth, from the first instance of being hailed, called forth, is the intuitive, the affective—the “blank” spaces between letters, between words, between poems and even between books. These lacunae constitute, as a system and structure, the black hole that is lack. There is indeed nothing outside the text, and one need only emphasize that “nothing” to grasp the semantic and syntactic, ethical and political, psychological and social, power of this assertion, to see how “nothing” has stood in for, as one example, “other,” as that which must be expelled to a horizon and clung to at the very moment it threatens to disappear “over” that horizon in order to formulate “I,” “we,” “community,” nation,” etc., that set of believers (in rationality, in democracy, in capitalism in socialism, in freedom, in communism, in individualism, in collectivism, etc.).