Negative Space

According to his student, Norman Malcom, “Wittgenstein once said that a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes.” It’s one of his most-repeated aphorisms, despite the fact that it was not presented by Malcolm as a direct quotation. The passage from Malcolm’s memoir continues:

Another time he said that a philosophical treatise might contain nothing but questions (without answers). In his own writing he made wide use of both.

In 2022, the essayist David Shields published The Very Last Interview, a book that consists of questions he had been asked by interviewers over forty years (without answers), organized by theme and remixed to create a negative space—like the one-sided phone calls pioneered by Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart, in which the audience completes the joke by imagining what the other must have said.

In Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth, Maggie Nelson writes:

My favorite moment from any interview ever:
What has been your great…