The fire is part of a monumental meditation on literary creation. It is not just a collection of stunning readings of the work of poets (Mallarmé, Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rene Char, the surrealists), storytellers (Kafka, Sartre, Gide, Leiris, Constant, Miller, Malraux, Hemingway, Lautreamont) and thinkers and philosophers (Nietzsche, Pascal, Valèry, Paulhan), but also the renewed attempt to Maurice Blanchot to answer a question that sneaks into the mystery of his own way of being: what is literature? To this question the part of the fire, in his final essay ( "Literature and the right to death"), will respond with great seriousness: literature is language, the language that "brings death and remains there." That is also the same as the title says: literature is "part of the fire."

The part of the fire? The meaning of this French expression is not easily accessible to the Spanish reader: "faire la part du feu" means the act by which accept losing a part to preserve the rest, as when, in a fire, unable to immediately smother the flames, fire -place is oriented in a direction where everything will be consumed (the part of fire) - in order that otherwise remains intact and safe.

According to the analogy of the fire, all that exists, no other event is comparable to the time it was likely to be named. The language then extends its sovereignty over that named in the manner of a fire can raze everything: everything disappears in speech that name it, everything is quick to sink into an irreparable absence. The literature, which is language, extends the same movement in a surprising way: her words, like all make the absence, but themselves extend even further its movement and want to get away, be that same absence. And maybe become so in the work of all those who have brought this work to its end, but the result (disappointing, but there is the mystery of his glory) that, instead of the total absence, over and over time and in many ways, only have the presence of that absence thus created. That is, the "part of the fire" (literature), which is what disappears, in turn, as pointing to what disappears, is what can not disappear or, and is, something impossible not you can stop appearing.