….Let us take two modes of expression: “The sky is blue,” “Is the sky blue? Yes.” One need be no great scholar to recognise what separates them. The “Yes” does not at all restore the simplicity of the flat affirmation; in the question the blue of the sky has given way to the void.

The blue, however, has not dissipated. On the contrary, it has been raised dramatically up to its possibility: beyond its being and unfolding in the intensity of this new space, certainly more blue than it has ever been, in a more intimate relation with the sky, in the instant-the instant of the question where everything is in instancy.

Yet hardly is the Yes pronounced, and even as it confirms in its new brilliance the blue of the sky brought into intimacy with the void, we become aware of what has been lost. Transformed for an instant into pure possibility, the state of things does not return to what it was.

The categorical Yes cannot render what was, for a moment, only possible; still more, it withdraws from us the gift and the richness of possibility since it now affirms the being of what is, but affirms it in response, thus indirectly and in a manner that is only mediate.

So in the Yes of the answer we lose the direct, immediate given, and we lose the opening, the richness of possibility. The answer is the question’s misfortune, its adversity….

Maurice Blanchot: The Most Profound Question: The Infinite Conversation: