What is the relationship, in the work of Blanchot and Derrida, between the limit of

literature and the limit of death?

By Beth Guilding, Goldsmiths College, University of London

E come il vento

Odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello

Infinito silenzio a questa voce

Vo comparando: e mi sovvien l'eterno,

E le morte stagioni, e la presente

E viva, e il suon di lei. Così tra questa

Immensità s'annega il pensier mio:

E il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare.

Giacomo Leopardi,

‘L’Infinito’1

1819

On July the 20th, 1994, Jacques Derrida received a letter from Maurice Blanchot in

which Blanchot declares, “Fifty years ago, I knew the happiness of nearly being shot to

death.”2 A curious statement, begging the question: why would one feel happiness about

almost being murdered? I will return to this letter later on in this essay, when I will discuss

the problems concerning testimony and autobiography, but for now I will focus on this

question of Blanchot’s “happiness,” which I believe we can begin to comprehend by referring

to Leopardi’s poem, cited above, ‘L’Infinito’. Here the poet sees himself as sitting on the

edge of his favourite hill-top, at a point where he cannot see the full horizon because the view

is blocked by a hedge. The poet feels protected by this hedge, and describes how it allows

him to imagine the infinite space which lies beyond the horizon, or, that is to say, beyond his

comprehension. He compares the hedge that rustles in the wind (E come il vento Odo stormir

tra queste piante), with the sound of the infinite silence (Infinito silenzio a questa voce Vo

comparando), and feels both pleasure and fear from such an experience. With regards to this,

1 Giacomo Leopardi, ‘L’Infinito’ in Angela Esterhammer ed., Romantic Poetry, Vol. 7 (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002), p. 191.2 Jacques Derrida, Demure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 47.

one could draw a hedonistic parallel between this Blanchot’s “happiness,” and the sensation

of vertigo that the poet in ‘L’Infinito’ implies. Death, Blanchot believes, is, “the richest

moment of meaning,”3 which is perhaps because it provides the answer to the question that

we can never know in life: what happens when we die?

In this essay, which will centre around the limit of literature and the limit of death,

there is significantly more to be said for this fear and intrigue concerning the infinite; with

regards to what the concept of the infinite entails, and to the limit, or the boundary, that one

must transcend in order to enter into the infinite; here, I am of course referring to the nature

of death as the limit of life. I will focus on Blanchot’s The Instant of my Death and Derrida’s

Demeure in order to demonstrate how death presents literature with the enigma of the

schematically unrepresentable; the question that cannot be answered, what happens at the

instant that one transcends the limit of life? For, as Wagner aptly phrases it, death “is a puzzle

almost as incomprehensible today as it was when early man sat by the motionless body of his

mate and gazed in perplexed bewilderment at the sky.”4

I began this essay with the above extract from Leopardi’s ‘L’Infinito’ because I

wanted to stress from the outset the idea of the infinite possibilities surrounding the answer to

this question of what lies beyond the limit of life. But what must also be stressed is that any

such answer to this question can only belong to the make-believe fictional realm; as Paul De

Man has termed it, a “prosopopoeia,” that is, “the fiction of the voice-from-beyond-the-

grave.”5 The idea of this infinity is one that Blanchot also adopts in The Instant of my Death

in which the narrator retrospectively describes his experience of the instant of his death as

“freed from life? the infinite opening up?”6 But, and this is essential, what is so interesting

about Blanchot’s text is that although the narrator encounters death, he does not actually

experience physical death, and yet this encounter nonetheless presents him with the

opportunity to articulate a vision of death from the position of life.

In Demeure, Derrida says of Blanchot’s chosen title, The Instant of My Death, that it

“promises us a narrative or a testimony – signed by someone who tells us in many ways and

according to every possible tense: I am dead, or I will be dead in an instant, or an instant ago I

3 Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire, trans. by Charlotte Mandell (California: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 320.4 August H. Wagner ed., What Happens When You Die? Twentieth Century Thought on Survival After Death (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1968), p. 13. 5 Ivan Callus, ‘Comparatism and (Auto)thanatography: Death and Mourning in Blanchot, Derrida and Tim Parks’, Comparative Critical Studies, 1, 3, (2004), pp. 337-358: p. 338. 6 Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of my Death, trans. by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 8.

was going to be dead.”7 There are two keys points that we need to address here; firstly, is The

Instant of My Death a narrative or a testimony? This is a question that is strictly not possible

to answer. On the one hand, we have the evidence of the letter that Blanchot wrote to Derrida,

which Derrida asserts, “does not belong to what we call literature. It testifies.”8 On the other

hand, in The Instant of My Death we are presented with a narrator who sets out, from the title,

to enunciate his death – which, as we have discussed above, is only possible in the realms of

make-believe fiction. This brings us to the next question: how does one write of one’s own

death if one survives it?

Derrida notes how it is “an essential kind of generality” that “[o]ne testifies only when

one has lived longer than what has come to pass,” and with regards to The Instant of My

Death, “[w]hat runs through this testimony of fiction is thus the singular concept of an

‘unexperienced experience.’” 9 Death is the experience that every living, mortal being will

undergo, but as one cannot testify to one’s own death because it transcends the limit of one’s

life, it thus becomes the universally “unexperienced experience.” So we can understand why

it is that Blanchot believed death to be “the richest moment of meaning” – because death is

the epitome of opacity. One cannot know what happens when one dies because when one dies

one passes out of life, and thus cannot communicate to the living the true state of being dead.

And so we find ourselves at a limit that literature can only combat through the powers of the

imagination, by imagining the infinity that lies beyond our comprehension – as is exemplified

in Leopardi’s poem. Thus death remains unreachable by any text that claims to be a source of

the truth, such as autobiography, or that is, testimony, for, as Derrida points out, “[i]n essence

a testimony is always autobiographical: it tells, in the first person, the shareable and

unshareable secret of what happened to me, to me, to me alone.”10 But it can never be a case

of what happens to “me alone” when discussing one’s own death. In Demeure Derrida

comments how “dying means: you are dead already, in an immemorial past, of a death that

was not yours.”11 Death can only be discussed in terms of the paradox that it is at once the

most universal of experiences, we all die, and at the same time, the most utterly personal of

experiences because it is our own death, the moment that we can never translate. We can

witness another’s death, but to say “I am dead” is impossible.

7 Demeure, p. 45. 8 Demeure, p. 52. 9 Demeure, pp. 45 and 47. 10 Demeure, p. 43. 11 Demeure, p. 51.

The death that the narrator experiences in The Instant of My Death is not a physical

death, but an internal division from life: “As if the death outside of him could only henceforth

collide with the death in him.”12 It is as if, Derrida says, “the death that came at him […]

waits for Blanchot […] What remains for him of existence […] is this race for death in view

of death in order not to see death coming.”13 It is difficult to comprehend the meaning of this

division and Derrida’s comment on it, because common sense tells us that our existence is

also founded on this race for death, that is, a journey towards death as the intrinsic part of

human life. But what is so interesting about the narrator’s experience with death in

Blanchot’s story is the death that he feels from within, which we could perhaps draw a

parallel to here in order to further comprehend such a feeling; in his book, What Happens

When You Die? Wagner has compiled a wide range of twentieth-century critics’ opinions

concerning the subject of death. In it, Hereward Carrington comments how “when a man is

shot through the head, we say that he is ‘dead.’ If on the other hand we pick a rose, we do not

say that the rose is ‘dead’ until it fades and withers.”14 In The Instant of my Death we could

say that this inner death experience is a metaphoric ‘picking of the rose’; the narrator

describes the immediate feeling of his encounter with death as one of “extraordinary

lightness, a sort of beatitude […] Dead – immortal. Perhaps ecstasy. Rather the feeling of

compassion for suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal or eternal.”15 But

this immortality, Derrida says, “[does] not in the least signify eternity […] At this instant

there can be elation, lightness in the immortality of death, happiness in compassion, a sharing

of finititude, a friendship with finite beings, in the happiness of not being immortal – or

eternal.”16 Through his encounter with death, Blanchot’s narrator understands the inevitability

of death as a part of the human experience, and although death is interior to the self, “the

darkness is in man”17 as Tennyson said, it is exterior because it is universal to mankind.

Combined with this limit of representing one’s own death is also the limit of language

to express extreme human emotion. In the introduction to The Limits of Autobiography, Leigh

Gilmore asserts how “language fails in the face of trauma […] trauma mocks language and

confronts it with its insufficiency.”18 And in The Instant of My Death the narrator describes

how,

12 The Instant of my Death, p. 9. 13 Demeure, pp. 94 and 95. 14 Wagner, p. 41. 15 The Instant of my Death, p. 5. 16 Demeure, p. 69. 17 Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Poetic and Dramatic Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson (Montana: Kessinger, 2004), p. 500.

There remained, […] the feeling of lightness that I would not

know how to translate: freed from life? the infinite opening up?

Neither happiness, nor unhappiness. Nor the absence of fear and

perhaps already the step beyond.19

Here we are presented with a multitude of mixed feelings; lightness, freedom, happiness,

fear, absence of fear. It appears that the narrator, being unable to translate in clear-cut terms

the exactness of emotion that he is experiencing, is echoing something similar to the

statement that Blanchot makes in ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, that “if literature

coincides with nothing for just an instant, it is immediately everything, and this everything

begins to exist.”20 But - and herein lies the problem - once this everything begins to exist, we

must find a way to represent it, to understand it, to capture it in language (hence literature

also, which is rooted in language). But as it is inherent in the nature of language to undermine

fixed meanings, and the human mind cannot conceive the infinite, which is at once

everything and nothing, the impossibility of representing death or an encounter with death as

a monolithic construct or moment defines the limit of literature as one which can never grasp

the opaque nature of life. Consider Dante, who, despite having used, as Lucia Boldrini

asserts, “nearly 28,000 words” of the Italian vernacular, still concludes The Divine Comedy

by commenting “How weak are words and how unfit to frame my concept.”21 Dante’s

“programme” was “to go beyond the immediate perceptual reality in order to say what had

never been said before – in order, that is, to express the novum, the divine, the ineffable.”22

And in The Instant of my Death the narrator also strives to say what has autobiographically

never been said before, the feeling of death. The lightness of almost experiencing physical

death but being turned back to life at the last minute, “At that instant, an abrupt return to the

world […] The lieutenant moved away to assess the situation.”23

The narrator of The Instant of My Death describes how he remembers “a young man

[…] prevented from dying by death itself.”24 The meaning of this can be applied to Roland

18 Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (New York: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 6. 19 The Instant of my Death, p. 8 – 9. 20 The Work of Fire, pp. 301 – 302. 21 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: III Paradise, trans. by Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds (Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd, 1962), p. 346. 22 Lucia Boldrini, Joyce, Dante and the Poetics of Literary Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 3, 4.23 The Instant of my Death, p. 5. 24 The Instant of my Death, p. 3.

Barthes’ notion of ‘the death of the author’. In their introduction to Blanchot, Haase and

Large comment on how “we write so that our words outlive us, so that in the eternal presence

of a work we might be granted immortality. But this ‘outliving us’ has a more sinister and

dark meaning. The words outlive me, because in a certain sense my existence is irrelevant to

them.”25 In this sense then, by the very act of writing an author is sentencing himself to a

certain kind of death. This relates to the idea that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost

of the death of the author,”26 because the meaning of literary text is unified only by the

individual reader’s interpretation and understanding of it. It is a limit of writing that Blanchot

comments on in The Writing of the Disaster, “To write (of) oneself is to cease to be, in order

to confide in a guest – the other, the reader – entrusting yourself to him who will henceforth

have as an obligation, and indeed as a life, nothing but your inexistence.”27 But this passing

over from author to reader also highlights the inexhaustible quality that literature has; as John

Barth points out, “literature can never be exhausted if only because no single text can ever be

exhausted – it’s 'meaning' residing as it does in its transaction with individual readers.”28 But

this inexhaustibility is not synonymous with limitlessness – because we, the reader, are still

limited by our own understanding of the text, and, as Barthes says, “did [the author] wish to

express himself, he ought to at least know that the ‘inner’ thing he thinks to ‘translate’ is

itself only a ready formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so

on indefinitely…” One could argue then, that in literature what one actually finds is a denial

of death as the final end, but the appropriation of death as a transition to a new level of

understanding. As Derrida asserts in Aporias, “The crossing of borders always announces

itself according to the movement of a certain step […] – and of the step that crosses a line.”29

That is, a step that crosses the line and remains in existence, although changed, on the other

side of this line. This is exemplified in Blanchot’s story in which the narrator also comments

“Nor the absence of fear and perhaps already the step beyond. I know, I imagine that this

unanalyzable feeling changed what there remained for him of existence.”30

25 Ullrich Haase and William Large, Maurice Blanchot (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 13. 26 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ in Dennis Walder ed., Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 263. 27 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. by Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 64. 28 John Barth, ‘The Literature of Replenishment’ in Essentials of the Theory of Fiction: Third Edition Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy, ed., (USA: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 176.29 Jacques Derrida, Aporias trans. by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 11. 30 The Instant of my Death, pp. 8 – 9.

Perhaps this notion of the stepping across the limit, the transcendence of the boundary

of both life and of literature defines the absolute limit of death. Humanity cannot comprehend

that after life there is absolutely nothing – because even by writing nothing one will still

imagine nothing as a state of being, as a flatness, an emptiness. Black, grey, white. The sound

of the infinite silence the Leopardi imagines. Death’s limit is that it is the cessation from life,

and dying is “this movement where I can no longer push death away from me by attributing it

to ‘everyone’. Rather here I become ‘everyone’ that is, I lose myself and experience how

‘one dies’.”31 Just as in producing a literary work, Blanchot asserts, “I renounce the idea of

producing and formulating myself; I fulfil myself in something exterior and inscribe myself

in the anonymous continuity of humanity.”32 Death is the limit of humanity of which writing

can transcend but only through losing the ability to say ‘I’, that is to pass the work to the

gamut of the reader – who is at once singular and universal. One could say then, that the limit

of literature and the limit of death is one of the unobtainable secrets of being: singularity. In

literature we are provided with a means of overcoming the absence of the self in life,

literature allows “a relation to the enigma of our singular existence.”33 But, as soon as this

enigma becomes ‘published’ in language, either speech or writing, it is lost; this is what

Blanchot means when he comments how “when I speak, death speaks in me. [Speech] is

there between us as the distance that separates us, but this distance is also what prevents us

from being separated, because it contains the condition for all understanding.”34 As an

individual, I can experience interior emotions and feelings about an event or a piece of

literature, but as soon as these experiences are articulated, named, they lose their individual

quality and enter into the realm of a ready-made gamut of words, and words about words,

about feelings of experiences that are at once singular and universal.

What we encounter, in The Instant of my Death, in the narrator’s experience with

death as producing a feeling of “lightness,” is the self as separated from humanity for an

instant, as one almost encounters one’s own death, but, through trying to articulate this

instant the narrator approaches the limit, the perilous threshold, where he says, “I am alive.

No, you are dead.”35 Dead both because he has passed up his singularity through articulation

(i.e., the death of the author), and dead because at the point of almost being shot to death, the

narrator declares that he is already “Dead – immortal.” Derrida comments how because of

31 Maurice Blanchot, p. 53. 32 The Writing of the Disaster, p. 7. 33 Maurice Blanchot, p. 58. 34 The Work of Fire, pp. 323 – 324. 35 The Instant of my Death, p. 9.

this “[the narrator] is already dead, since there has been a verdict […] When one is dead, it

does not happen twice, there are not two deaths even if two die […] I am not dead and I am

dead. At that instant I am immortal because I am dead: death can no longer happen to me.” 36

Therefore, from the instant of the narrator’s death he perceives death’s imminence, and

recognises ““the instant of my death henceforth always in abeyance.”37 Bringing us back to

the image of the rose being picked that I have discussed above (see page 5); what the narrator

awaits now is the withering of life from his being.

The limit of literature can therefore be seen as the limit to express absolute singularity

of either experience or meaning. The limit of death is that it is the termination of life which

also negates a singular experience. And the limit of literature and death combined is that

death can never be accounted for in the realms of testimony or autobiographical fiction. What

is so fascinating about The Instant of my Death is how this encounter with the limit, the

perilous threshold of life, and the turn around back into life, allows the narrator a perception

of death which can be articulated in life.

“Life is a secret; death is the key that opens it; but he who turns the key disappears

forever into the secret.”38

Maurice Maeterlink, Before the Great Silence

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