Maurice Blanchot.

There could be little less discreet than writing "on Maurice Blanchot." Hopelessly redundant, in a sense,
either one must accept the theory he provides, or reject it. There is little room for compromise.
The real work of writing alongside, that which would work him silently (though not parasitically, or simply
victim to mimetic contagion) into one's thinking. Well, I'm not sure that I'm there yet...though the danger
his writing poses in such regard, is certainly far greater than most.
It is especially hard to engage Blanchot's thought without extensive citation. The rhythms of his thought ––
a unique intensity and persistent sobriety and patience (not to mention ambiguity of genre, use of paradox,
double injunction and oxymoron)–place a high demand on the reader who would comment. At the same
time, there is a wonderful alinearity at work, like all writing in fragments, one might suppose, that resists
the sterile confinement of citation.
Blanchot, maybe needless to say, is not so much concerned with preemptively parrying his every possible
imaginary critic (and in the process reducing them to mere cookie-cutter versions of their former selves) as
he is with pursuing a faithful description of that peculiar trembling or disquiet, namely the one which
seems to have left its mark on a generation of thinkers left writing after Heidegger, and under the
permanently fallen sky (dis-aster, the star-less night) of the Holocaust.
But also like Kafka, Blanchot permits himself this strange indulgence, the pursuit of this some-thing that
will forever float inverted commas around the word, 'literature'. In a sense, he is even more dismissive of
his critics than Derrida (or for that matter Nabokov) both of whom at least respond, even if it's only to point
again to their books.
In any case, what follows is sort of long, and probably pushing the limits of bloggility. Also, it isn't very
good. Be as gentle or as brutal as you wish with it. In short, this will have been a largely mediocre post,
but hopefully somewhat productive nonetheless.
And if it happens that to the question "When will you come?" the Messiah answers, "Today," the answer is
certainly impressive: so, it is today! It is now and always now. There is no need to wait, although to wait
is an obligation. And when is it now? When is the now which does not belong to ordinary time, which
necessarily overturns it, does not maintain but destabilizes it? When? -- especially if one remembers that
this "now" which belongs to no text, but is the now of a severe, fictitious narrative, refers to texts that make
it once more dependent upon realizable-unrealizable conditions: "Now, if only you heed me, or if you are
willing to listen to my voice." Finally, the Messiah -- quite the opposite in this respect, from the Christian
hypostasis -- is by no means divine. He is a comforter, the most just of the just, but it is not even sure that
he is a person -- that he is someone in particular. When one commentator says, The Messiah is perhaps I,
he is not exalting himself. Anyone might be the Messiah -- must be he, is not he. For it would be wrong to
speak of the Messiah in Hegelian language -- "the absolute intimacy of absolute exteriority" -- all the more
so because the coming of the Messiah does not yet signify the end of history, the suppression of time. It
announces a time more future, as the following mysterious text conveys, than any prophesy could ever
foretell: "All prophets -- there is no exception -- have prophesied only for the messianic time [l'epokhe?]
[Blanchot's brackets]. As for future time, what eye has seen it except Yours, Lord, who will act for him
who is faithful to you and keeps waiting." (Levinas and Scholem.) (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster,
142).
As the German expression has it, the last judgement is the youngest day, and it is a day surpassing all days.
Not that judgment is reserved for the end of time. On the contrary, justice won't wait; it is to be done at
every instant, to be realized all the time, and studied also (it is to be learned.) Every just act (are there
any?) makes of its day the last day or -- as Kafka said -- the very last: a day no longer situated in the
ordinary succession of days but one that makes of the most commonplace ordinary, the extraordinary.
(Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 143)

Does Blanchot, as some have suggested, present a "negative eschatology?" In a time––this moment,
now––so saturated with capitalist noise about the "victory of (neo)liberal democracy" and its
accompanying, mantric, superficially (neo)Hegelian echoes of an "end of History"––we might do well to
heed the warnings contained in Derrida's later writings, particularly Specters of Marx. It is surely a time of
unprecedented change and inter-hypertextual exchange that is neither without its increasing fragility, and
inequalities, nor its own accompanying jubilatory rhetoric, marked equally by false conjuring and denial.
What might be called the "messianicity" in both Blanchot's and Derrida's thinking may stand in radical
opposition to the messianism, or even--as Derrida once put it--"apocalyptic tone"--conditioning much of the
discourse now predominating, pop-politically as well as philosophically.
What might it mean for the "coming community," as Giorgio Agamben would have it, to wrest some
chance of survival from the (post)modern irony of an 'advertising without object' (soap commercials with
everything but the soap--or maybe only soap)?
(Agamben is no (neo)Marxist; this much seems clear, although maybe this is not so easily said about
certain others writing in Blanchot's shadow). In his original reading of Spinoza, and unmistakably in the
spirit of Blanchot (though perhaps not without significant adaptation), Agamben theorizes a politics of
community oriented by a singularity without essence, an "inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no
way concerns an essence" (Agamben, The Coming Community, 18-19).
But what about a community oriented by a refusal of homogeneity and sameness?
At a certain moment, in the face of public events, we know that we must refuse. The refusal is absolute,
categorical. It does not argue, nor does it voice its reasons. This is why it is silent and solitary, even when
it asserts itself, as it must, in broad daylight. Men who refuse and who are tied by the force of refusal know
that they are not yet together. The time of joint affirmation is precisely that of which they have been
deprived. What they are left with is the irreducible refusal, the friendship of this certain, unshakable,
rigorous No that keeps them unified and bound by solidarity. (Blanchot, Friendship, 111)
How is it possible to affirm an absolute singularity without in any way referring to an essence of singularity
(perhaps "irreducible" is not the same as "absolute")? What about refusing, in a more general and liberal or
pragmatic sense, the politics of perpetual war and the threat of nuclear holocaust? What might a politics––
a "democracy" perhaps––seeking to become truly open to the other qua other in fact look like? Is it enough
to swim in the waters of a relative "being in potential" without also risking the madness of decision,
acknowledging a radical aporia of responsibility? These questions are hopelessly general, and Agamben is
not so easily pinned down. Still, he does not seem to credit the recent mobilizations against the structuring
of so-called "free trade" with much more than a sort of "simple affirmation." On the other hand, "whatever
singularities" that "do not possess any identity" or "bond," and so require no "recognition," are themselves--
when they gather together ("being in common" without however belonging)––the true site of resistance
against the State:
The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of
the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction
between whatever singularity and the State organization. This has nothing to do with the simple
affirmation of the social in opposition to the State that has often found expression in the protest movements
of recent years. Whatever singularities cannot form a societas because they do not possess any identity to
vindicate nor any bond of belonging for which to seek recognition...What the State cannot tolerate in any
way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-
belong without any representable condition of belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition)...
Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and
thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State. Wherever
these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a Tiananmen, and, sooner or
later, the tanks will appear. (Agamben, The Coming Community, 84-86)
At the same time as they are lauded, these "whatever singularities" then seem to foreshadow the
inevitability of a final showdown of sorts. Could such a thing still be called a "revolution" or a "war"?
Might Agamben be articulating something both ancient and modern at once? What are the alternatives?
Hasn't this being-in-common without belonging already taken place at so many moments? The question
that orients most, as always, concerns death.
The fact is that the senselessness of their existence runs up against a final absurdity, against which all
advertising runs aground: death itself. In death the petty bourgeois confront the ultimate expropriation, the
ultimate frustration of individuality: life in all its nakedness, the pure incommunicable, where their shame
can finally rest in peace...This means that the planetary petty bourgeoisie is probably the form in which
humanity is moving toward its own destruction. But this also means that the petty bourgeoisie represents
an opportunity unheard of in the history of humanity that it must at all costs not let slip away. Because if
instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of
individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper
being-thus not an identity and an individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and
absolutely exposed singularity--if humans could...be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face,
then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into
a communication without the incommunicable.
 Selecting in the new planetary humanity those characteristics that allow for its survival, removing the
thin diaphragm that separates bad mediatized advertising from the perfect exteriority that communicates
only itself--this is the political task of our generation. (Agamben, The Coming Community, 65)
An "absolutely exposed singularity"––one without secrets, even? A "communication without the
incommunicable?" How might such an exposure be possible without being reduced merely to a hollow, or
willingly appropriated gesture? Does such an ontology remain bascially metaphysical, however subtly
disguised? How might such a "selecting," already within the beast of advertising, occur––and occur in
time? To be sufficient might such a "selecting" require nothing less than the reorientation of advertising
itself? (Advertising is shaped by complex motives, after all, although the power of the image extends
beyond its concept.)
{There is an old surrealist film (whose title and author escapes me) in which two human heads
composed of an enormously elaborate collage of random everyday objects are made to open their mouths
and consume each other in a reciprocal, vomitous movement. It is a battle of epic proportions, but each
time they re-pool and resist being formed into one. The exchanges marked as much by loud silences
between Agamben and Derrida might resemble something like this. It is a movement of near-total
appropriation, where one renders the other's argument even stronger in order to reorient it in one's own
direction--the clutter of words from the other consumed and regurgitated back. Very well, nothing new
about that!}
In any case, striding gargantuanly along, the above passages belonging to Agamben beg to be presented
alongside those of Derrida, where the themes of secrecy and responsibility are defended in a condition
without belonging:
How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself and
without my being able to see him in me? And if my secret self, that which can be revealed only to the
other, to the wholly other, to God if you wish, is a secret that I will never reflect on, that I will never know
or experience or possess as my own, then what sense is there in saying that it is "my" secret, or in saying
more generally that a secret belongs, that it is proper to or belongs to some "one," or to some other who
remains someone? It is perhaps there that we find the secret of secrecy, namely, that it is not a matter of
knowing and that it is there for no-one. A secret doesn't belong, it can never be said to be at home or in its
place [chez soi]...The question of the self: "who am I?" not in the sense of "who am I" but "who is this 'I'"
that can say "who"? What is the "I," and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the "I"
trembles in secret? (Derrida, The Gift of Death, 92)
Writing, finally no less homesick than speaking, remains a potential site for a certain kind of politics--
one not without fragility or risk. Maybe impropriety is not without its secrets. Maybe Agamben does not
deny or surpress 'the secret', but he does seem not to give it the same tension and certainly not the same
attention as Derrida, who seems to want to hold on to the strong sense of what binds me to the other, even
if it must by definition remain unpronouncable, or unspoken. Agamben, on the other hand, often seems
closer to Blanchot, in that it is not so much the One who is affirmed through the act of (always multiple)
sacrifice, as it is sacrifice itself that is affirmed through the One. Here, closer to Levinas than Derrida,
perhaps, is Blanchot again:
Dying means: you are dead already, in an immemorial past, of a death which was not yours, which you
have thus neither known nor lived, but under the threat of which you believe you are called upon to live;
you await it henceforth in the future, constructing a future to make it possible at last––possible as
something that will take place and will belong to the realm of experience. (Blanchot, The Writing of the
Disaster, 65)
Is Blanchot's politics of writing diagnosably apocalyptic? Having always already arrived, the disaster
can hardly be demanded "to come," although neither has it once arrived (once and for all).
And why the idea of the Messiah? Why the necessity of a just finish? Why can we not bear, why do we
not desire that which is without end? The messianic hope--hope which is dread as well--is inevitable when
history appears politically only as an arbitrary hubbub, a process deprived of meaning or direction. But if
political thinking becomes messianic in its turn, this confusion, which removes the seriousness from the
search for reason (intelligibility) in history--and also from the requirement of messianic thought (the
realization of morality)--simply attests to a time so frightful, so dangerous, that any recourse appears
justified: can one maintain any distance at all when Auschwitz happens? How is it possible to say:
Auschwitz has happened? (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster)
The holocaust may figure in Blanchot's thinking as a sort of enforced apocalypse--one that has
undeniably already taken place, but that will remain, in an important sense, still unbelievable. (The
apocalypse has already disappointed.) Blanchot seems to be distinguishing here between a "political
thinking" in a weak sense, and a "messianic thought" whose demand for a certain "realization of morality"
might be not altogether unimportant. But in the same breath Blanchot is clearly opposing the idea of an
"end of history" inasmuch as such a thought is the reactive messianism, reacting in a time when the
"meaning or direction" of history is rendered inaccessible--alienated, perhaps--by superficial political
"hubbub." Such a reactive messianism, if it were to contaminate politics--hasn't it already?--would lead
only to the worst.
(From a strictly political point of view fascism and Nazism have not been overcome, and we still live under
their sign.) (Agamben, The Coming Community, 63)
In his wonderful, if a bit strangely titled(?) book, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, Leslie Hill
provides a lucid reading of the affinities shared between Derrida and Blanchot in their conceptions of both
community and the future.
The invocation of the end is a tribute necessarily paid to infinity, as Blanchot makes clear by pointing at the
end to the self-defeating paradox of Wittgenstein's famous conclusion to the Tractatus. To speak of the end
is always to defer the end; no sooner is it pronounced than the finality of the apocalyptic 'come!' in fact
suspends the end as a moment of perpetual (re)beginning. Apocalypse in Blanchot is therefore not an
apocalypse, for it is an apocalypse without end, truth or finality. It is, as Derrida had predicted, apocalypse
without apocalypse. (Hill, 208)
Derrida likes to distinguish between two types of "future"––one that is predictable, subject to
prescriptions, programs, forcasts and formulas; and one that resists such labeling efforts, remaining, in the
most open sense, still a future yet "to-come." Thinking the future then requires a sensitivity toward two
registers of language––one that is immediate or practicle, and one that seeks to remain almost indifferent to
the present, or faithful to some desire for a language not yet formed.
The need to distinguish between two kinds of language finds not unrelated expression in the theory of
Georges Bataille. According to Bataille, a language belonging to a "restricted economy" would be that
which is merely routine, practical, normative, or self-evident (perhaps everyday, ontic, byt) while that of a
"general economy"––(words in their stronger, perhaps more philosophical sense––although what
"philosophical" might mean of course in terms of Hegel and Nietzsche is far from certain, especially in
Bataille)––would begin to interrogate or reflect upon its possibility beyond a condition of mere practicality
or self-evidence. In short, "general economy" might suggest a language––while still remaining
philosphical, perhaps––belonging more to poetry. At least in Blanchot's reading, the language of "general
economy" might still take place in conversation––particularly between friends––whereby through repetition
and re-affirmation meanings are not so much deepened as distended, opened onto an abyss, or even made in
some sense, "tragic." (Blanchot perhaps tending to speak of anguish where Bataille would rather talk of
laughter.) (Blanchot, "Affirmation and the Passion of Negative Thought," 54). There is of course a
potential playful element to this tragedy as well. The language of a "general economy" is that––in
Blanchot's terms––of the "limit-experience," or of "patience."
The need for more than one language is linked to the aporia of responsibility––in every demand, there is
always more than one demand:
There are, Blanchot maintains, always at least two languages, two voices, two demands. Such multiplicity
of tone, according to Derrida, is a trait common to all eschatology; but Blanchot raises it to the status of a
philosophical, literary, and political strategy. Writing, he argues, falls subject to an injunction which by
definition cannot be satisfied and is capable of supplying neither sanction nor recompense. But for every
demand addressed to the act of writing by virtue of its own absence of worldly foundation or justification,
there is always another demand requiring that justice be done without delay in the world. These two
demands, the one requiring the obliqueness of infinite patience, the other demanding urgent and decisive
action, function according to different rhythms, different temporalities, and different logics of possibility
and impossibility. While not necessarily opposed to one another, and not homogeneous even within
themselves, they are nonetheless radically disjoined, and it is essential, in the nameless name of the neuter,
Blanchot argues, that the dissymmetry arising from this disjunction be affirmed, respected and obeyed.
(Hill, 210)
The separation between these "two rhythms" or "logics" as Hill puts it, is not rigorously possible, if one
believes them to be always already conditioning each other. There may in fact be something radically anti-
elitist in this––an undoing of the hierarchizing of langauge––at the same time that the stakes and demands
for a seriousness and complexity of thought have never been greater. Blanchot's affirmation, at least as
read by Derrida, seeks also to go beyond this "dissymetry," in a sense, perhaps even to transform the space
of both demands if not the meaning of affirmation itself. (It might be not unlike guiding a drop of water
with a pin, he thought to himself. But the image always fails.) There may be nothing "essential" about the
space of the 'neuter', and nothing like a command merely to "obey," but without this affirmation of
disjunction––without heeding the full weight of its injunction––there can only ever be no future––just "the
end."
Hegel's thought must itself be "gone through" with patience in order to be effectively transformed and
perhaps finally left behind. More generally still, writing must also, and from the moment it begins,
withdraw from its appearing as such. Writing must "revoke" the pretension of any "end," even while it
cannot help but imply such a thing the moment it begins.
Last witness, end of history, close of a period, turning point, crisis--or, end of (metaphysical)
philosophy...But if (since there is no other way of putting this) a decisive historical change is announced in
the phrase "the coming comes," making us come into our "most proper," or "own-most" (being), then one
would have to be very naive not to think that the requirement to withdraw ceases from then on. And yet it
is from then on that "withdraw" rules--more obscurely, more insistently...Why does writing--when we
understand this movement as the change from one era to a different one, and when we think of it as the
experience (the inexperience) of the disaster--always imply the words inscribed at the beginning of this
"fragment," which, however, it revokes? It revokes them even if what they announce is announced as
something new which has always already taken place, a radical change from which the present tense is
excluded. (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 102)
Writing then refuses the present, but never in the same way as the phrase, "end of history," forecloses on
the present (or never in the same way twice). If writing has the power to transform eras, or if writing itself
is the change between eras, there is a sense in which writing both hears and refuses its own present––or at
least its own presence as a representation of power (over the future, for instance). Blanchot's politics of
writing is, at least in Leslie Hill's reading, nothing if not a responsibility (very much in the sense Derrida
gives to this word) to alterity and to the Other (as irriducibly other). Perhaps only a radical indifference to
the first of Derrida's two futures––to the one that is prescribed or merely (in the "weak" sense) "possible"––
can clear a space for the gift of another kind of time. Such a time might be open, or ceaselessly opening––a
prelude without hasty or absolute distinctions between "enemies" and "friends."
The Politics to which Blanchot's writing gives voice...is an eschatology--eschatology beyond eschatology--
which addresses the future not as power but as judgement, not as imminent presence but as infinite
promise. The hope is not for more, or better representation, but rather for the destruction of the present as
such and thus for a revolution that would open time itself to the otherness that presence always excludes
(Hill, 209).
As is fitting, Hill cites Blanchot's article, 'N'oubliez pas!' that appeared in May 1968:
a revolution...destroying all without anything destructive, destroying, rather than the past, the very present
in which it took place and not attempting to provide a future, extremely indifferent to any possible future
(judged as success or failure), as though the time it sought to open up was already beyond these standard
determinations. (Hill, 209)
"I" die before being born. (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 101)

I believe only in death, and precisely in death as impossible, for which reason I am obsessed with, curious
about, and convinced of mortality. (Derrida, "Deconstructions: The Im-possible," 18)

But there is another kind of interruption, more enigmatic and more grave. It introduces the wait that
measures the distance between two interlocutors--no longer a reducible, but an irreducible distance.
(Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 76)

Conversely, political speech--Blanchot refers especially to the "terrible monologues" of Hitler--often seeks
to eliminate silence altogether, and so perhaps also the exigency that is an incessant dying (The Infinite
Conversation, 75).
To think the way one dies: without purpose, without power, without unity, and precisely without "the way."
Whence the effacement of this formulation as soon as it is thought--as soon as it is thought, that is, both on
the side of thinking and of dying, in dis-equilibrium, in an excess of meaning and in excess of meaning. No
sooner is it thought than it has departed; it is gone, outside.
Thinking as dying excludes the "as" of thought, in a manner such that even if we suppress this "as" by
paratactic simplification and write: "to think: to die," it forms an enigma in its absence, a practically
unbridgeable space. The un-relation of thinking and dying is also the form of their relation: not that
thinking proceeds toward dying, proceeding thus toward its other, but not that it proceeds toward its
likeness either. It is thus that "as" acquires the impetuousness of its meaning: neither like nor different,
neither other nor same. (The Writing of the Disaster, 39)
Presence is only presence at a distance, and this distance is absolute--that is, irreducible; that is, infinite.
(Blanchot, Friendship, 218)

Language, in its attentive and forgetful being, with its power of dissimulation that effaces every
determinate meaning and even the existence of the speaker, in the gray neutrality that constitutes the
essential hiding place of all being and thereby frees the space of the image - is neither truth nor time,
neither eternity nor man; it is instead the always undone form of the outside. It places the origin in contact
with death, or rather brings them both to light in the flash of their infinite oscillation - a momentary contact
in a boundless space. The pure outside of the origin, if that is indeed what language is eager to greet, never
solidifies into a penetrable and immobile positivity; and the perpetually rebegun outside of death, although
carried toward the light by the essential forgetting of language, never sets the limit at which truth would
finally begin to take shape. They immediately flip sides. The origin takes on the transparency of the
endless; death opens interminably onto the repetition of the beginning. And what language is (not what it
means, not the form in which it says what it means), what language is in its being, is that softest of voices,
that nearly imperceptible retreat, that weakness deep inside and surrounding every thing and every face -
what bathes the belated effort of the origin and the dawnlike erosion of death in the same neautral light, at
once day and night. Orpheus's murderous forgetting, Ulysses' wait in chains, are the very being of
language. (Foucault, Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside)

My speech is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in the world, that it has suddenly appeared
between me, as I speak, and the being I address: it 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. Death alone allows me to grasp what I want to attain; it exists in words as the only way they
can have meaning. Without death, everything would sink into absurdity and nothingness. (Blanchot, The
Work of Fire, 323-24)

Derrida's emphasis on radical aporia extends to "belief" in this manner: "belief" in its strongest affirmative
sense requires that the thing one is believing in remain unbelievable. That is, "if one only believed in what
was believable, the concept of belief itself would disappear." (In Derrida's reading, Heidegger never
attempts to acknowledge sufficiently the act of belief that allows him to say "we" in the first place (Derrida,
"Faith and Knowledge"). According to Derrida then, if anything would seem to require an act of true belief
it would be atheism. Atheism is precisely the belief in death. Death, only ever knowable by the other, from
the distance of the witness becomes, in a sense maybe, the new God.

Giving urgency and meaning to language, given to each other through the act of witnessing, death is the
condition of possibility for any community, ethics or just relation toward the other. Blanchot's writing is
obsessively occupied with the experience of the death of the other, which is a "limit-experience" because it
exposes the subject to a certain fragility that is unavoidably at once immediate and inaccessible.
What calls me most radically into question? Not my relation to myself as finite or as the consciousness of
being before death or for death, but my presence in the proximity of another who by dying removes himself
definitively, to take upon myself another's death as the only death that concerns me, this is what puts me
beside myself, this is the only separation that can open me, in its very impossibility, to the Openness of a
community. (The Unavowable Community, 9)
he death of the Other is one of those overwhelming events which reverberate throughout L’arrêt de mort
[Death Sentence], and indeed all of Blanchot’s fiction. In such events, the Other affects me, or concerns
me. and at the same time escapes my scrutiny. The traditional directionality of Western thought is inverted.
I am no longer able to refer the advent of the other person to my thought of that person, or to a space of
figural substitution in which my fantasy is able to play freely. Instead, my thought is taken away from me,
estranged, singularized, and necessitated, by the Other’s attraction. Metaphor gives way to metamorphosis.
I am altered, and drawn outside of myself, in an encounter that does not even occur in the time of my own
interiority but precedes the constitution of myself as someone capable ot having such an encounter. Just as
my thinking is sustained by a pensée that exceeds my capacity to think it, so in its turn that pensée is
generated in the violence and surprise of a happening that it is unable to adequately formulate. Just as
writing is not a self-sufficient action, but is drawn into and impelled by a broader movement of compulsion,
so the obsessive repetition that initiates thought is itself exceeded in a moment of contact. The
impersonality and nonintentionality of passion implies, not isolation, but engagement with an Other. Before
the unhappy subsistence of the “I,” there is the shock of the Other’s touch. Prior to the very constitution of
my subjectivity in obsession, there is the singularity of a glance or a voice that summons me. (Shaviro,
Passion and Excess, 153-154)

Through this contact--an incommunicable intimacy or touch existing, or pre-existing 'outside' of language--
it is perhaps the other who is granted something like the potentially earth-and-self-shattering power of God,
and precisely as she gives, by withdrawing. The indifference that normally permits communication (as well
as violence) is shattered by an even greater indifference. Can this touch even really exist? And yet it does.
There is a willing for it, although a willing that does not belong to anything except perhaps this willing
itself. Something takes place. (The disaster...happens.)
Something beautiful takes 'place', but not because it is pure, only because it is bound up with a yearning or
a willing toward a purity it knows to be impossible. Something enigmatic and yet extremely simple.
Something without cure. Speaking of Mallarmé, Blanchot writes:
"If it gets finished (the tale), I shall be cured." This hope is touching in its simplicity. But the tale was not
finished. Impotence--that abandon in which the work holds us and where it requires that we descend in the
concern for its approach--knows no cure. That death is incurable. The absence that Mallarmé hoped to
render pure is not pure. The night is not perfect, it does not welcome, it does not open. It is not the opposite
of day--silence, repose, the cessation of tasks. In the night, silence is speech, and there is no repose, for
there is no position. There the incessant and the uninterrupted reign--not the certainty of death achieved,
but "the eternal torments of Dying." (The Space of Literature, 118-119)

Death always means: the death of the other. But death itself remains unpronounceable; we know only
dying. Is then the witness in fact the one who dies? With something of a crude finger, I would like to point
to a passage that should really not be pointed to in this way, without being read in the full weight (or full
'lightness') of its context. (But then again, maybe context is not so all-important after all.) It comes from a
work of Blanchot's "fiction," and yet it may express things better than any theoretical argument ever could.
At the same time, we are led to believe it is nothing less than an intensely personal act, almost a confession,
the writing of this story, his words, writing as a witness, in a sense the closest thing to him-self that will
have been possible, and so to cite it merely as support for some "theory" may be another violence toward
Blanchot (or at least until several years ago, it would have been). Now it is something different again, but
let us listen:
She had fallen asleep, her face wet with tears. Far from being spoiled by it, her youth seemed dazzling:
only the very young and healthy can bear such a flood of tears that way; her youth made such an
extraordinary impression on me that I completely forgot her illness, her awakening and the danger she was
still in. A little later, however, her expression changed. Almost under my eyes, the tears had dried and the
tear stains had disappeared; she became severe, and her slightly raised lips showed the contraction of her
jaw and her tightly clenched teeth, and gave her a rather mean and suspicious look: her hand moved in
mine to free itself, I wanted to release it, but she seized me again right away with a savage quickness in
which there was nothing human. When the nurse came to talk to me--in a low voice and about nothing
important--J. immediately awoke and said in a cold way, "I have my secrets with her too." She went back to
sleep at once.
...As I listened without pause to her slight breathing, faced by the silence of the night, I felt extremely
helpless and miserable just because of the miracle that I had brought about. Then for the first time, I had a
thought that came back to me later and in the end won out. While I was still in that state of mind--it must
have been about three o'clock--J. woke up without moving at all--that is, she looked at me. That look was
very human: I don't mean affectionate or kind, since it was neither; but it wasn't cold or marked by the
forces of this night. It seemed to understand me profoundly; that is why I found it terribly friendly, though
it was at the same time terribly sad. "Well," she said, "you've made a fine mess of things." She looked at me
again without smiling at all, as she might have smiled, as I afterwards hoped she had, but I think my
expression did not invite a smile. Besides, that look did not last very long.
Even though her eyelids were lowered, I am convinced that from then on she lay awake; she lay awake
because the danger was too great, or for some other reason; but she purposefully kept herself at the edge of
consciousness, manifesting a calm, and an alertness in that calm, that was very unlike her tension of a short
time before. What proved to me that she was not asleep--though she was unaware of what went on around
her because something else held her interest--was that a little later she remembered what had happened
nearly an hour before: the nurse, not sure whether or not she was asleep, had leaned over her and suggested
she have another shot, a suggestion which she did not seem to be at all aware of. But a little later she said to
the nurse, "No, no shot this evening," and repeated insistently, "No more shots." Words, which I have all
the time in the world to remember now. Then she turned slightly towards the nurse and said in a tranquil
tone, "Now then, take a good look at death," and pointed her finger at me. She said this in a very tranquil
and almost friendly way, but without smiling. ("Death Sentence")
A sentence of death, spoken with a finger, is passed from the dying to the witness. The witness receives a
death sentence, with an exchange of looks, and for a death that is not his. The affinities shared by this
passage and the meditations on God that are pursued by Derrida in The Gift of Death are striking.

One hesitates to read too much. But with that worry in mind, it might just be noted that in Blanchot's story
the character of the nurse (if she is a character, as well as--perhaps?--a real person) occupies an interesting
position as a sort of mediator between the narrator and "J." The death worn on the witness's or narrator's
face can only be seen by a third party or a second witness. In a strange way, then, the nurse is not unlike a
sort of priest, mediating between a God (the narrator--death)--a God who sees in the other (J.) in secret,
without himself being seen-- and J. herself. But the story also lends itself to being read in an opposite
direction (and this is part of the performative ambiguity--if such a thing can be said without raising to many
eyebrows at once--of the text), whereby J. is clearly the figure of God ("you've made a fine mess of
things")--a God whose omniscience (seeing every secret) with regard to the narrator is a profound comfort,
although one that is at once "terribly friendly" and "terribly sad."
In any case, much more might be said about this passage, and this story where every act of naming may or
may not be quite deliberate. Could it have been written--and can it be read--by someone who hasn't felt
these things as well? Blanchot writes of having once been convinced he was about to die, before the firing
squad. He miraculously escaped, but it would seem an experience that left him forever marked by death.
An "alertness in that calm"--isn't this also the "passivity" of which The Writing of the Disaster speaks at
such length? A friendship without friendship, a gift without giving--these are the aporias that Derrida
transforms from Blanchot's logic of the 'neuter'. In his reading of Blanchot's récit, "The Instant of My
Death", Derrida elaborates:
Life can only be light from the moment that it stays dead-living while being freed, that is to say, released
from itself. A life without life, an experience of lightness, an instance of “without,” a logic without logic of
the “X without X,” or of the “not” or of the “except,” of the “being without being,” etc. In “A Primitive
Scene,” we could read: “To live without living, like dying without death: writing returns us to these
enigmatic propositions.”
The proof that we have here, with this testimony and reference to an event, the logical and textual matrix of
Blanchot’s entire corpus, so to speak, is that this lightness of “without,” the thinking of the “X without X”
comes to sign, consign or countersign the experience of the neuter as ne uter, neither-nor by bringing it
together. This experience draws to itself and endures, in its very passion, the thinking as well as the writing
of Blanchot, between literature and the right to death. Neither...nor: in this way the witness translates the
untranslatable demourance....The neuter is the experience or passion of a thinking that cannot stop at either
opposite without also overcoming the opposition -- neither this nor that, neither happiness nor unhappiness
(Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, 88-90).

There is of course also a 'weaker' sense in which the phrase "death sentence" may be read. As precisely a
sort of entirely banal prohibition against dying--a living death instead of a dying life, if you will. For
example, the political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, currently serving his twenty-second (24) year in solitary
confinement (and in support of whose case Derrida wrote, years ago, to then-President Bill Clinton), has
been given such a "death sentence."
To presume to pronounce the other's death--is this to exercise the violence of a sovereign, as if one could
ever justly assume adequate authority over whether the other lives or dies (the implication being that one
had then somehow mastered one's own death); moreover to justify this power as the condition of possibility
for any relation at all to the other, or indeed of any politics--such might even be the definition of injustice,
mightn't? Derrida's critical reading of Carl Schmitt in The Politics of Friendship would point away from
such a politics. Where Schmitt would affirm the permanent threat of war between sovereign nation-states
(annihilation, even, extending without limit the exigency of the Cold War's logic of "deterrance") as the
condition of the political, Derrida would rather dream of something else, and not only because he sees in
Schmitt's analysis a dangerous sanctioning of a certain sanctified or legalized "killing without murder."
With regard to Schmitt, Derrida writes (and it is well worth reproducing at a little length for the playful
echoes of Blanchot's questions and indeed Blanchot's style that appear):
One can infer symmetrically that there is no friend without this possibility of killing which establishes a
non-natural community. Not only could I enter into a relationship of friendship only with a mortal, but I
could love in friendship only a mortal at least exposed to so-called violent death--that is, exposed to being
killed, possibly by myself. And by myself, in lovence itself, in an essential, not an accidental manner. To
love in love or friendship would always mean: I can kill you, you can kill me, we can kill ourselves.
Together or one another, masculine or feminine. Therefore, in all cases, we already are (possibly, but this
possibility is, precisely, real) dead for one another...Let us not forget that the political would precisely be
that which thus endlessly binds or opposes the friend--enemy/enemy--friend couple in the drive or decision
of death, in the putting to death or in the stake of death. We were speaking of the political enemy at the
beginning of this analysis. A hypothesis, then: and what if another lovence (in friendship or in love) were
bound to an affirmation of life, to the endless repetition of this affirmation, only in seeking its way (in
loving its way, and this would be phileîn itself) in the step beyond the political, or beyond that political as
the horizon of finitude, putting to death and putting of death. The phileîn beyond the political or another
politics for loving, another politics to love, for love (à aimer)? Must one dissociate and associate together
differently pólis, politeía, philía, Éros, and so forth? If a choice between these three hypotheses and these
three logical chains were simply or clearly possible, we would make that choice, we would choose one
immediately. In this very place.
Hence we must be patient at the crossroads and endure this undecidable triviality. Without it--and this is the
thesis and the decision--no decision would be possible, nor even any friendship. There we are. In this very
place? No, there.(The Politics of Friendship, 122-123)

No doubt what then began for the young man was the torment of injustice. No more ecstasy; the feeling
that he was only living because, even in the eyes of the Russians, he belonged to a noble class.
This was war: life for some, for others, the cruelty of assassination.
There remained, however, at the moment when the shooting was no longer but to come, 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. I know, I imagine
that this unanalyzable feeling changed what there remained for him of existence. As if death outside of him
could only henceforth collide with the death in him. "I am alive." "No, you are dead." ("The Instant of My
Death", 7-9)

This lightness neither frees nor relieves of anything; it is neither a salvation through freedom nor an
opening to the infinite because this passion is without freedom and this death without death is a
confirmation of finitude. Yet here is a more affirmative response, if not a more positive and more assured
one...We could appeal to all of Blanchot's texts on the neuter here--the neither-nor that is beyond all
dialectic, of course, but also beyond the negative grammar that the word neuter, ne uter, seems to indicate.
The neuter is the experience or passion of a thinking that cannot stop at either opposite without also
overcoming the opposition--neither this nor that, neither happiness nor unhappiness. (Demeure: Fiction
and Testimony)

Taking issue with the formula often attributed to Kafka--"Write to be able to die--Die to be able to write"--
Blanchot in "The Work and Death's Space" responds:
At first glance, the preoccupation of the writer who writes in order to be able to die is an affront to common
sense. It would seem we can be sure of at least one event: it will come without any approach on our part,
without our bestirring ourselves at all; yes, it will come. That is true, but at the same time it is not true, and
indeed quite possibly it lacks truth altogether. At least it does not have the kind of truth which we feel in
the world, which is the measure of our action and of our presence in the world. What makes me disappear
from the world cannot find its guarantee there; and thus, in a way, having no guarantee, it is not certain.
This explains why no one is linked to death by real certitude. No one is sure of dying. No one doubts death,
but no one can think of certain death except doubtfully, the brittleness of the unsure. It is as in order to
think authentically upon the certainty of death, we had to let thought sink into doubt and inauthenticity, or
yet again as if when we strive to think on death, more than our brain--the very substance and truth of
thought itself--were bound to crumble. This in itself indicates that if men in general do not thing about
death, if they avoid confronting it, it is doubtless in order to flee death and hide from it, but this escape is
possible only because death itself is perpetual flight before death, and because it is the deep of
dissimulation. Thus to hide from it is in a certain way to hide in it. (The Space of Literature, 95)

In the "brittleness of the unsure," thought finds its necessity. The real is fragile, and this is precisely what
makes it real. However, the real has already been forgotten, and then remembered. Following in the steps of
Nietzsche, and perhaps even skipping a mountain peak every now and then (though we could argue about
whether he reaches the clouds), Blanchot emphasizes that memory is always a function of forgetting.
Impossible necessary death; why do these words--and the experience to which they refer (the
inexperience)--escape comprehension? Why this collision of mutually exclusive terms? Why efface them
by considering them as a fiction peculiar to some particular author? It is only natural. Thought cannot
welcome that which it bears within itself and which sustains it, except by forgetting. (The Writing of the
Disaster, 67)

However, returning to the phrase: “Prevented from dying by death itself." One way of approaching this
enigmatic statement might run more or less like this: if death as such is only knowable or realizable through
the experience of watching the other die--of witnessing the other in their absolute mortality from a
perspective and necessary distance that they themselves will never know--then this “death” is also in some
sense a pronouncement of immortality, signifying the impossibility of one's own death.
But in another sense (and there are many--Derrida has quipped in Demeure that “years could be spent on
this sentence alone”--which is most convincing coming from him, but in any case), if one thinks this
sentence with a different emphasis, one placed not unlike invisible quotes on “dying” rather than on death,
then, again, the aporia might be said to be placed on dying. In this sense, one’s need for a kind of dying--an
infinite dying, in fact--would be violently abridged by the imposition: death. (In a sense it is the same
everyday imposition of calling someone by their name, which is at once to reference a time when such a
call cannot be answered, but only the name itself will echo.)
In other words, it is essential to be able to die without in fact dying, to die without death--otherwise the
ethical demand of death is not addressed, and "death" becomes only a kind of epithet or slogan hurled at the
living. One can never be through responding to the dead, or rather to the demand placed by the enigma of
their disappearance. Just how one remains faithful to this infinite demand (and what being "faithful" might
mean) without, as Freud once said, being “unconsciously afraid of the dead and because of this hidden
awe...often led to speak in overpraising term," is not a simple question (Lacoue-Labarthe, "The Echo of the
Subject," 158). Freud, for one, might suggest that it is also a question of shame.

It is a question whose tone has been uniquely and permanently altered by the events of the second World
War. It may be a question of an “ethics without redemption,” but, paradoxically, also one of lightness, and
perhaps, above all, of friendship.

To be truly responsible, in the strongest possible sense of this word--a word that is so important in linking
Blanchot and Derrida, and in a manner that may finally open beyond either one of them--requires a
negotiation of the aporia of dying. Dying is at bottom an impossible contradiction that can never be
resolved with any finality, through the mantric or numbing false comfort of any formula, program or
prescription--there is in fact no “at bottom” at all.
The "I" that is responsible for others, the I bereft of selfhood, is sheer fragility, through and through on
trial. This I without any identity is responsible for him to whom he can give no response; this I must answer
in an interrogation where no question is put; he is a question directed to others from whom no answer can
be expected either. The Other does not answer. (The Writing of the Disaster, 119)

The inessentiality and necessity of dying, for any ethics (as essentiality necessarily devoid of essence), can
only be approached by first acknowledging the impossibility of doing so. (Which is not, of course, what
anybody likes to hear, and it may be only too easy to underestimate the power of this dislike.) But then as
soon as one chooses an approach--a decision that is always in some sense "mad"--so Derrida follows
Kierkegaard--one is constantly in danger of letting one’s style seduce and subsume the meaning or obscure
the stakes of one’s intervention. In fact there is no avoiding this obscurity, but only degrees of patience.
If in fact every interpretation cannot help but transform what it interprets, then one is still responsible for
how one goes about transforming, deforming, and reforming, even if the result is always failure. There
might be a kind of relief in this, if it were not also the greatest burden in the world: how to fail responsibly
and in failing, disappear (or nearly disappear)...with style (but not into style). To fail so that in failing, there
is still genuine risk.

"Prevented from dying by death itself." This sentence plays on the many readings made possible depending
on which language--general or restricted, weak or strong--is heard, and when. In the end, every reading
might amount to much the same point. But there might also be a kind of violence in reducing the enigmatic
quality or multiplying expressiveness of such a phrase to a single point, because the inability of language to
express the full weight of such a point is also part of the point. That is, to dismiss such phrases as mere
"word play" is to miss hearing the serious tone of the game--one refusing to be excused from aporia and
contradiction.

The phrase, “prevented from dying by death itself” must finally be read in the light of the camps--where
"light" is not a 'lightness' at all; it is perhaps a blinding glare, a "night without darkness," or a day without
dawn.

"Prevented from dying by death itself." Is this not the self-sacrificial "leap" that is required of 'belief'?
Yes, let us remember the earliest Hegel. He too, even prior to his "early" philosophy, considered that the
two deaths were indissociable, and that only the act of confronting death--not merely of facing it or of
exposing oneself to its danger (which is the distinguishing feature of heroic courage), but of entering into
its space, of undergoing it as infinite death and also as mere death, "natural death"--could found the
sovereignty of masterhood: the mind and its prerogatives. The result was perhaps, absurdly, that the
experience which initiates the movement of the dialectic--the experience which none experiences, the
experience of death--stopped it right away, and that the entire subsequent process retained a sort of memory
of this halt, as if of an aporia which always had still to be accounted for. (The Writing of the Disaster, 68)