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Blanchot, Maurice, The Instant of My Death; and Derrida, Jacques, Demeure:
Fiction and Testimony. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford UP,
2000. Pp. 115.
This book presents Blanchots Instant of My Death, a tiny prose text
of 1994 so spare that nearly any paraphrase overwhelms it, followed by
Derridas Demeure, a hundred-page lecture on the Blanchot text. In Blanchots
storyor memoir, or fantasythe narrator recalls a young man nearly shot
in the last days of World War II. A roving band of soldiers pillages his region
of the French countryside, burning farms and killing the farmers sons. The
lieutenant orders his men to execute the young man, then moves away,
distracted by the noise of an explosion. It turns out that the soldiers are
actually Russians from the traitorous General Vlassovs army, and one of
them, who explains this, dismisses the young man. Instead of losing his life,
he loses only a manuscript, which the soldiers remove from his house. The
narrator reflects on the strange feelings of elation and guilt that forever alter
this mans now posthumous life, as if the death outside of him could only
henceforth collide with the death in him (9). In a kind of postlude, the
protagonistclearly a literary figure now, more and more resembling
Blanchotmeets with Malraux and Paulhan concerning the lost manuscript.
Elizabeth Rottenberg, translator of the present volume, renders demeure
as residence (84) or abode [la demeure]; that which abides [ce qui
demeure] (16), remains (7, 11), or resides (77); that which holds
abidingly [ce qui se tient demeure], and that by which one must abide [ce
qui met en demeure] (16); demeure means permanently (30). Derrida points
out that Blanchot uses the word five times, including these two instances
towards the end of the story: There remained [demeurait], 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 . . . . All that remains [seul demeure] is
the feeling of lightness that is death itself (7,11). The notion of la demeure
recalls Derridas thoughts on survival (survivre) from Living On, his
1981 essay on Blanchots novella Arrt de Mort. In that novella, a dying young
woman survives her prognoses, then death itself. Survival or living on
living after lifehas been a particularly influential deconstructive lexeme,
in a league with diffrance and supplementarity. Living on aptly describes
inheritances, traces, and half-lives whose quasi-existence overflows classical
ontology. It names a realm where representation can no longer keep account
of the difference between continuance and vanishing, positing an ambiguity
within ordinary life upon which concepts of animacy and inanimacy depend.
Since Blanchots text dramatizes everything that can go by the name of
living on, what does Derrida add to the analysis of living on, and to Blanchot
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interpretation, by focusing on The Instant of My Death? What, in fact, can
Blanchot himself add to Arrt de Mort by writing this text? Although Arrt de
Mort is also set on very specific dates, as Derrida notes, the historical moment
of The Instant of My Death is more heavily underlined, as is its ambiguous
status as truth or fiction. Derridas lecture concerns itself with the dynamic
between these features: how are we to understand Blanchots simultaneous
insistence on sociohistorical precision and his evasion of autobiography, and
how does this simultaneity contextualize living on? Derrida remarks that
the dnouement of the story reflects on the young mans residence in the
villages Chteau, which was spared destruction [b]ecause it was the
Chteau (7). The young mans survivors guilt is compounded by the class
difference between himself and the farmers sons, even though his class does
not seem directly operative in the accident of his survival (as is the case with
the preservation of his house). Perhaps distinguish[ing] the empirical from
the essential in the manner of Hegel, whose own wartime experience is
mentioned in the story, he is tormented by the feeling that he was only
living because, in the eyes of the Russians, he belonged to a noble class (7).
For the rest of his life he remains under the protection of the Chteau, so to
speak, for better or worse. Strictly speaking, the guilt that colors his afterlife
is separate from the state of living on itself and from the feeling of
lightness at the instant of death: these are three distinct effects of the whole
scenario. Nonetheless, living onincluding its production of neo-Cartesian
self-consciousness in the narrators self-division into third- and first-
personsseems to run parallel to social privilege and ethical compromise,
if not to be formed by them.
I am not sure how to understand this parallel, which Derrida does not
address. At face value, the obsessive guilt in The Instant of My Death is
not theoretically helpful. Living on, as I mentioned earlier, is a constituent
of conscious life as such, like the cogito. Its self-division constitutes an odd
existence, as Derrida writes, but at the same time very banal. Every one of
us can say at every instant: really, I dont remember what I felt; I cant describe
what I felt at that moment . . . What was me is no longer me (66). Derrida
argues that it is necessary to take The Instant of My Death as exemplary:
its logic assumes a singular instant of my death in general. Singular in
general. If this text is readable . . . it would be so insofar as it is exemplary
(91). Filtering a general structure of experience through the persistence of
social privilege, as Blanchot does, qualifies its formal nature. The story
cultivates an analogy that loosens its own exemplarity, suggesting different
flavors of Cartesian consciousness for different classes. The suggestion is
worth considering, and Demeure misses an opportunity to do so.
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Derrida reads Blanchot nearly reverently in Living On, The Law of
Genre, and elsewhere. The last fifty pages of Demeure, too, follow The
Instant of My Death almost word by word, line by line. Some of the
explication lacks energy, at least in comparison with Derridas literary
readings of the sixties and seventies. A highlight of Derridas work here is
the subtlety of his entry point into the issue of justice: a sensitivity to the
multiple languages Blanchot evokes. The narrator hears inarticulate howls,
Russian that is at first unrecognizable in this context, and French as spoken
by French, German, and Russian people in an all-too-intimate Europe.
Collisions between these languages identify faultlines and trigger a series
of guilty and redemptive gestures. At first the officers shamefully normal
French (3) conceals the Russianness of this unit from the young man.
Shameful for whom? Derrida asks, and answers, a Nazism whose
language is French, a Nazism that has been naturalized French or a French
that has been naturalized Nazi (59). In contrast, the French of the Russian
soldier who steps forward to dismiss the young man is not normal: he
approached and said in a firm voice, Were not Germans, Russians [nous,
pas allemands, russes], and with a sort of laugh, Vlassov army, and made
a sign for him to disappear (5). Standard French is compatible with Nazism,
while Russian French signs the soldiers break with his commander on the
basis of Russian self-identitya betrayal of a betrayal, a double negative
that restores a modicum of order. The young man is saved by the nearby
explosion of Resistance action and by a Russian soldiertwo powers that
really did influence the chain of events leading to Frances liberation. If the
lieutenant wants to execute the young man because he believes, wrongly,
that he might be in the Resistance (61), the Russian soldier may release him
for the same reason and equally wrongly. He is treated as an enemy, as an
enemy of the Nazis, Derrida notes (60). Therein lies what Blanchot calls
perhaps the error of injustice (3). In other words, Derrida remarks, it
would have been just for him to dieperhaps(54).
The possible justice of the execution that didnt occur can be read in
two ways, as can the social privilege running parallel to the state of survival.
The shortest sentence in the storyDeadimmortal (5)embodies this
alternation. The young man is saved and/or doomed, exonerated and/or
condemned. Derrida entertains the possibility that, in depicting the young
man as being possible to mistake for a Resistance fighter, Blanchotan author
with a contemporary and literal need to exculpate his wartime activitiesis
engineering an alliance between himself and the Resistance: One might
insinuate that [Blanchot] is exploiting a certain irresponsibility of literary
fiction in order to pass off, like contraband, an allegedly real testimony, this
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time not fictional, coming to justify or exculpate in a historical reality the
political behavior of an author easily identified with both the narrator and
the central character.
In this space, one can put forward the hypothesis that Blanchot intends
finally to mark, by means of a fiction so obviously testimonial and
autobiographical in appearance (autothanatological, in truth), that he is
someone the Germans wanted to shoot in a situation where he would visibly
have been on the side of the Resistance fighters. One can always call into
question the purity of this testimony and sense calculation in it.
I am convinced that calculation is present. How could it not be? And in
the name of what would one want it to be absent, thus depriving the account
of any self-justification or self-explanation? The testimony is therefore
probably not unjustified, but there is this calculation that we must take
into account in our reading. (Derrida, 55-56)
This is the first possibility: the young mans death would be correct, and his
survival an injustice, if he were in some sense a member of the Resistance.
The other possibility, however, is that his execution, though taking place for
the wrong reasons, would have been just, precisely because he was not a
member of the Resistance. Blanchots description of the way the manuscript
came to be lost supports this interpretation: Everything was searched . . . .
Some money was taken; in a separate room, the high chamber, the lieutenant
had found papers and a sort of thick manuscriptwhich perhaps contained
war plans. Finally he left (7).
Its easy to assume that the phrase which perhaps contained war plans
is indirect discourse occurring in the mind of the lieutenant, explaining why
he takes the manuscript. But perhaps it does contain a sort of war plans:
wartime writings (an omnious phrase, after the discovery of Paul de Mans
Le Soir articles), a narrative that would reveal the authors relation to the
war. If that were the case, losing this manuscript might be yet another stroke
of unjust luck, enabling the wartime writer to die and another writer, the
writer of The Instant of My Death, to live in his place. This second
possibility also gratifies the author-narrator insofar as it allows him to confess
that he should have died and thus gain the credit of difference from a past
self. The Instant of My Death thus engages the Rousseauvian structure of
confession falling into excuse, of which de Man writes. Like Rousseaus
Confessions and de Mans Excuses, it is a text that cannot wincannot
justify the acts of its protagonist and cannot seem not to be trying to do so.
Derrida deals best with the elusive mode of The Instant of my Death.
Is it a story, a thinly veiled memoir, or the fictive illusion of a thinly veiled
memoir? For Derrida, the texts wavering quality expresses the
phenomenality of its occurrences. The topos of the instant of death without
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death, here and elsewhere in Blanchot, links the difficulty of conceiving
non-events to the unpredictability and fathomlessness of ordinary events
(91). As in Specters of Marx, a non-event, lie, fiction, or phantasmatic
hallucination has to be understood as having taken place . . . through a
phantasmaticity, according to a spectrality . . . that is its very law (91).
Spectralitya law of appearanceunderwrites events and non-events,
histories and fictions: it is here that false testimony and literary fiction can
in truth still testify, at least as symptom, from the moment that the possibility
of fiction has structuredbut with a fracturewhat is called real experience
(92). Under this reading, what is important in the feeling of lightness that
remains with the narrator is that it is only phenomenal, and survives
independent of reasons. Derrida suggests that the unaccountable persistence
of merely phenomenal experiencethe independent life of its conviction
be taken seriously as a component of understanding. Derridas thinking
about the meaning of appearance, which has been gathering force since
Specters of Marx, stands to become an important part of his philosophy.
Demeure contributes in a minor way to this thought, while raising questions
about the articulation of class with fundamental structures of mind and
further deepening Blanchots enigma.
Rei Terada
University of Michigan
Brandt, Joan. Geopoetics: The Politics of Mimesis in Poststructuralist French Poetry
and Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. 344.
In concluding Geopoetics: The Politics of Mimesis in Poststructuralist French
Poetry and Theory, Joan Brandt speaks of the spirit of hospitality (251),
conjured by Jacques Derrida and Edmond Jabs. Brandt is referring to
Derridas quasi-concept of the New International explored in Specters of
Marx and Jabss thinking on a Jewish community of limits. While Jabs
has gone relatively unremarked, except among French scholars in the Anglo-
American academy, Derridas suggestive figure can hardly be said to have
met with anything resembling a spirit of hospitality on the part of the Left
in the English-speaking world, since the publication of Specters of Marx in
1994.
Subsequently, the translation of Derridas The Politics of Friendship has
also had relatively little positive impact on the political programs of the
traditional Left. Indeed, there is little apparent understanding in such
quarters of the political potential in the work of deconstruction, which, in