The Instant of My Death, and: Demeure: Fiction and Testimony(review)

Rei Terada

SubStance, Issue 96 (Volume 30, Number 3), 2001, pp. 132-136 (Article)

Published by University of Wisconsin PressDOI: 10.1353/sub.2001.0034

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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 Blanchot’s “Instant of My Death,” a tiny prose textof 1994 so spare that nearly any paraphrase overwhelms it, followed byDerrida’s Demeure, a hundred-page lecture on the Blanchot text. In Blanchot’sstory—or memoir, or fantasy—the narrator recalls a young man nearly shotin the last days of World War II. A roving band of soldiers pillages his regionof the French countryside, burning farms and killing the farmers’ sons. Thelieutenant orders his men to execute the young man, then moves away,distracted by the noise of an explosion. It turns out that the soldiers areactually Russians from the traitorous General Vlassov’s army, and one ofthem, who explains this, dismisses the young man. Instead of losing his life,he loses only a manuscript, which the soldiers remove from his house. Thenarrator reflects on the strange feelings of elation and guilt that forever alterthis man’s now posthumous life, “as if the death outside of him could onlyhenceforth collide with the death in him” (9). In a kind of postlude, theprotagonist—clearly a literary figure now, more and more resemblingBlanchot—meets with Malraux and Paulhan concerning the lost manuscript.

Elizabeth Rottenberg, translator of the present volume, renders demeureas “residence” (84) or “abode” [la demeure]; “that which abides” [ce quidemeure] (16), “remains” (7, 11), or “resides” (77); “that which holdsabidingly” [ce qui se tient à demeure], and “that by which one must abide” [cequi met en demeure] (16); à demeure means “permanently” (30). Derrida pointsout that Blanchot uses the word five times, including these two instancestowards the end of the story: “There remained [demeurait], however, at themoment when the shooting was no longer but to come, the feeling of lightnessthat I would not know how to translate . . . . All that remains [seul demeure] isthe feeling of lightness that is death itself” (7,11). The notion of la demeurerecalls Derrida’s thoughts on “survival” (survivre) from “Living On,” his1981 essay on Blanchot’s novella Arrêt de Mort. In that novella, a dying youngwoman survives her prognoses, then death itself. “Survival” or “living on”—living after life—has been a particularly influential deconstructive lexeme,in a league with différance and supplementarity. “Living on” aptly describesinheritances, traces, and half-lives whose quasi-existence overflows classicalontology. It names a realm where representation can no longer keep accountof the difference between continuance and vanishing, positing an ambiguitywithin ordinary life upon which concepts of animacy and inanimacy depend.

Since Blanchot’s text dramatizes everything that can go by the name ofliving 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, canBlanchot himself add to Arrêt de Mort by writing this text? Although Arrêt deMort is also set on very specific dates, as Derrida notes, the historical momentof “The Instant of My Death” is more heavily underlined, as is its ambiguousstatus as truth or fiction. Derrida’s lecture concerns itself with the dynamicbetween these features: how are we to understand Blanchot’s simultaneousinsistence on sociohistorical precision and his evasion of autobiography, andhow does this simultaneity contextualize “living on”? Derrida remarks thatthe dénouement of the story reflects on the young man’s residence in thevillage’s “Château,” which was spared destruction “[b]ecause it was theChâteau” (7). The young man’s survivor’s guilt is compounded by the classdifference between himself and the farmers’ sons, even though his class doesnot seem directly operative in the accident of his survival (as is the case withthe preservation of his house). Perhaps “distinguish[ing] the empirical fromthe essential” in the manner of Hegel, whose own wartime experience ismentioned in the story, he is tormented by “the feeling that he was onlyliving 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 Château, so tospeak, for better or worse. Strictly speaking, the guilt that colors his afterlifeis separate from the state of “living on” itself and from the “feeling oflightness” at the instant of death: these are three distinct effects of the wholescenario. Nonetheless, living on—including its production of neo-Cartesianself-consciousness in the narrator’s self-division into third- and first-persons—seems 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 notaddress. At face value, the obsessive guilt in “The Instant of My Death” isnot theoretically helpful. Living on, as I mentioned earlier, is a constituentof conscious life as such, like the cogito. Its self-division constitutes “an oddexistence,” as Derrida writes, “but at the same time very banal. Every one ofus can say at every instant: really, I don’t remember what I felt; I can’t describewhat I felt at that moment . . . What was me is no longer me” (66). Derridaargues 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 ingeneral. If this text is readable . . . it would be so insofar as it is exemplary”(91). Filtering a general structure of experience through the persistence ofsocial privilege, as Blanchot does, qualifies its formal nature. The storycultivates an analogy that loosens its own exemplarity, suggesting differentflavors of Cartesian consciousness for different classes. The suggestion isworth considering, and Demeure misses an opportunity to do so.

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Derrida reads Blanchot nearly reverently in “Living On,” “The Law ofGenre,” and elsewhere. The last fifty pages of Demeure, too, follow “TheInstant of My Death” almost word by word, line by line. Some of theexplication lacks energy, at least in comparison with Derrida’s literaryreadings of the sixties and seventies. A highlight of Derrida’s work here isthe subtlety of his entry point into the issue of justice: a sensitivity to themultiple languages Blanchot evokes. The narrator hears inarticulate howls,Russian that is at first unrecognizable in this context, and French as spokenby French, German, and Russian people in an all-too-intimate Europe.Collisions between these languages identify faultlines and trigger a seriesof guilty and redemptive gestures. At first the officer’s “shamefully normalFrench” (3) conceals the Russianness of this unit from the young man.“Shameful for whom?” Derrida asks, and answers, “a Nazism whoselanguage is French, a Nazism that has been naturalized French or a Frenchthat has been naturalized Nazi” (59). In contrast, the French of the Russiansoldier who steps forward to dismiss the young man is not “normal”: he“approached and said in a firm voice, ‘We’re not Germans, Russians’ [‘nous,pas allemands, russes’], and with a sort of laugh, ‘Vlassov army,’ and madea sign for him to disappear” (5). Standard French is compatible with Nazism,while Russian French signs the soldier’s break with his commander on thebasis of Russian self-identity—a betrayal of a betrayal, a double negativethat restores a modicum of order. The young man is saved by the nearbyexplosion of Resistance action and by a Russian soldier—two powers thatreally did influence the chain of events leading to France’s liberation. If thelieutenant wants to execute the young man because he believes, wrongly,that he might be in the Resistance (61), the Russian soldier may release himfor the same reason and equally wrongly. “He is treated as an enemy, as anenemy of the Nazis,” Derrida notes (60). Therein lies what Blanchot calls“perhaps the error of injustice” (3). “In other words,” Derrida remarks, “itwould have been just for him to die—perhaps”(54).

The possible justice of the execution that didn’t occur can be read intwo ways, as can the social privilege running parallel to the state of survival.The shortest sentence in the story—”Dead—immortal” (5)—embodies thisalternation. The young man is saved and/or doomed, exonerated and/orcondemned. Derrida entertains the possibility that, in depicting the youngman as being possible to mistake for a Resistance fighter, Blanchot—an authorwith a contemporary and literal need to exculpate his wartime activities—isengineering an alliance between himself and the Resistance: One mightinsinuate that [Blanchot] is exploiting a certain irresponsibility of literaryfiction 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 thepolitical behavior of an author easily identified with both the narrator andthe central character.

In this space, one can put forward the hypothesis that Blanchot intendsfinally to mark, by means of a fiction so obviously testimonial andautobiographical in appearance (autothanatological, in truth), that he issomeone the Germans wanted to shoot in a situation where he would visiblyhave been on the side of the Resistance fighters. One can always call intoquestion the purity of this testimony and sense calculation in it.

I am convinced that calculation is present. How could it not be? And inthe name of what would one want it to be absent, thus depriving the accountof any self-justification or self-explanation? The testimony is thereforeprobably not unjustified, but there is this calculation that we must takeinto account in our reading. (Derrida, 55-56)

This is the first possibility: the young man’s death would be correct, and hissurvival an injustice, if he were in some sense a member of the Resistance.The other possibility, however, is that his execution, though taking place forthe wrong reasons, would have been just, precisely because he was not amember of the Resistance. Blanchot’s description of the way the manuscriptcame to be lost supports this interpretation: “Everything was searched . . . .Some money was taken; in a separate room, ‘the high chamber,’ the lieutenanthad found papers and a sort of thick manuscript—which perhaps containedwar plans. Finally he left” (7).

It’s easy to assume that the phrase “which perhaps contained war plans”is indirect discourse occurring in the mind of the lieutenant, explaining whyhe takes the manuscript. But perhaps it does contain a sort of war plans:wartime writings (an omnious phrase, after the discovery of Paul de Man’sLe Soir articles), a narrative that would reveal the author’s relation to thewar. If that were the case, losing this manuscript might be yet another strokeof unjust luck, enabling the wartime writer to die and another writer, thewriter of “The Instant of My Death,” to live in his place. This secondpossibility also gratifies the author-narrator insofar as it allows him to confessthat he should have died and thus gain the credit of difference from a pastself. “The Instant of My Death” thus engages the Rousseauvian structure ofconfession falling into excuse, of which de Man writes. Like Rousseau’sConfessions and de Man’s “Excuses,” it is a text that cannot win—cannotjustify 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 veiledmemoir? For Derrida, the text’s wavering quality expresses thephenomenality 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 conceivingnon-events to the unpredictability and fathomlessness of ordinary events(91). As in Specters of Marx, a non-event, lie, fiction, or “phantasmatichallucination” has to be understood as having “taken place . . . through aphantasmaticity, according to a spectrality . . . that is its very law” (91).Spectrality—a law of appearance—underwrites events and non-events,histories and fictions: “it is here that false testimony and literary fiction canin truth still testify, at least as symptom, from the moment that the possibilityof fiction has structured—but with a fracture—what 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 survivesindependent of reasons. Derrida suggests that the unaccountable persistenceof merely phenomenal experience—the independent life of its conviction—be taken seriously as a component of understanding. Derrida’s thinkingabout the meaning of appearance, which has been gathering force sinceSpecters of Marx, stands to become an important part of his philosophy.Demeure contributes in a minor way to this thought, while raising questionsabout the articulation of class with fundamental structures of mind andfurther deepening Blanchot’s enigma.

Rei TeradaUniversity of Michigan

Brandt, Joan. Geopoetics: The Politics of Mimesis in Poststructuralist French Poetryand Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. 344.

In concluding Geopoetics: The Politics of Mimesis in Poststructuralist FrenchPoetry and Theory, Joan Brandt speaks of the “spirit of hospitality” (251),conjured by Jacques Derrida and Edmond Jabès. Brandt is referring toDerrida’s quasi-concept of the “New International” explored in Specters ofMarx and Jabès’s thinking on a “Jewish community of limits.” While Jabèshas gone relatively unremarked, except among French scholars in the Anglo-American academy, Derrida’s suggestive figure can hardly be said to havemet with anything resembling a “spirit of hospitality” on the part of the Leftin the English-speaking world, since the publication of Specters of Marx in1994.

Subsequently, the translation of Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship hasalso had relatively little positive impact on the political programs of thetraditional Left. Indeed, there is little apparent understanding in suchquarters of the political potential in the work of deconstruction, which, in