The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Meridian, Stanford, California) - Softcover

Blanchot, Maurice; Derrida, Jacques

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804733260 ISBN 13: 9780804733267

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2000

Synopsis

This volume records a remarkable encounter in critical and philosophical thinking: a meeting of two of the great pioneers in contemporary thought, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, who are also bound together by friendship and a complex relation to their own pasts. More than a literary text with critical commentary, it constitutes an event of central significance for contemporary philosophical, literary, and political concerns.

The book consists of The Instant of My Death, a powerful short prose piece by Blanchot, and an extended essay by Derrida that reads it in the context of questions of literature and of bearing witness. Blanchot's narrative concerns a moment when a young man is brought before a firing squad during World War II and then suddenly finds himself released from his near death. The incident, written in the third person, is suggestively autobiographical―from the title, several remarks in the text, and a letter Blanchot wrote about a similar incident in his own life―but only insofar as it raises questions for Blanchot about what such an experience might mean. The accident of near death becomes, in the instant the man is released, the accident of a life he no longer possesses. The text raises the question of what it means to write about a (non)experience one cannot claim as one's own, and as such is a text of testimony or witness.

Derrida's reading of Blanchot links the problem of testimony to the problem of the secret and to the notion of the instant. It thereby provides the elements of a more expansive reassessment of literature, testimony, and truth. In addressing the complex relation between writing and history, Derrida also implicitly reflects on questions concerning the relation between European intellectuals and World War II.

About this title

About the Author

Stanford has published two books by Maurice Blanchot: Friendship (1997) and The Work of Fire (1995). Stanford has published seven books by Jacques Derrida, most recently Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (1999).

From the Back Cover

This volume records a remarkable encounter in critical and philosophical thinking: a meeting of two of the great pioneers in contemporary thought, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, who are also bound together by friendship and a complex relation to their own pasts. More than a literary text with critical commentary, it constitutes an event of central significance for contemporary philosophical, literary, and political concerns.
The book consists of The Instant of My Death, a powerful short prose piece by Blanchot, and an extended essay by Derrida that reads it in the context of questions of literature and of bearing witness. Blanchot’s narrative concerns a moment when a young man is brought before a firing squad during World War II and then suddenly finds himself released from his near death. The incident, written in the third person, is suggestively autobiographical—from the title, several remarks in the text, and a letter Blanchot wrote about a similar incident in his own life—but only insofar as it raises questions for Blanchot about what such an experience might mean. The accident of near death becomes, in the instant the man is released, the accident of a life he no longer possesses. The text raises the question of what it means to write about a (non)experience one cannot claim as one’s own, and as such is a text of testimony or witness.
Derrida’s reading of Blanchot links the problem of testimony to the problem of the secret and to the notion of the instant. It thereby provides the elements of a more expansive reassessment of literature, testimony, and truth. In addressing the complex relation between writing and history, Derrida also implicitly reflects on questions concerning the relation between European intellectuals and World War II.

From the Inside Flap

This volume records a remarkable encounter in critical and philosophical thinking: a meeting of two of the great pioneers in contemporary thought, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, who are also bound together by friendship and a complex relation to their own pasts. More than a literary text with critical commentary, it constitutes an event of central significance for contemporary philosophical, literary, and political concerns.
The book consists of The Instant of My Death, a powerful short prose piece by Blanchot, and an extended essay by Derrida that reads it in the context of questions of literature and of bearing witness. Blanchot s narrative concerns a moment when a young man is brought before a firing squad during World War II and then suddenly finds himself released from his near death. The incident, written in the third person, is suggestively autobiographical from the title, several remarks in the text, and a letter Blanchot wrote about a similar incident in his own life but only insofar as it raises questions for Blanchot about what such an experience might mean. The accident of near death becomes, in the instant the man is released, the accident of a life he no longer possesses. The text raises the question of what it means to write about a (non)experience one cannot claim as one s own, and as such is a text of testimony or witness.
Derrida s reading of Blanchot links the problem of testimony to the problem of the secret and to the notion of the instant. It thereby provides the elements of a more expansive reassessment of literature, testimony, and truth. In addressing the complex relation between writing and history, Derrida also implicitly reflects on questions concerning the relation between European intellectuals and World War II.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE INSTANT OF MY DEATH

By Maurice Blanchot

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2000 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-3326-7

Contents

§ THE INSTANT OF MY DEATH Maurice Blanchot, 1, 
§ DEMEURE: FICTION AND TESTOMONY Jacques Derrida, 13, 
Reading "beyond the beginning"; or, On the Venom in Letters: Postscript and "Literary Supplement", 104, 
Notes, 111, 

CHAPTER 1

§ The Instant of My Death

I REMEMBER a young man—a man still young—prevented from dying by death itself—and perhaps the error of injustice.

The Allies had succeeded in getting a foothold on French soil. The Germans, already vanquished, were struggling in vain with useless ferocity.

In a large house (the Château, it was called), someone knocked at the door rather timidly. I know that the young man came to open the door to guests who were presumably asking for help.

This time, a howl: "Everyone outside."

A Nazi lieutenant, in shamefully normal French, made the oldest people exit first, and then two young women.

"Outside, outside." This time, he was howling. The young man, however, did not try to flee but advanced slowly, in an almost priestly manner. The lieutenant shook him, showed him the casings, bullets; there had obviously been fighting; the soil was a war soil.

The lieutenant choked in a bizarre language. And putting the casings, the bullets, a grenade under the nose of tant sous le nez de l'homme déjà moins jeune (on vieillit vite) les douilles, les balles, une grenade, cria distinctement: "Voilà à quoi vous êtes parvenu."

Le nazi mit en rang ses hommes pour atteindre, selon les règles, la cible humaine. Le jeune homme dit: "Faites au moins rentrer ma famille." Soit: la tante (94 ans), sa mère plus jeune, sa soeur et sa belle-soeur, un long et lent cortège, silencieux, comme si tout était déjà accompli.

Je sais—le sais-je—que celui que visaient déjà les Allemands, n'attendant plus que l'ordre final, éprouva alors un sentiment de légèreté extraordinaire, une sorte de béatitude (rien d'heureux cependant),—allégresse souveraine? La rencontre de la mort et de la mort?

A sa place, je ne chercherai pas à analyser ce sentiment de légèreté. Il était peut-être tout à coup invincible. Mort—immortel. Peut-être l'extase. Plutôt le sentiment de compassion pour l'humanité souffrante, le bonheur de n'être pas immortel ni éternel. Désormais, il fut lié à la mort, par une amitié subreptice.

A cet instant, brusque retour au monde, éclata le bruit considérable d'une proche bataille. Les camarades du maquis voulaient porter secours à celui qu'ils savaient en danger. Le lieutenant s'éloigna pour se rendre compte. Les Allemands restaient en ordre, prêts à demeurer ainsi dans une immobilité qui arrêtait le temps.

Mais voici que l'un d'eux s'approcha et dit d'une voix ferme: "Nous, pas allemands, russes," et, dans une sorte de rire: "armée Vlassov," et il lui fit signe de disparaître.

Je crois qu'il s'éloigna, toujours dans le sentiment de légèreté, au point qu'il se retrouva dans un bois éloigné, nommé "Bois des bruyères," où il demeura abrité par les arbres qu'il connaissait bien. C'est dans le bois épais que tout à coup, et après combien de temps, il retrouva le sens du réel. Partout, des incendies, une suite de feu continu, the man already less young (one ages quickly), he distinctly shouted: "This is what you have come to."

The Nazi placed his men in a row in order to hit, according to the rules, the human target. The young man said, "At least have my family go inside." So it was: the aunt (ninety-four years old); his mother, younger; his sister and his sister-in-law; a long, slow procession, silent, as if everything had already been done.

I know—do I know it—that the one at whom the Germans were already aiming, awaiting but the final order, experienced then a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of beatitude (nothing happy, however)—sovereign elation? The encounter of death with death?

In his place, I will not try to analyze. He was perhaps suddenly invincible. Dead—immortal. Perhaps ecstasy. Rather the feeling of compassion for suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal or eternal. Henceforth, he was bound to death by a surreptitious friendship.

At that instant, an abrupt return to the world, the considerable noise of a nearby battle exploded. Comrades from the maquis wanted to bring help to one they knew to be in danger. The lieutenant moved away to assess the situation. The Germans stayed in order, prepared to remain thus in an immobility that arrested time.

Then one of them approached and said in a firm voice, "We're not Germans, Russians," and, with a sort of laugh, "Vlassov army," and made a sign for him to disappear.

I think he moved away, still with the feeling of lightness, until he found himself in a distant forest, named the "Bois des bruyères," where he remained sheltered by trees he knew well. In the dense forest suddenly, after how much time, he rediscovered a sense of the real. Everywhere fires, a continuous succession of fires; all the farms were burning. A little later, he learned that three young toutes les fermes brûlaient. Un peu plus tard, il apprit que trois jeunes gens, fils de fermiers, bien étrangers à tout combat, et qui n'avaient pour tort que leur jeunesse, avaient été abattus.

Même les chevaux gonflés, sur la route, dans les champs, attestaient une guerre qui avait duré. En réalité, combien de temps s'était-il écoulé? Quand le lieutenant était revenu et qu'il s'était rendu compte de la disparition du jeune châtelain, pourquoi la colère, la rage, ne l'avaient-elles pas poussé à brûler le Château (immobile et majestueux)? C'est que c'était le Château. Sur la façade était inscrite, comme un souvenir indestructible, la date de 1807. Etaitil assez cultivé pour savoir que c'était l'année fameuse de Iéna, lorsque Napoléon, sur son petit cheval gris, passait sous les fenêtres de Hegel qui reconnut en lui "l'âme du monde," ainsi qu'il l'écrivit à un ami? Mensonge et vérité, car, comme Hegel l'écrivit à un autre ami, les Français pillèrent et saccagèrent sa demeure. Mais Hegel savait distinguer l'empirique et l'essentiel. En cette année 1944, le lieutenant nazi eut pour le Château le respect ou la considération que les fermes ne suscitaient pas. Pourtant on fouilla partout. On prit quelque argent; dans une pièce séparée, "la chambre haute," le lieutenant trouva des papiers et une sorte d'épais manuscrit—qui contenait peut-être des plans de guerre. Enfin il partit. Tout brûlait, sauf le Château. Les Seigneurs avaient été épargnés.

Alors commença sans doute pour le jeune homme le tourment de l'injustice. Plus d'extase; le sentiment qu'il n'était vivant que parce que, même aux yeux des Russes, il appartenait à une classe noble.

C'était cela, la guerre: la vie pour les uns, pour les autres, la cruauté de l'assassinat.

Demeurait cependent, au moment où la fusillade n'était plus qu'en attente, le sentiment de légèreté que je ne saumen, sons of farmers—truly strangers to all combat, whose only fault was their youth—had been slaughtered.

Even the bloated horses, on the road, in the fields, attested to a war that had gone on. In reality, how much time had elapsed? When the lieutenant returned and became aware the young chatelaine had disappeared, why did anger, rage, not prompt him to burn down the Château (immobile and majestic)? Because it was the Château. On the facade was inscribed, like an indestructible reminder, the date 1807. Was he cultivated enough to know this was the famous year of Jena, when Napoleon, on his small gray horse, passed under the windows of Hegel, who recognized in him the "spirit of the world," as he wrote to a friend? Lie and truth: for as Hegel wrote to another friend, the French pillaged and ransacked his home. But Hegel knew how to distinguish the empirical and the essential. In that year 1944, the Nazi lieutenant had for the Château a respect or consideration that the farms did not arouse. Everything was searched, however. Some money was taken; in a separate room, "the high chamber," the lieutenant found papers and a sort of thick manuscript—which perhaps contained war plans. Finally he left. Everything was burning, except the Château. The Seigneurs had been spared.

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 unrais traduire: libéré de la vie? l'infini qui s'ouvre? Ni bonheur, ni malheur. Ni l'absence de crainte et peut-être déjà le pas au-delà. Je sais, j'imagine que ce sentiment inanalysable changea ce qui lui restait d'existence. Comme si la mort hors de lui ne pouvait désormais que se heurter à la mort en lui. "Je suis vivant. Non, tu es mort."

happiness. 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 the death outside of him could only henceforth collide with the death in him. "I am alive. No, you are dead."

Plus tard, revenu à Paris, il rencontra Malraux. Celui-ci lui raconta qu'il avait été fait prisonnier (sans être reconnu), qu'il avait réussi à s'échapper, tout en perdant un manuscrit. "Ce n'étaient que des réflexions sur l'art, faciles à reconstituer, tandis qu'un manuscrit ne saurait l'être." Avec Paulhan, il fit faire des recherches qui ne pouvaient que rester vaines.

Qu'importe. Seul demeure le sentiment de légèreté qui est la mort même ou, pour le dire plus précisément, l'instant de ma mort désormais toujours en instance.

Later, having returned to Paris, he met Malraux, who said that he had been taken prisoner (without being recognized) and that he had succeeded in escaping, losing a manuscript in the process. "It was only reflections on art, easy to reconstitute, whereas a manuscript would not be." With Paulhan, he made inquiries which could only remain in vain.

What does it matter. All that remains is the feeling of lightness that is death itself or, to put it more precisely, the instant of my death henceforth always in abeyance.

DEMEURE

Jacques Derrida

The first version of this essay was delivered on July 24, 1995, at a conference at the Catholic University of Louvain, to open an international colloquium organized under the direction of Michel Lisse.

The proceedings of that colloquium (Passions de la littérature: Avec Jacques Derrida) were published in 1996 by Editions Galilée with this as the lead essay, entitled "Demeure: Fiction et témoignage."

§ Demeure

Fiction and Testimony

"Fiction and Testimony" was at first a provisional and improvised title, a foray of sorts, a way of seeing. I must answer for it today, given that, rightly or wrongly, I prefer to keep it more or less intact. It can be heard now as a minor and displaced echo, indeed, a modest translation, anachronistic and awkward but deliberately distorted: Dichtung und Wahrheit. One can also imagine a twisted translation, voilée, as one says in French of a wheel after an accident, that its spokes have buckled: Dichtung und Wahrheit after the fall.

Dichtung is often mistakenly translated as "fiction." I myself have yielded to this bad habit at least once, more than ten years ago, in a context not unrelated to a certain history of Belgium—to which I will return in another way today—the context of the relations between fiction and autobiographical truth. Which is also to say, between literature and death. Speaking then, shortly after his death, of my friend Paul de Man, whose memory I salute since we are here in his country, I wrote the following, which you will perhaps forgive me more easily for citing if I promise not to do it again and if I also do so to admit without modesty the shortcomings of a translation:

Funerary speech and writing would not follow upon death; they work on life in what we call autobiography. And this takes place between fiction and truth, Dichtung und Wahrheit.

An obvious allusion to a distinction between fiction and autobiography that not only remains undecidable but, far more serious, in whose indecidability, as de Man makes clear, it is impossible to stand, to maintain oneself in a stable or stationary way. One thus finds oneself in a fatal and double impossibility: the impossibility of deciding, but the impossibility of remaining [demeurer] in the undecidable.

I will attempt to speak of this necessary but impossible abidance [demeurance] of the abode [demeure]. How can one decide what remains abidingly [à demeure]? How is one to hear the term—the noun or the verb, the adverbial phrases—"abode [la demeure]," "that which abides [ce qui demeure]," "that which holds abidingly [ce qui se tient à demeure]," "that by which one must abide [ce qui met en demeure]"?

Huddled in the shadow of these syllables, dwells [demeure]—the troubled grammar of so many sentences. We hear it coming; it is ready for everything.

Goethe, for one, never confused Dichtung (equally poorly translated as "poetry") and fiction. Dichtung is neither fiction nor poetry. When he means fiction, Goethe says Fiction. If, always in irreverent homage to Goethe, truth becomes testimony here, it is perhaps because, as in Dichtung und Wahrheit, it will often be a question today of lies and truth: more precisely, of the biographical or autobiographical truthfulness of a witness who speaks of himself and claims to be recounting not only his life but his death, his quasi-resurrection, a sort of Passion—at the limits of literature. Have no fear, it will not be a question of my autobiography but of another's. The improvised title "Fiction and Testimony" thus seems in its own way "parodistical," to appeal to another of Goethe's terms. Goethe thereby characterized a mode of translation and a period, a way of "appropriating" "a foreign spirit" by "transposing" it into one's own:

I would call this period parodistical [he says in The West-Eastern Divan], taking this word in its purest sense.... The French use this procedure in the translation of all poetic works.... The Frenchman, just as he adapts all foreign words to his speech, does so for feelings, thoughts and even objects; he demands that a surrogate be found for all foreign fruit at any price, one that has been grown in his own soil.

We are already in the annals of a certain Franco-German border. In Louvain-la-Neuve, in this non-French frontier zone of French-speaking communities, I will begin by staying close to this border, between de Man and Goethe, in order to give proper names to the places and metonymies to the landscape. Everything that I put forward will also be magnetized by a history of the European wars between France and Germany, more precisely and closely related to a certain episode at the end of the last world war and the Nazi Occupation, which still resonates with us today.

Once again Michel Lisse has given us everything and has given himself without reserve. He has offered us hospitality here, at home, in his country and in his university; he has given place to this encounter. And of himself he will have given a title to this encounter, that is, a name, Passions of Literature.

Who would dare measure out the gratitude for so many gifts? They are boundless and without equivalent, thus without possible return.

But even if from the outset the privileged guest that I am must give up rendering thanks as much as he should, he is nonetheless beholden to agree in spirit with the name chosen by the other, by our host, Michel Lisse, Passions of Literature, in order to say what this name gives or what it gives rise to. The guest must respond to this name, more than one name, Passions of Literature: not respond in the name of this name or answer for this name, which remains the signature of Michel Lisse, or even bring an answer to the name, but resonate with it, enter into a resonance, a consonance, or a correspondence with Passions of Literature. It cannot be a question of doing this in a way that would be adequate and adjusted but rather, if possible, in a way that is true [juste], according to an affinity. "True" as is sometimes said in the register of voice or sound. True and also close—close, that is, in the friendly relation of a proximity, the vicinity or the borders of an area, not too far from a threshold, a shore, or a bank.

To attempt this, one would have to hear what the title Passions of Literature means: first of all what Michel Lisse wanted it to say, and, more specifically, what he wanted to have said with these three words or what he meant to say. Even if this meaning-to-say insists on remaining equivocal, one must nonetheless be ready to secure this equivocation to a shore, to fix or stabilize it within limits that are assured, abiding [à demeure].

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE INSTANT OF MY DEATH by Maurice Blanchot. Copyright © 2000 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804733260
• ISBN 13: 9780804733267
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128