Abstract

This chapter presents a reading of Blanchot’s 1948 narrative Death Sentence (L’arrêt de mort) which focuses on the various despoliations (dépouillements), the stripped away remnants and residues of past time, that structure its narrative. These remnants, such as molds of hands and a death mask, point toward a haunting from which the peculiar exigency of the narrative draws its figural force. This haunting takes the literal form of a feminine ghost present to the narrator as he writes the récit. It is argued that the autobiographical structure of the first-person narrative, together with the insistence on the death and disappearance of feminine characters, indicates a complex melancholic economy that demands an uncanny allegorical conversion: the woman who is an object of love becomes, in the end, the narrator’s thought, who/which is in turn linked, in passionate, lyrical language, with an indestructible affirmation. The residual sublimity of a movement out of the world appears to be compensated by an eternal haunting that inhabits the deathly empty core of the writing imperative.

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