In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

SubStance 30.3 (2001) 132-136



[Access article in PDF]

Book Review

The Instant of My Death, and:
Demeure: Fiction and Testimony


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 text of 1994 so spare that nearly any paraphrase overwhelms it, followed by Derrida's Demeure, a hundred-page lecture on the Blanchot text. In Blanchot's story--or memoir, or fantasy--the 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 Vlassov's 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 man's 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 protagonist--clearly a literary figure now, more and more resembling Blanchot--meets 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 à demeure], and "that by which one must abide" [ce qui met en demeure] (16); à 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 Derrida's thoughts on "survival" (survivre) from "Living On," his 1981 essay on Blanchot's novella Arrêt de Mort. In that novella, a dying young woman 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 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. [End Page 132]

Since Blanchot's 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 interpretation, by focusing on "The Instant of My Death"? What, in fact, can Blanchot himself add to Arrêt de Mort by writing this text? Although Arrêt 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. Derrida's lecture concerns itself with the dynamic between these features: how are we to understand Blanchot's simultaneous insistence on sociohistorical precision and his evasion of autobiography, and how does this simultaneity contextualize "living on"? Derrida remarks that the dénouement of the story reflects on the young man's residence in the village's "Château," which was spared destruction "[b]ecause it was the Château" (7). The young man's survivor's 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...

pdf

Share