The Communication of the Impossible

Joseph Suglia

Diacritics, Volume 31, Number 2, Summer 2001, pp. 49-69 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/dia.2003.0014

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THE COMMUNICATION OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

JOSEPH SUGLIA

Death is the death of other people, contrary to the tendency of contemporary philosophy, which is focussed on ones own solitary death. Only the former is central to the search for lost time. But the daily deathand the death of every instantof other persons, as they withdraw into themselves, does not belong to an incommunicable solitude: that is precisely what nurtures love. That is Eros in all its ontological purity, which does not require participation in a third term (tastes, common interests, a connaturality of souls)but direct relationship with what gives itself in withholding itself, with the other qua other, with mystery. Emmanuel Levinas, The Other in Proust Desire, pure impure desire, is the call to bridge the distance, to die in common through separation. Maurice Blanchot, Lcriture du dsastre Of the many challenges to the Heideggerian analytic of mortality that emerged throughout the twentieth century, none has been more groundbreaking than that of Maurice Blanchot.1 The originality and singularity of this confrontation consists in its accent on the social character of mortality: the experience of death appears, in this body of discourse, as a relation to the autrui. Death is, for Heidegger, an individual engagement.2 Heidegger absolutely excludes from his existential analytic of mortality any consideration of the Others dying as a possible object of experience.3 Although Sein und Zeit (1927) posits cobeing (Mitsein) as a structure essential to the constitution of selfhood,4 death belongs exclusively to the solitary Dasein.5 The problematic of sacrifice is irrelevant to the existential analytic, since the representative function of sacrifice does not correspond to the unrepresentable

1. Derridas better-known argument in Donner la mort (1992), for instance, concerning the irreplaceability of the responsible self vis--vis the death of the Other, would not have been possible without Blanchots intervention into the problematic of dual mortality. 2. The theme of the Others death in Heidegger is discussed extensively in Christopher Fynsk, The Self and Its Witness. 3. Je angemessener das Nichtmehrdasein des Verstorbenen phnomenal gefasst wird, um so deutlicher zeigt sich dass solches Mitsein mit dem Toten gerade nicht das eigentliche Zuendegekommensein des Verstorbenen erfhrt [SZ 239]. 4. Auf dem Grunde dieses mithaften In-der-Welt-seins ist die Welt je schon immer die, die ich mit den Anderen teile. Die Welt des Daseins ist Mitwelt. Das In-Sein ist Mitsein mit Anderen. Das innerweltliche Ansichsein dieser ist Mitdasein [SZ 118]. 5. Keiner kann dem Anderen sein Sterben abnehmen. [. . .] Am Sterben zeigt sich, dass der Tod ontologisch durch Jemeinigkeit und Existenz konstuiert wird [SZ 240].

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character of death.6 This is because, as Heidegger points out, even if one dies for the Other, one does not take away the Others death.7 As Heidegger remarks, Dasein may never experience the Others arrival at the end (Zuendegekommensein) [SZ 239] (the true object of thanato-ontology), but only its transition into something unliving (Unlebendiges) [SZ 238].8 For this reason, no ontological study of death could take the death of the Other as an object of formal research. Although the fate of Dasein is communal (occurring within the shared context of a community), Dasein takes no part in the Others relation to its most proper possibility: the anticipation of death, which discloses every other possibility and which makes possibility itself possible. Individuals in the community relate to their respective fates as a series of disconnected possibilities of impossibility. There is, at most, a holding-incommon of deaths that are infinitely separated from each other. In destiny (Geschick), individual Daseins share nothing more than the mutual impossibility of experiencing each others deaths: there is an infinite distance between the death of the self and the death of the Other, an impossible articulation or interlacing of incommensurable nonexperiences. Every death is a parallel deathand nothing else besides. There is, then, for Heidegger, essentially no rapport between the death of the self and the death of the Other. Dasein is beside the Other in its dying without ever dying in the place of the Other. As Heidegger puts it in paragraph forty-seven of Sein und Zeit, Wir erfahren nicht im genuinen Sinne das Sterben der Anderen, sondern sind hchstens immer nur dabei [We do not experience the dying of others in a genuine sense, but are, at the very most, always just there] [SZ 239]. Holding death in common is what holds the members of the relation together in their mutual separation. Despite the methodological sleight of hand that Heidegger terms destiny, Daseins relation to its own death is constitutively dissociated from that of the Other. In contrast to this tendency, Blanchot conceives of the self s relation to its own death as an exposure that opens onto the death of the other person. Such is Blanchots most important contribution to the thought of death, as well as what distinguishes his position most radically from that of Heidegger. Heidegger forecloses the possibility of
6. Indes scheitert diese Vertretungsmglichkeit vllig, wenn es um die Vertretung der Seinsmglichkeit, die das Zu-Ende-kommen des Daseins ausmacht und ihm als solche Glnze gibt [SZ 240]. In contrast to the tendency in Heideggerian thought to exclude sacrifice from the thought of death, Levinas describes the function of sacrifice as opening up the possibility of another relation (one that is determined as the experience of guilt and sur-vival). Levinas criticizes Heideggers refusal of dying for . . . (understood as substitution for the Other in its dying) as an existential possibility (an existential relation to mortality) in his fascinating Mourir pour . . . . It should be noted, however, that Heidegger does use the term das Opfer (sacrifice, offering, victim), and a thematics of sacrifice is evident throughout his writing. To cite a few instances of the motif of sacrifice in Heideggerian thought: in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, the essential sacrifice (das wesentliche Opfer) is given as one of the finite instantiations of the becoming-of-truth; in the second volume of the Nietzsche lectures, the theme of sacrifice is introduced in the context of a discussion of Nietzsches autobiography; a metaphorics of sacrifice can be traced throughout the Hlderlin lecturesin particular, Hlderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung, Germanien, and Andenken; the Rectorial Address approaches the question of sacrifice in its concern with the appropriation of authentic freedom; according to Heideggers reading of Georges Das Wort in Das Wesen der Sprache, the attempt to find the word for the thing is sacrificed, and so on. 7. Jemand kann wohl fr einen Anderen in den Tod gehen. Das besagt jedoch immer: fr den Anderen sich opfern in einer bestimmten Sache [SZ 240]. 8. But neither is Dasein, Heidegger reminds us, capable of experiencing its own end. One might say that Daseins approach toward its end is infinitely delayed.

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experiencing the death of the Other as that of the Other. Whoever takes the Others dying as a point of departure for an ontology of death, Heidegger suggests, misses the phenomenon of death altogether. For Blanchot, however, the exact opposite is the case. Anyone who fails to take the death of the Other as constitutive of the death of the self misses the phenomenon of death as such. Throughout his entire oeuvre, Blanchot suggestsin a manner that is at times oblique and yet nonetheless forcefulthat only the experience of the Others death may grant me a relation to the impossible.

La communaut inavouable What calls me into question most radically, Blanchot writes in La communaut inavouable (1983), is my presence for an Other who absents itself by dying.9 Every human being calls itself into question, Blanchot suggests, by exposing itself to the Other as Other an exposure that grants the self a relation to the outside. By contesting itself, the self opens itself up to the community, which is grounded precisely by the self s relation to the death of the other person. Blanchot writes, To hold oneself present in the proximity of another who by dying removes himself definitively, to take upon myself anothers death as the only death that concerns me, this is what puts me outside of myself,10 this is the only separation that can open me, in its very impossibility, to the Open of a community [CI 21/UC 9]. When Blanchot writes that the self places itself beside the Other in its dying, he means that the self is brought outside of itself and into the community by way of its relation to the Others finite existence. I can only experience death by exposing myself to the Other in its finitude, and this exposure grants me a relation to mortality. Although I cannot know my own death, I can experience mortality via the other person in its finite existencean existence that contests the self by exposing it to an infinite alterity. Knowledge of the Other as a finite, existing being is at the same time an experience of mourning, and the exposure to the death of the Other is an exposure to an absolute transcendence.11
9. Blanchots text takes as its point of departure Jean-Luc Nancys discussion of the community. On the relation between Nancy and Blanchot, see Bernasconi. 10. Blanchot borrows this term from Georges Bataille: A man alive, who sees his fellow man die, can survive only outside of himself [hors de soi] [CI 21/UC 9]. This is translated as beside himself in the English translation. 11. See Fynsks foreword to Jean-Luc Nancys Inoperative Community [xvii]. The relation between the self and the Other described in La communaut inavouable is not, despite appearances, a struggle that would lead to a Hegelian Anerkennung in which the fragile mastery of the self (fragile because, in its satiety and loss of possibility, it is liable to be overturned) would be posited vis--vis the slave. Certainly, there is a structural parallelism between the Knecht-Herr relation and that delineated by Blanchot: the Other is what radically calls the self-subsistence of the subject into question by drawing that subject outside of itself. Hegel writes: For selfconsciousness is another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself [ausser sich]. This is the same movement described in the Bataille citation [see note 10]: when it encounters the Other, the self is pulled into an ecstatic movement. Hegel continues: This has a two-fold significance: first, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as another being [. . .] . At this point, Blanchot/Bataille and Hegel seem to be in agreement. Yet Blanchot interrupts the Hegelian dialectic, insofar as he refuses to follow him beyond this point. Hegel continues: [S]econdly, in doing so [in finding itself as another being] it has sublated the other [das Andere aufgehoben] [146]. The Other is never, strictly speaking, sublated in Blanchot: it retains its transcendence and its impulse toward exteriorization. Again, neither does this struggle lead to recognition in Blanchot, but rather to the sheer negation of a formally posited individuality. The dialectic, it would seem, has been stalled at its negative moment. The self experiences itself as an exteriority through its engagement with

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The one who gives the infinite alterity of mortality is the one who is dying, yet lives on as a sur-vivor. To illustrate this point, Blanchot elaborates a silent conversation between one who mourns and one whom is mourned: The mute conversation in which, holding the hand of the another who dies, I keep up with him, I dont keep up simply to help him die, but to share the solitude of the event which seems to be the possibility that is most his own and his unshareable possession in that it dispossesses him radically [CI 21/UC 9]. From this passage, the following thesis may be derived: death is both what is proper to the Other and what infinitely exceeds its mastery. An infinite excess: this is the case not only because no subject could ever experience death, but because by definition death excludes the possibility of experience (throughout this essay, I will use the term the impossible to describe this impossible experience). Precisely because of the impossible character of this experience, my own dying is intimately bound to the dying of the Other:12 it is this intimacy that allows the Other to give its death to me. By taking part (partager) in the infinite solitude of the Others dying (a dying that is shielded by a partage), the self is granted an exposure to mortality. Holding the hand (tenant la main) of the one who dies in the present (main-tenant), one affirms that there is no now in which I could die. The self can never mourn its own deathprecisely because my death could never occur in or as the present. Death could never be made present for me at all except through the process of substitutionthe substitution of the Other who dies, so to speak, in my stead. Community comes into being by way of this relation: a relation in which the Other replaces me in my dying. The one who sacrifices itself for the self is a replacement for the self in its dying but how far could this replacement extend, if neither of the parties experiences his or her own death firsthand? After the passage cited above, Blanchot miscites himself (from Le pas au-del) in order to throw light upon this question:13 Alone, dying, you do not distance yourself alone, you are still present, for here you grant me this dying as the harmony that surpasses all pain, all solicitude, and in which I tremble softly even in that which rends, at a loss for words with you, dying with you without you, letting me die in your place, in receiving the gift beyond you and me. [CI 21/UC 9] In this colloquy, it is not clear who is speaking, nor where this speaking occurs: the names of the characters have been effaced. One who dies faces one who bears witness to this dying: dying is granted the survivor as a gift. An impossible dying-with: one is beside the Other, bearing witness to its dying, but can never engage in this dying. Death
the other person in its (non)engagement with mortality: the solus ipsus is also a socius. Blanchots theory of sacrifice (insofar as it could be called a theory at all) could also be placed in relation to Hegelian Rechtsphilosophie, which places the negation of individuality at the source of civil society. The relation between Blanchot and Hegel, while of great interest to me, will not be discussed directly in this essay, because it exceeds its limited focus. 12. A corollary to this argument is that no a priori substantialized subject would exist selfsubsistently and before others: there is a fundamental insufficiency of the self (as suggested by Blanchots citations of Lexprience interieur throughout La communaut inavouable), inasmuch as mortality is an unknown variable except by way of the Other. No sociality, no community can precede this relation to impossibility. Insubjectivity itself is founded upon the relation of the self to the Others finitude. 13. The original passage reads: Mourant, tu ne meurs pas, tu maccordes ce mourir comme laccord qui passe toute peine, toute sollicitude et ou je frmis doucement jusque dans ce qui dchire, perdant la parole avec toi, mourant avec toi sans toi, me laissant mourir ta place, en recevant le don au-del de toi et de moi [PD 169].

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here surpasses the one who is dying, as well as the one who bears witness to this dying: it is greater than both of them and paradoxically cannot be subordinated to the logic of gift-giving, since it is owned by neither the gift-giver nor the recipient. The survivor receives the gift of death from the substitute: it is a gift that extends beyond either the one or the other. The gift of death exceeds the terms of the relation, but is made possible only by the relation itself (the dying that is with you without you). It would seem that the exposure to death is made possible by the conversation, but is not reducible to it. The Other is responsible for the self in its dying, for the self is incapable, by itself, of going to the limits of the extreme [CI 46/UC 25]. The self is endlessly dying without ever bringing its dying to an end. The Other substitutes for the self by dying in its place: such is the painful responsibility that one must assume. Yet this substitution does not extend so far as to remove the self s dying. Both the self and the Other are bound together by substituting for each other in their mutual engagement with mortality. Neither the self nor the Other is able to appropriate their death, which remains infinitely other-than-themselves. Standing-in for the self is a painful responsibility that could not even be described as ethical if by ethics one intends a general code of behavior: it is, as Blanchot reminds us, a responsibility that surpasses all ethics.14 The self and the Other, bound together by their mutual incapacity to experience mortality, form the community. The community of human existence is brought into being, is founded, Blanchot writes, by its exposure to what infinitely exceeds it: the transcendence of death (and birthnot every relation to the other is one of mortality): There could not be a community without the sharing of that first and last event which in everyone ceases to be able to be just that (birth, death) [CI 22/UC 9]. Although human finitude is the ground of all sociality, it is not a ground in the sense of a fundamentum inconcussum. The death of the Other is a nonground, insofar as it is a relation: indeed, it is a social relation that makes all social relations possible. There would be no sociality without this prior exposure to what exceeds all measure. Absolutely no intersubjective relation would be possible without a relation to the death of the Other: the exposure of the human to an infinite transcendence. If the one who substitutes for the self in its dying exposes the self to transcendence, there is an inequality at the heart of the social relation. For this reason, Blanchot writes, the community adheres to relations that suspend the tutoiement [CI 22/UC 9]. Community is not the hypostasis or fusion of selves that are identical to each other into a collective unity; it is not the transcendental synthesis of disparate representations in the social imagination. If the community is to be thought of otherwise than as commonality, this is because it is founded upon a dissymmetrical relation. Because I have no relation to my own death except by way of the Other (the death of whom, as Blanchot asserts, is the only death that concerns me),15 my relation to my own death is at the same time a relation to the outside. This relation to the outside is what allows one to think of the community other than as a common measure that individuals would share. Every com14. Blanchot remarks in Lcriture du dsastre: once declared responsible for dying (for all dying), I can no longer appeal to any ethics, any experience, any practice whateversave that of some counter-living, which is to say an un-practice, or (perhaps) a word of writing [ED 47/WD 26]. The following passage from Emmanuel Levinas (Dieu, la mort et le temps) is also relevant to this context: The death of the Other affects me in my very identity as a responsible I [. . .] made up of unspeakable responsibility. This is how I am affected by the death of the Other, this is my relation to his death. It is, in my relation, my deference toward someone who no longer responds, already a guilt of the survivor [qtd. in Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas 7]. 15. Compare this passage from Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence: In that relation with the face, in a direct relation with the death of the other [sic], you probably discover that the death of the other has priority over yours, and over your life [164].

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munity is a community of death, and the community of death is the death of all community. That is to say: there is no community without the exposure to death, and this exposure to death makes it difficult to conceive of a community as a relation between common terms. Mortality founds as well as founders all community. To the extent that it is grounded upon an impossible relation (a relation to the impossible), one could say, with Blanchot, that every community is an impossible community ( l impossible communaut) [CI 46/UC 25].

The Life of the Other Is the Death of the Other The community says its ground, bearing witness to the exposure to finitude, by folding back upon its origin in the other person, who is substitutive of an impossible relation to dying. Inasmuch as the community articulates its ground as an impossible relation, it announces that communion between individuals is suspended. If community (understood as a common measure between individuals) is suppressed, what makes communication between individuals possible? Blanchot touches upon the motif of communication in the passage that follows: Now, the basis of communication is not necessarily speech, or even the silence that is its foundation and punctuation, but the exposure to death, no longer my own exposure, but someone elses, whose living and closest presence is already the eternal and unbearable absence, an absence that the travail of deepest mourning does not diminish. And it is in life itself that the absence of someone else has to be met. It is with that absenceits uncanny presence, always under the prior threat of a disappearancethat friendship is brought into play and lost at each moment, a relation without relation or without relation other than the incommensurable. . . . Such is, such would be the friendship that discovers the unknown that we ourselves are, and the meeting of our own solitude which, precisely, we cannot be alone to experience (incapable, by myself alone, of going to the limits of the extreme). [CI 46/UC 25] We cannot be alone to experience the solitude of our own dying. Blanchot asserts here, in opposition to Heidegger, the sociality of mortality.16 For Blanchot, my relation to my own deatha relation without relation insasmuch as death is the impossibleis also a relation to the death of the other person. The other person is, for him, the presence of an absence that permits the self to enter into an incommensurable relation (a relation to dying), which is also a self-relation. Against the tendency in Heideggerian thought to regard death as an individual engagement, Blanchot vigorously affirms that exposure to the death of the Other is the only experience that could grant me a relation to that which cannot be experienced. This experience of a nonexperience is communicated through a self-offeringa relation to dying that Blanchot determines as friendship.

Thomas lObscur We come to approach just such a problematic, I think, in those pages of Thomas lObscur (1941/1950) devoted to Annes death.17 Anne expresses the greatest passion ever expe16. Blanchot affirmed that every death is a communal death (a multiple doubling) at least as early as 1973 (in Le pas au-del). 17. See chapter 13 of the 1941 version and chapter 10 of the 1950 version. A brief summary

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rienced (la plus grande passion) [1: 201/2: 115/TO 81] as she assumes the possibility of her death. Her passion is at the same time the absolute loss of affectivity, a radical absence of feeling that comes about as anguish (langoisse): This hardness weighed terribly on Anne; she felt the absence of all sentiment in her as an immense void, and anguish clutched her [2: 116/TO 81].16 The affect she experiences (langoisse) is a nonfeeling: that is to say, a feeling without content. Langoisse names the feeling that responds to the absolute withdrawal of all feeling, and Annes being-toward-death is revealed through this fundamental affect, the affect of a nonaffect. The ineluctable feeling of langoisse, the affect of mourning, is of a different quality than all other affects: She drew from herself not the weak emotions, sadness, regret, which were the lot of those around her, meaningless accidents with no chance of making any change in them, but the sole passion capable of threatening her very being, that which cannot be alienated and which would continue to burn when all the lights were put out [1: 202/2: 117/ TO 82]. At the heart of this absence of feeling is an impassioned relation to nonexistence. Through the anticipation of her death, Anne attempts to give form to this absolute an-aesthesia: she made the sacrifice, full of strangeness, of her certainty that she existed, in order to give sense to this nothingness of love [nant damour = a reference to langoisse] which she had become [1: 202/2: 116/TO 82]. Her sacrifice, then, would
of the novel (if it is one) might be in order here. It would be tempting to say that Thomas lObscur (both versions) is the record of a metamorphosis. The title of the novel invokes not so much an accidental trait of its main character as his incessant engagement with the obscure, an engagement that often takes the form of a self-duplication or self-exteriorization. Thomas may not even be said to metamorphose into something other, since the term metamorphosis suggests a position of purity and stability against which a change could be measured. Thomas is the meta- of all form. Since he cannot be contained in any particular form, Thomas is the pure movement of turning-into-something-other-than-what-he-is: absolute change without stabilization. In a word, Thomas is nothing other than his metamorphoses into an other. No formal or stable subject remains intact outside of the changes that he undergoes. The metamorphosis that Thomas endures in the penultimate chapter (in which he becomes a representation of death itself) is a repetition of the ecstatic moment in chapter 1 in which Thomas is immersed in the waves, and becomes indistinguishable from the water in which he was tossed. The appearance of the night repeats the opening movement of Thomas lObscur, in which the disappearance of the self into the world occurs through the idealization of both. In the first version of the second chapter (a passage completely omitted in the second), thought becomes body and world through a process of realization: Thomas walked upon a path with a body made up of his most intimate thoughts and desires (avec un corps fait des penses et des dsirs les plus intimes) [1: 13 14]. His very thought later becomes a nocturnal mass that he is able to touch. Objects enter into him (the representations of his consciousness take on bodily form): self-affection is here an extreme experience of exteriority (the outside). In the fourth chapter, Thomas assumes a position of extreme passivity, as, a profound reader, he is read by the (feminine) text that he attempts to read. For a detailed reading of this passage, see Schestag. A brief discussion of this passage also occurs in Mesnard 18283. Thomas is subjected to an ecstatic movement in which he exteriorizes himself by doubling himself in the fifth chapter (I touch upon this passage briefly below). One might say that, in the first chapter and throughout this text (although this is not an argument that I will pursue here), Thomas is at grips with his becoming-other. This is an interpretation that Fynsk hints at in his foreword to The Station Hill Blanchot Reader. For a brief discussion of metamorphosis in Thomas lObscur, see Fries 276-77. Interpretations of Thomas lObscur are sparse. For some useful discussions of the text, see Londyn; Stillers; Tsuquiashi-Daddesio, Plasticit graphique; and Hill. For an account of the history of the texts publication and reception (in both versions), see Bident 20002, 28790. 18. In the 1941 version, the text reads: Dans son immobilit absolue, dans son insensibilit parfaite, elle ressenti comme un vide immense labsence en elle de tout sentiment pour ceux qui vivaient [1: 20102].

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embody the absence of all sentiment in anticipation of the possibility of no-longerbeing-there. Anne offers herself in her dying to those who mourn over her, proleptically mourning her own death as the death of an Other (she is at once the one who mourns and the one over who is mourned): To those who cried over her, cold and oblivious, she returned hundred-fold what they had given her, devoting to them the anticipation of her death, her death, the pure feeling, never purer, of her existence in the tortured anticipation of her non-existence [1: 202/2: 11617/TO 82].19 Annes gift of her dying exceeds the possibility of compensation: it is an expenditure that could never be repaid. If the concept of sacrifice, as Jacques Derrida suggests, implies the reciprocity of interest (and surely it does), then Annes self-sacrifice is an offering that transcends the economy of sacrifice: the offering of her work of (self-)mourning exceeds hundred-fold the mourning that had been granted to her. Annes sacrifice is a nonreciprocal and dissymmetrical sacrifice: it is a (non)act of unconstrained generosity.20 Through her self-sacrifice, her existence unites with her nonexistence (alive, she is already dead [1: 202/2: 116/TO 82]an absolute contradiction): For the first time, she raised the words give oneself to their true meaning: she gave Anne, she gave much more than the life of Anne, she gave the ultimate gift, the death of Anne; she separated herself from her terribly strong feeling of being Anne, from the terribly anguished feeling of being Anne threatened with dying, and changed it into the yet more anguished feeling of being no longer Anne, but her mother, her mother threatened by death, the entire world on the point of annihilation. [1: 202/2: 117/TO 82] What benefit is gained from this self-sacrifice? Who benefits? Giving the gift of an impossible relation to her own death, Anne accedes to another order: that of sociality.21 We have already seen how, for Blanchot, the possibility of community is not conceivable apart from a relation to human mortality. For Blanchot, the gift of an impossible relation to ones own death is the sacrificial gesture that founds all community. It should be no surprise, then, that, offering herself in her dying, Anne is forced to die not personally but by the intermediary of all the others (contraint de mourir non pas personellement, mais par lintermdiare de tous les autres) [1: 202/2: 118/TO 82]. Surrendering her death to those who mourn her, Annes death becomes mediated by the Other and is devoted to the Other. Her death becomes that of the Other. In the extraordinary gesture by which Anne gives of her death, she offers to those who are witnesses to her death the impossibility of assuming death as a possibility. In this way, Blanchots first literary text forecasts what will be rearticulated in his more theoretical statements of 1983 in La communaut inavouable. For Blanchot, the

19. The expression froide et inconsciente (cold and oblivious) in this passage is puzzling, insofar as it problematizes or at least complicates Blanchots own thesis that death may be known only through the death of the Other. 20. See Derridas Donner la mort for a discussion of restricted and general economic configurations of sacrifice: according to this dualistic typology, sacrifice is either a symmetrical economy of exchange or an economy that incorporates loss. Derridas discussionalthough he does not expressly acknowledge itis heavily indebted to Blanchots Lcriture du dsastre. 21. For reasons of economy, I am not able to discuss the motif of motherhood in this passage. Because of the narrowly restricted focus of this essay (the relationship of the self to the Other as determined by the problematic of mortality), an exposition of the figure of maternity in Blanchot would require a separate study altogether. For a consideration of this topic, see Huffer.

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unconditional loss of relation affords another relation, the relation of a nonrelation:22 Then, in the form of this primordial passion, having now only a silent and dreary soul, a heart empty and dead, she offered her absence of friendship as the truest and purest friendship; she resigned herself, in this dark region where no one touched her, to responding to the ordinary affection of those around her by this supreme doubt concerning her being, by the desperate consciousness of being nothing any longer, by her anguish. [1: 202/2: 116/TO 81] Langoisse again names an affect that discloses the relation of a nonrelation (the absence of all relation, the absence of friendship).23 Annes anguished anticipation of that which permits no relation forms is, paradoxically, the condition of the truest and purest friendship. We have already encountered the motif of friendship in Blanchots remarks on the basis of communication. There, friendship was determined as a work of mourning that allows the self to experience what the self cannot experience individually. Here, the truest and purest friendship is mediated (sacrificial) dyingthe offering of the Others death which is the condition of all community (the absence of friendshipthe disconnection of every relation). The anticipated loss of relation constitutes the basis of a (paradoxical) relation: such is the friendliness of Annes self-immolation.24

22. My discussion of the relation of a non-relation is largely derived from Blanchots Lentretien infini. In the first part of this volume (La parole plurielle), Blanchot is chiefly concerned with the question of the autrui and the relation that exists between instances of speech (speech as writing). Between any two speech acts, between address and response, there is an infinite distance, a double dissymmetry, that makes speech possible. Both events of speakingwriting are separated and yet held together in a common separation or unbridgeable gap that Blanchot terms a relation of that which has no relation or the relation of the third genre. (In seeming homage to Steven Spielberg, the translator renders this as the relation of the third kind.) This interruption is language itself, a pure relation that could never be said to be identical with itself. See Lentretien infini, especially Le rapport du troisime genre [94105]. 23. Compare the following passage from the second part of La communaut inavouable (in reference to Sade): Apathy, impassibility, the non-event of feelings and all forms of impotence, not only do not prevent relationships between beings, but lead to relationships towards crime which is the ultimate and (if one may say so) incandescent form of insensibility [IC 81/UC 49]. 24. The death of Anne brings those who mourn over her to terms with their own imminent fatality. For a comparable figuration of friendship (as a relation based on death), see the opening conversation of Lentretien infini. Friendship is always imagined in Blanchot as a bond formed by the absence of every bond. At an earlier moment in the text of the second version, Anne speaks of the possibility of obtaining a greater proximity to Thomas by withdrawing from him to an infinite distance (Le seule possibilit que jaurais de diminuer la distance qui nous separe serait de meloigner infiniment [2: 7273/TO 55]). And even in the transports of sexual intimacy, contact between their bodies bound so intimately together by such fragile bonds reveals the paucity of bonds between them (leur peu de liens) [2: 63/TO 47; translation modified]. In the 1941 version, the text reads: their absence of bonds (leur absence de liens) [1: 58]. The intersubjective relation that binds them together is a relation that consists in the fact that there is no possible relation between them. For a comparable figuration of friendship as the impossibility of relationality, see Blanchot, Adolphe ou le malheur des sentiments vrais [PF 22137]. Blanchot distinguishes his own notion of friendship from the Greek concept of philia (which presupposes a reciprocal relation) in Pour lamiti [see esp. 35]. On the relation between Thomas and Anne, see Mykyta. See also Tsuquiashi-Daddesio, Thomas e(s)t Anne, for an interesting discussion of the intratextual relation between both personages with reference to the apocrypha [see esp. 123].

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The relation to the autrui is one of friendship, and friendship is based upon death upon the exposure of the self to its own mortality. In a fragment from Lcriture du dsastre, Blanchot writes: Friendship is not a gift, or a promise; it is not a form of generosity. Rather, this incommensurable relation of the one to the other is the outside drawing near in its rupture and inaccessibility [ED 50/WD 29]. Friendship is not a gift, but a sacrifice. The concept of a gift implies a pregiven plenitude that could be expended without diminishing ones supply; a sacrifice, on the contrary, is meaningful only when one cannot dispense with that with which one dispenses. Friendship implies the absolute dispossession of the self, the anguished anticipation of ones mortality. The outside approaches via the sacrifice of the other personthe sacrifice by which the other person exposes itself as finite and hence delivers the self over to its mortality. The approach of the autre (the impossible) comes by way of the approach of the autrui (the other human being). To that extent, the autrui mediates the infinite alterity of mortality. The sacrifice of friendship (subjective and objective genitive) opens onto the abyss of the impossible and grants a (non)relation to the impossible. It is a friendship, as Blanchot demonstrates in Le pas au-del, that is determined as the sharing of what cannot be possessed, as the impossible sharing of mortality. Annes death reflects upon the death at the heart of community. The ultimate sacrificial figure, Anne offers her death to the Other as a death that is entirely other. Deprived of its singularity, Annes death is characterized only by and as an indeterminate dying that is rid of all of its historical characteristics. Her death is generalized to the point at which it obtains the indifference of man stirbt. Sacrifice here requires a certain dedifferentiation. The particularity of Annes existence is reduced until she becomes of the order of anonymous and impersonal entities; human being becomes thinglike: [She is] like something which could not be represented, no longer a human being, but simply a being, marvelously a being [1: 203/2: 119/TO 83]. Delivered over to the mediated impersonality of death (in which she is forced to die by the intermediary of all the others), the solitude of Annes dying is infringed upon. The passionate/passionless anticipation of death gives way to the sacrifice of the person to the neutral: Already [Anne] had no more importance. Those who mourn over this nameless sacrificial victim are likewise deprived of their personal traits: her mother was no longer anything more than an insignificant being; Thomas is insignificant [1: 206/2: 125/ TO 86]. The characters are effaced and surrendered to the neutrality of a faceless dying. Annes presentation of her finitude is at the same time the gift of her mortalityand yet this testimony is that of the autre (the other as anonymous transcendence), not that of the autrui (the other human being). The testimony is of an anonymous impersonality. The uncanniness of the address consists in the fact that it is of the other: Annes sacrifice affords a relation to an alterity. Annes death is not final in that it incites discoursethe inner monologue of Thomas, who will attempt to appropriate Annes death as speech. Provoked by Annes death, Thomas is given to speak. Annes self-offering, however, does not pass entirely into the speech of Thomas.25 Thomas is right to say to himself that Anne gave herself entirely over to death in an instant (elle sest en un instant donn entirement la mort) [1: 206/2: 127/TO 89]. Yet nowhere in his long and powerful reflection on Annes struggle does Thomas articulate Annes gesture of giving her dying to him. To that extent, Annes self-sacrifice bespeaks a lack in Thomass speech. Her sacrifice is measured by

25. This is suggested by Fynsk in his foreword to The Station Hill Blanchot Reader. Thomass monologue constitutes almost the entirety of the fourteenth chapter in the 1941 version and the eleventh chapter in the 1950 version.

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the inarticulable. Annes sacrifice is not translated into the thought of Thomas: the transference of its meaning is suspended.26 As if prompted by Annes self-offering, which he misunderstands, Thomas undergoes a metamorphosis in which, completely alive, he is united with death (All of my being mingled with death [1: 21011/2: 132/TO 92]):27 But those who contemplated me felt that death could also associate with existence and form this decisive word: death exists. They have developed the habit of saying about existence everything they could say of death for me and, rather than murmur, I am, I am not, mix the terms together in a single happy combination and say, I am, while I am not, and likewise, I am not, while I am, without there being the slightest attempt to force contradictory words together, rubbing them one against the other like stones. [1: 215/2: 140/TO 96] The becoming-human of death is the resolution of the Epicurean paradox (in Epicuruss letter to Menoeceus): Where there is death, you are not; where you are, death is not. Existence-death collapses both terms of the relation, maintaining them in an impossible conjunction. An antimony is established in which the exclusivity of both of the terms is neutralized: both being and death are held together in their mutual inclusivity. The simultaneity of being and nonbeing is, of course, an irreconcilable contradiction. Having obtained the greatest intimacy with death, Thomas feels the absolute withdrawal of feeling. He experiences the recession of all feeling as a feeling that surpasses any relation to an object: I am reaching regions where that which one experiences has no relation with that which is experienced [1: 221/2: 153/TO 102]). This intense engagement with nothing incites Thomas to move from the absence of feeling to the absence of desire, or, put otherwise, to the absence that is desire. Here, desire attains the absoluteness of an infinite relation of self-concern (desire as the relation to that which does not concern, as Blanchot will put it in the opening dialogue of Lentretien infini):
26. Annes resistance to Thomas is thematized in the eighth chapter of the first version as the intrusion of a physical force and an inassimilable nothingness [2: 89/TO 64] that thrusts itself before his indifference. (In the twelfth chapter of the first version, this is written of Irne [1: 187]a character who is completely elided in the 1950 edition.) Anne differs from the thought that Thomas represents by offering herself as a body, an intractable, triumphal presence to his thought, which can never appropriate her as a thought. In Thomass monologue in the penultimate chapter of both versions of Thomas lObscur, her resistance consists in her misappropriation in speech. Yet neither can Thomas be appropriated in the speech of Anne. In the eighth chapter of the 1950 version, Anne wars against Thomass indifference by transforming herself into a body a thousand times more beautiful than her own [2: 88/TO 63]. (Blanchots humor is evident in this passage, despite his extraordinary seriousness.) Anne thereby revolts against the impossibility of placing Thomas into a narrative. Thomas is described as a being who could not be questioned, since his existence itself is a terrible question posed to Anne. It would be extremely presumptuous for Anne, according to the narrator, to be shocked at her inability to understand Thomas; her rashness would go beyond all limits if she attempted to get information about him [1: 59/2: 65/TO 48]. Thomas is one whose nonknowability (the obscurity to which the title of the text refers and which is his common noun qualifier) is determined as his most essential determination, and who therefore suspends the distinction between comprehensibility and incomprehensibility altogether. Thomas is not incomprehensible, for the category of incomprehensibility implies the possibility that something may be known. Jacques Derrida discusses the common noun qualifier in the title Thomas lObscur in The Ear of the Other [160-61]. 27. The first version reads: Toute ma vie apparut confondue avec ma mort [1: 211]. The second version reads: Tout mon tre parut se confondre avec la mort [2: 132].

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Absent from Anne, absent from my love for Anne to the extent that I loved Anne [1: 221/2: 154/TO 103]. To a certain extent, Thomass absence of desire is the absence of alterity. But this absence of alterity is not solipsism. In a moment of extreme autoaffection that surpasses any relation of self-identity, Thomas experiences himself as absent from himself (absent, doublement, de moi) [2: 154/TO 103].28 Thomas is exteriorized as his own anonymous and impersonal doublea repetition of an earlier moment of the text (in the eighth chapter of the 1941 version and the fifth chapter of the 1950 version) in which Thomas attempts to coalesce with his death by interring himself in the earth, where he encounters his own corpse. Here, the experience of auto-affection is at the same time one of self-duplication: the experience of the self as an Other.29 Feeling himself as dead, Thomas presents himself not as a corpse, but in his living existence, drawing himself beyond a purely metaphorical death (Thomas exposes himself as a dead person (un mort) in order not to make of his death a metaphor (pour ne pas faire de sa mort une metaphore) [1: 211/2: 133/TO 92]). Thomas bypasses the logic of metaphoricitythe transference (meta-pherein) from figure (that which immediately represents) to concept (that which is mediately represented)by immediately presenting what he represents. As the figure of the impossible, Thomas becomes the impossible. The exclusivity of life and death is eradicated when Thomas poses himself as dead in his living, finite existence: I feel myself deadno; I feel myself, living, infinitely more dead than dead [1: 222/2: 156/TO 104]. A feeling arises that discloses not his historical existence, but his existence as historical. Thomas anticipates his nonbeing through the fundamental affect of langoisse a feeling that, as Blanchot writes, molds Thomas, making him and unmaking him, causing [him] to feel in a total absence of sentiment his reality in the shape of nothingness [1: 22223/2: 15657/TO 104]. We see that Thomass experience of mortality is inextricably connected with that of Anne: langoisse (once more, the feeling of the loss of all feeling) describes the joint that articulates their deaths. Feeling nothing, feeling himself as nothing, Thomas opens himself up to a moribund jouissance. Ravaged by delights (ravage de dlices), Thomas posits himself in relation to a future void (vide futur) as if to a frightful enjoyment (jouissance affreuse) [1: 222/2: 155/TO 103]. It would seem that his ecstasis is the pleasure of anticipating mortality. This rapture is so great that it can only be experienced in its withdrawal as torment: I am at grips with a sentiment that reveals to me that I cannot experience it, and it is at that moment that I experience it with a force which makes it an inexpressible torment [1: 222/2: 155/TO 104]. His delight (dlice) at no longer existing is so great that it is beyond the ability of any subject to experience it; the subject can at most experience its inability to undergo this experience. Le tourment names the feeling that reveals the impossibility of feeling this feeling; it discloses an impossible experience through which the subject would be nullified. There is a transition from the absence of feeling, the absence of desire, and the absence of alterity to the exposure to an alterity. It is as if an extraordinarily dense experience of auto-affection forms the condition for an engagement with an infinite transcendence. Along with the feeling that everything is vanished (toutes les choses se sont vanouies), the night brings Thomas the feeling that everything is immediate (toute chose mest immediate): It is the supreme relationship that is sufficient unto itself; it leads me eternally to itself, and an obscure race from the identical to the

28. There is a slight discrepancy between the first and the second versions at this point. The 1941 version reads: Et absent, doublement absent de moi [1: 221]. 29. For a discussion of self-doubling in Thomas lObscur, see Hurault 7274.

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identical imparts to me the desire of a wonderful progress [1: 223/2: 157/TO 105].30 The supreme relationship that is sufficient unto itself repeats itself eternally, but this does not suggest (as is demonstrated by Klossowskis interpretation of the Nietzschean ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen) the static recurrence of the identical.31 Is the supreme relationship not similar in its structure to poetry in Blanchots essay of 1949 devoted to Jean Paulhan (La mystre dans les lettres)? Poetry demands, Blanchot writes, absolute being through the synthesis of meaning and sign. Both aspects of language aspire to become interchangeable with each other. This is possible because, Blanchot writes, in poetry the relationship preexists the terms; the terms exist only in their relationship (les termes nexistent que dans le rapport) [PF 57/WF 51], and what we know of isolated terms, from other experiences, has the same value only in the relationship that grounds them. Poetic languageunderstood here as the pure signifying power of languageis an original difference that maintains both opposing perspectives as identical; it is an interruptive opening that engenders both poles. When read in the context of Blanchots later research, one may hypothesize that the supreme relationship bears similar structural features to that of poetry in the Paulhan essay: both are relations that precede and make their relata possible. The su30. My interpretation of this passage was inspired by some of Fynsks remarks in his foreword to The Station Hill Blanchot Reader. 31. Blanchot alluded to this interpretation in Le pas au-del. According to the Klossowskian interpretation of the ewige Wiederkehr, consciousness is struck by a moment of delirious lucidity when the inconceivable thought emerges that all things will have repeated themselves infinitely. Klossowski stresses the non-narratable character of the eternal recurrence: its experience may not be preserved or archivalized, since a forgetting is essential to this experience. This is because the time in which the experience of the eternal recurrence is itself experienced must occur in time, and so must be relegated to an amnesia no less vital than anamnesis. As Klossowski remarks, it is inscribed in the very essence of the circular movement that the movement itself be forgotten from one state to the next [110]. The I to whom recurrence discloses itself is destroyed, for the time in which he or she will experience the infinitely recurring moment of disclosure is not the time in which the I lives, subordinated to the everyday system of signs. For personal pronouns are, for Klossowski, the fossilized signs of ordinary language and crystallize through their repetition. Eternal recurrence casts the stagnant character of the I into dispersion and transforms it into a pronoun in the third person (this is the very movement that Blanchot himself describes in La voix narrative in Lentretien infini and La solitude essentielle in Lespace littraire). When I experience that all things will return, I am reconciled with myself only insofar as I become integrated within an infinite series of permutations of the self. Auto-affection is at this moment a form of hetero-affection. Klossowskis ecstatic self is not a self-same subject committed to the infinite repetition of the same acts and the same thoughts; he rather emphasizes the expropriation of the self from its own self-identity. All that the self has in common with itself, according to this interpretation, is reduced to a mere moment of disjunctive instanteity, wherein its own self-sameness is forgotten, insofar as it is temporalized, disappropriated only to be taken up again, reappropriated not in the lucidity of self-consciousness, but in terms of a disjunctive member of an infinite temporal serieswhat Klossowski terms the successive realization of all possible identities [108]. When the meaning of the eternal recurrence is disclosed to me, my self is obliterated in the face of something objectively necessary and absoluteits own othering. The experience of eternal recurrence is the experience of a nonexperience, for it involves the dissolution of the very self that would have experienced it. What Klossowski understands by the eternal recurrence of the same, then, is not the constitution of a static identity, for the self that experiences the eternal recurrence must actualize all other possible selves, revealing itself as nothing more than one of a series of masks. The eternal recurrence demands a time without identity, since no instant is determinable as identical to itself outside of the series of determinations that recurrence imposes. But if it is the case that no instant is identical to itself, then sameness is no longer conceivable as identity, since what is the same occurs only in terms of the diversity of its repetition. See Deleuze, The Logic of Sense.

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preme relationship is a pure relation,32 one that exists in itself, and therefore in a certain sense estranged from the things related. This apparently paradoxical formulation invites one to conceive a relation that is a priori. Whatever else it may signify, the supreme relation that is sufficient unto itself is a relation that is independent of its own terms. Absolutely self-subsistent, eternally recurrent, the supreme relationship is an infinite transcendence (its self-sufficiency suggests that the supreme relationship is not of the order of the human). Yet the alterity to which Thomas accedes is a transcendence without transcendence: it is the beyond, if the beyond is that which admits of no beyond [1: 223/2: 157/TO 105].33 The absolute is (by definition) wholly other, yet nonetheless intimately bound up with finite existence. In the face of an ungraspable alterity, Thomas is surrendered to the ceaseless movement of a metamorphosis in which he becomes the equal of the night by offering himself as a mirror for [its] perfect nothingness in order for the void to contemplate itself [1: 226/2: 163/TO 108]. As the mimetic representation of the night, Thomas reduces the night to the status of passivity, without ever forcing it to renounce its dominance (You become a delicious passivity. You attain entire possession of yourself in abstention [1: 226/2: 163/TO 109]). The mirror that allows the night to contemplate itself, Thomas establishes a relationship of interdependence between himself and the night (Porous, identical to the night, which is not seen, I am seen. [. . .] In the night we are inseparable [1: 224/2: 159/TO 105]). Something like an ontico-ontological schism is articulated here: the human induces the night into a kind of self-doubling (an ec-stasis (extase) [1: 226/2: 163/TO 108], as Blanchot terms it). The night needs and uses the human in order to reflect itself. Transcendence includes within itself a certain praxis. In the context of Thomass monologue and its emphasis on the unification of being with death, there is little question that what is being named here as night is death. Further philological evidence for this equation could be found in Lexprience dIgitur in which la nuit is determined as a positive absencethe subsistence of pure disappearancethe appearance of which is anticipated by the suicide it enables. Death (if one were to deceive oneself and name that unreality) is the supreme relationship that is sufficient unto itselfyet this supreme transcendence requires an intermediary in order to show itself. Humankindin the form of Thomas (and the text supports this synecdochal movement)34is exposed to an otherness that infinitely exceeds it. The infinite is an infinitely self-subsistent relation. But at the heart of this infinite self-subsistence there is the demand for another relation. Absolute self-identity opens onto a relation to the human: I make you experience your supreme identity as a relationship. I name and define you [1: 226/2: 163/TO 109]. Through his mediation, the night is able to achieve a relation with itself. The separation between Thomas and the night is absolute, but the absolute loss of separation is at the same time the absoluteness of separation: Our intimacy is this
32. The notion of a pure relation can be found in the Heideggerian text Das Wesen der Sprache (although the author does not use this term). In order to approach the essence of language, Heidegger suggests, one must think the neighborhood (Nachbarschaft) between poetrymaking (Dichten) and thinking (Denken). Both terms belong to the same element, Heidegger writes: that of saying (Sagen). One enters into perplexity (Verlegenheit) in engaging in thought with the neighborhood that holds both relata together. Thinking this relation qua relation is the precondition of thinking through the essence of language. 33. As Blanchots rhetoric suggests, a step (pas) into the beyond is here interdicted (pas) at the same time as it comes to pass. 34. Thomas is figured as humankind in the opening of the penultimate chapter: With me, the species died each time completely. [. . .] I was the sole corpse of humanity [1: 21213/2: 13536/TO 93].

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very night. Any distance between us is suppressed, but suppressed in order that we may not come closer one to the other. It is a friend to me, a friendship which divides us [2: 15960/TO 10506].35 The infinite distance of friendship describes the articulation of a relation between death and the human. In the intimate bond that is brought about between the supreme relationship and Thomas, a separation is still maintained. There is an infinite entre-tien, a comaintenance, a holding-betweena relation between them subsists, which consists in the fact that there is no relation whatsoever. If the night is absolute transcendence, in the later moments of Thomass monologue, the absolute is relativized. If the self-sufficiency of the supreme relationship makes of it a transcendence, it is a finite transcendence. The supreme relationship is death, but death exists only in relation to the human. Absolutely self-identical, death itself opens up to its finitude. By reflecting its self-identity, Thomas sets terms to the infinite: You give to the infinite the glorious sentiment of its limits. [. . .] You bloom into new restrictions [1: 226/2: 16364/TO 109]. The absolute character of the night is not renounced; rather, it is made relative while retaining (neither surrendering nor compromising) its absoluteness. It would seem that mimesis relativizes the absolute, while preserving its absolute character. Thomas transmutes himself into a self-effacing medium through which the night reflects upon itself (Tu te contemples par mon intermdiaire ternellement) [1: 226/2: 164]. By presenting himself as the resemblance of the infinite, Thomas transforms the infinite into an object. Thomas thus presents himself as one who mediates the impossible. This victorious (self-) assertion of the human against an infinite otherness is an irreconcilable aporia.36

The Communication of the Impossible To return to this essays starting point: for Blanchot, death cannot be known except by way of the Other. As I have demonstrated, death in Thomas lObscur is at the furthest remove from the pathos of a solitary being-toward-death. Annes gift of mortality exists only in relation to the Other and is mediated by the Other. Can one not say that Thomas engagement with mortality was incited by Annes self-sacrifice? Her gift of dying leads to a kind of linguistic metamorphosis in which Thomas becomes the figure of death. Here it is a matter of the union between existence and death through the meta-metaphorical representation of that union. Because Anne gives her death to Thomas, he finds himself able, as an existing being, to become the figural representation not of her death, but of death as such. His transmutation of Annes gift of dying is such that he joins with the night only as its figural representation. There is a sacrifice of humanness insofar as the human responds to a figural exigency.37 It is necessary to read Thomass final, victorious affirmationIt makes me, nothingness that I am, like unto noth35. In the first version, this passage reads: Notre intimit est cette nuit meme. Mais si toute distance est supprime entre nous, cest pour que nous ne puissons pas nous rapprocher. Plus je lui suis proche, plus il mest tranger. Tous les rapports par lesquels il sunit moi servent empecher mon union avec lui. Chaque relation nouvelle est une relation qui me manque. Il mest ami, amiti qui ne me pntre pas [1: 224]. 36. The infinite, of course, can neither become an object nor have a cause. Nevertheless, Thomas paradoxically affirms himself as the origin of that which has no origin: I create that which cannot be created [1: 226/2: 164/TO 108]. 37. This figural-sacrificial exigency is also discussed in La littrature et le droit la mort, wherein literary negation is likened to the ideality of death in the Reign of Terror. Human particularity is sacrificed in order to obtain its representative function. See Fynsks interpretation of this text, Crossing the Threshold.

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ingness. In a cowardly way it delivers me to joy [1: 226/2: 165/TO 109]in the context of his self-figuration. If it is tempting to misinterpret Thomass triumphal declaration as the self-assertion of the human vis--vis the absolute, his status as a figure provides the appropriate counterbalance to this movement. The human does not have a self-subsistent, independent existence apart from the night. It would be more precise to say that the humanas the finite instantiation, the exigency, of an infinite relation is drawn out from the opening that the night makes possible. In the penultimate chapter of Thomas lObscur, the human does assert itself in the face of an inappropriable otherness, yet this self-assertion must be thought within an economy of need and usage. Thomass sacrifice is a self-offering of the human / as the human to an inexperiential transcendence in order for the void to figure itself and to constitute its absolute self-identity as a self-relation. Thomass self-immolation in no sense makes death possible (in the precise sense that Blanchot gives to this term in Lentretien infini and Lespace littraire). Death is not figured here as the possible annihilation of the self, since it is what passes beyond all possibility, insofar as the possible is what one is empowered to attain. One might say that, through his self-sacrifice, Thomas gives form to the human experience of mortalitybut at what price? The human is sacrificed to become the figure of the absolute, whereas the night remains altogether other. For Blanchot, sacrifice isin this contextthe substitution of the Other for the outside that opens the self to the outside, and the exposure of the community to the finitude that is its foundation. Death cannot be known except by way of the Other: thus there is an exigency of a relation to the other human being as to an absolute transcendence. This movement toward the outside (the autrui) is one of responsibility for the Other in its dying and is the origin of all social relations, indeed, of sociality itself. Thomas lObscur is also concerned with a sacrifice (in the figure of Anne) for the sake of the other person and the community. Both Annes death and that of Thomas serve the function of communicating the incommunicable: Anne mediates death for those who are witnesses to her dying; Thomas figures himself as death in response to this mediation. What the penultimate chapter of this text suggests to us is far more troubling, however. On the one hand, the penultimate chapter says the same thing as La communaut inavouable: the Other is necessary in order to mediate death, in order to make death (the inaccessible) accessible. Death appears as a self-subsistent relation (it is a supreme relationship that is outside of the human, since it is outside of all human power)but even at the heart of this self-subsistence, there is a relation to the human. On the other hand, however, even though Blanchot allows for the presence of the human, and affords a relation to the human, he reduces the human to a figural necessity. Blanchots positioning of the human vis--vis death is therefore highly ambiguous. The impossible is placed in relation to the human, yet the human becomes nothing more than the mediator of the impossible. The Others gift of its death occurs through the presentation of its finitudethe testimony of its finite existence. Between Thomass anguished anticipation of mortality and the absence (the night) that makes this anticipation possible, a reciprocity is established. Anonymous and impersonal transcendence opens up to and demands a relation to the other human being. Mortality appears as infinitely self-subsistent yet exists only in relation to the exigency of the human. Blanchot repeatedly poses the question of the human, even in his meditations and figurations of absolute transcendence. For Blanchot, as for Levinas, there is no metaphysics without ethics.38
38. For a discussion of the relation between Blanchot and Levinas, see Libertson; and Davies.

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Can one not also say of Blanchot what he himself says of Mallarm in Lexprience dIgitur? Does Blanchot here shrink back from what Mallarm calls, in the preface to Un coup de ds, the identical neutrality of the abyss? One could assert that it is no longer the night (absence) that speaks, but the night in the name of the human. Absence is posited as consciousness in order to appear as absence. The night becomes being, becomes life itself, in order that death be masteredit thus abjures its status as nothingness. Does Blanchotdespite every statement to the contrarymake death present? By humanizing absence, does Blanchot move back from what is most terrible in this experience? I do not pretend to have answers to these questions. Perhaps the experience should be left in its fundamental ambiguity. This much, at least, is clear: throughout the corpus of Blanchot, the question of mortality (or the neutral) is inextricably interlaced with the question of the autrui, as the question of the autrui implicates that of mortality. An aphorism from Lcriture du dsastre, however, complicates this assertion by its suggestion that the phrase the death of the Other is a pleonasm: The death of the Other: a double death, for the Other is death already, and weighs upon me like an obsession with death [ED 36/WD 19]. In the relation of the self to the autrui, passivity and dispossession reign: perhaps this is the death to which the fragment refers. And yet Blanchot seems to be saying something more here. The other person opens up a wound, granting receptivity to the other as the Other. The self is exposed to transcendence via the Other. The other person appears once more as a substitute for the impossible, and as the fragment of Lcriture du dsastre impliesis at the same time the impossible. Perhaps this is what Blanchot is implying in a parenthesis of Lentretien infini (or rather Blanchot, one of the interlocutors of the infinite conversation that runs throughout and beyond that volume) that reads, The Other is in the neutral, even when it speaks to us as Autrui [EI 456/IC 311]. An interlocutor in the same parenthesis suggests that death plays the role of a challenge to Being39 grasped as the One in a manner analogous to that of the Autrui: Coming as Other, having the false appearance of the neutral, not allowing itself to be seized as unified; attaining only inasmuch as it remains inaccessible (and thereby rendering inaccessible what it reaches), nevertheless touching only what it has always already touched; having no actuality and only allowing itself to be encountered by the Self that it haunts when the Self, stand-in for the Other, is no more than the already broken fictive partner that the Other offers itself and receives as a gift [EI 457/IC 311]. The self encounters death only inasmuch as the Other offers death to it as the Other. Neither the self nor the Other can engage in dying except by way of the other, who is substitutive of the experience of mortality. Mortality comes through and as the other person in its human finitude. In order for the community to know the finitude that serves as its elusive foundation, there must be a sacrifice. In its self-sacrifice, the other person answers to a figural exigency. The impossible must be communicated in order to institute the community of the impossible. The autrui is figurative of mortality, making death mediate, answering to the demand that there be a sacrifice in order to make of death something other than a metaphor.

39. Neither death nor the autrui are conceivable on the basis of being. Both are forms of nondialectical transcendence or excedence. Neither can be reduced to the one and the same; both are beyond the grips of ontology. This is a Levinasian argument that I am not able to pursue here because of the restricted scope of my essay.

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