If each word, each image, each story can signify its opposite — and the opposite of that as well — then we must seek the cause of that in the transcendence of death that makes it attractive, unreal, and impossible, and that deprives us of the only truly absolute ending, without depriving us of its mirage. Death dominates us, but it dominates us by its impossibility, and that means not only that we were not born … but also that we are absent from our death. … If night suddenly is cast in doubt, then there is no longer either day or night, there is only a vague, twilight glow, which is sometimes a memory of day, sometimes a longing for night, end of the sun and sun of the end. Existence is interminable, it is nothing but an indeterminacy; we do not know if we are excluded from it (which is why we search vainly in it for something solid to hold onto) or whether we are forever imprisoned in it (and so we turn desperately towards the outside). This existence is an exile in the fullest sense: we are not there, we are elsewhere, and we will never stop being there.
Maurice Blanchot, “Reading Kafka”
Our anxiety … does not come only from this emptiness from which, we are told, human reality would emerge only to fall back; it comes from the fear that even this refuge might be taken away from us, that nothingness might not be there, that nothingness might just be more existence. Since we cannot depart from existence, this existence is unfinished, it cannot be lived fully — and our struggle to live is a blind struggle that does not know it is struggling to die and gets mired in a potential that grows ever poorer. Our salvation is in death, but our hope is to live. It follows that we are never saved and also never despairing, and it is in some way our hope that makes us lost, it is hope that is the sign of our despair, so that despair also has a liberating quality and leads us to hope.
Maurice Blanchot, “Reading Kafka”
The ambiguity of the negation is linked to the ambiguity of death. God is dead, which may signify this harder truth: death is not possible. … The impossibility of death … is the mockery thrown on all humankind’s great subterfuges, night, nothingness, silence. There is no end, there is no possibility of being done with the day, with the meaning of things, with hope: such is the truth that Western man has made a symbol of felicity, and has tried to make bearable by focusing on its positive side, that of immortality, of an afterlife that would compensate for life. But this afterlife is our actual life.
Maurice Blanchot, “Reading Kafka”
The best would be not to begin. But I have to begin. That is to say I have to go on.
Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
Death itself would be that final silence that has never been attenuated by its imitations. Literature, on the other hand, lines up a torrent of incongruous words next to silence. Though it allegedly conveys the same meaning as death, this silence is only a parody of the latter. Nor is it, moreover, genuine language: it is even possible that literature may have the same fundamental meaning as silence, but it recoils before the final step that silence would be. Likewise this Molloy, who is its incarnation, is not precisely a dead man. The profound apathy of death, its indifference to every possible thing, is apparent in him, but this apathy would encounter in death itself its own limit. The interminable meandering in the forest of this death’s equivalent on crutches is, nevertheless, different from death in one respect: that out of habit, or for the sake of persevering more diligently in death and in the amorphous negation of life — in the same way that literature is in the end silence in its negation of meaningful language, but remains what it is, literature — the death of Molloy is in this death-obsessed life, in which not even the desire to forsake it is permitted.
Georges Bataille, “Molloy’s Silence”
Language is what determines this regulated world, whose significations provide the foundation for our cultures, our activities and our relations, but it does so in so far as it is reduced to a means of these cultures, activities and relations; freed from these servitudes, it is nothing more than a deserted castle whose gaping cracks let in the wind and the rain: it is no longer the signifying word, but the defenceless expression death wears as a mask.
Georges Bataille, “Molloy’s Silence”
W. reminds me of the Hasidic lesson Scholem recounts towards the end of his great study of Jewish mysticism.
When he was confronted by a great task, the first Rabbi, about whom little is known — his name and the details of his life are shrouded in mystery — would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer; and what he wanted to achieve was done.
A generation later, the second Rabbi — his name is not known, and only a few details have been passed down concerning his life — confronting a task of similar difficulty would go to the same place in the woods, and say, “We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers”. What he wanted to achieve was done.
Another generation passed, and the third Rabbi — whose name is known to us, but who remains, for all that, a legendary figure — went to the woods and said, “We can no longer light the fire, nor do we know about the secret meditations belonging to the prayer. But we do know that place in the woods to which it all belongs — and that must
be sufficient”. And what the Rabbi wanted to achieve was done.
Another generation passed, and perhaps others, who knows, and the fourth Rabbi — his name is well known, and he lived as we do — faced with a difficult task, merely sat in his armchair and said: “We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done”. And that too was enough: what he wanted to achieve was done.
There was a fifth rabbi Scholem forgot — well, he wasn’t really a rabbi, says W. His name is Lars, about whom all too much is known. He forgot where the woods were, and that he even had a task. His prayers, too, were forgotten; and if he meditated, it was upon the fate of Jordan and Peter Andre. He set fire to himself and his friend W. with his matches and the woods were burned to the ground. And then the whole world caught fire, the oceans boiled and the sky burned away and it was the end of days.
Lars Iyer, Spurious
D. What other plane can there be for the maker?
B. Logically none. Yet I speak of an art turning from it in disgust, weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.
D. And preferring what?
B. The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.
Samuel Beckett, “Three Dialogues”
Of course, I should take my life immediately, that would be the honourable thing, W. says. I should climb the footstool to the noose… But it would already be too late, that’s the problem, W. says. The sin has already been committed. The sin against existence, against the whole order of existing things.
That I should have lived at all is a disgrace, W. says. It’s the disgrace, the disgrace of disgraces. But about the fact that I do exist, nothing can be done.
He could stab me. In fact he’s offered several times. Sometimes I’ve asked him to. Sometimes I’ve proposed a double suicide: he stabbing me, and I him. But then, of course, it would do nothing; it’s already too late. There’s only the fact that I exist, and the fact that his, W.’s, existence has already been utterly contaminated by my existence.
A double suicide — is that the answer? But who would stab who first? Who would string up the nooses? And could W. be sure, really sure, that I was really prepared to die as he was? Or even that he would be prepared to die as I apparently was?
Death seems as far away from us as ever. When will it end?, W. wonders. Isn’t the end overdue? Shouldn’t it have come already? When the apocalypse comes, it will be a relief, W. says. We’ll close our eyes at last. There’ll be no more need to apologise, or to account for ourselves. No guilt…
Lars Iyer, Spurious
Do you think it’s possible to die of stupidity?” W. sighs. “Not as a consequence of that stupidity”, he notes, “but from stupidity. And shame”, W. asks me, “do you think you could die of shame, I mean literally die?”
We should hang ourselves immediately, W. thinks, it’s the only honourable course of action. We are compromised, utterly compromised.
Things are bad. We should kill ourselves, W. says. He’s thought of setting himself on fire before a crowd like that madman in Tarkovsky’s film. — “Not that it would do any good”, he says.
Lars Iyer, Spurious
