Asterisk This

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”