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”
