Escritura fragmentaria maurice blanchot biography death

Fordham University Press, Although the Allies had already landed on French soil, the Germans continued to struggle in vain against them, the war already lost but not yet over. The lieutenant ordered everyone outside, commanding the young man, along with his mother, aunt, sister, and sister-in-law, to line up for the firing squad. He would die alone.

All of a sudden, the young man felt seized by the inevitable grip of death, carried outside himself, suspended in time. The lieutenant stepped aside, and the Nazis, who were actually members of a collaborationist Russian army, abruptly left to join the skirmish. The author would often have recourse to such an experience of narrative self-dispossession and depersonalization before death.

He would argue that dying always eludes the grasp of comprehension by which the subject tries to put the totality of things at their disposal in the world. Dying leaves you passive and undone, exposed to the impropriety of your own death, as much as the death of the other. How might that unbelievable, even impossible experience end up transforming you?

How might it attune you to an entirely different sense of what it is to be alive and to die in an unjust world, where some lives are systemically rendered more disposable than others? No, you are dead.

In fact, Maurice Blanchot

We become caught in a loop that encourages us to go back to the texts themselves. His research into the anonymity of language, above all literary language, sought to reassess the social role of the writer when divested of identity, authority, and subjectivity. Blanchot, by contrast, asked whether the most engaged form of literature might in fact be disengaged.