SI'EPI\lOT

Translated and with an Introduction by Lycette Nelson

This translation ofMaurice Blanchot's work is of major importance to

late 20th-ct>ntury literature and philosophy studies. Using the fragmentary
form, Bl.anchot challen ges the boundaries between the literary and the

philphical. With the obsess ive rigor that has always marked his writing,
Blanchot returns to the themes that have haunted his work the
beginning: writing, death, transgression, the neuter. But here his discus
sion turns around the figures of Hegel and Nietzsche rather than Mallanni
and Kafka.
Blanchot's metaphor for writing in The StepNot Beyond is the game of
chan. Fragmentary writing is a play of limits, a play of ever-multiplied
terms in which no one term ever takes precedence. Through the random
ness of the fragmentary, Blanchot explores ideas as varied as the relation

of writing to luck and to the law, the displacement of the self in writing,
the temporality of the Eternal Return, the responsibility of the self
towards other.>.
I

A volume in the SUNY series

Intersections: Philosc.lphy Dtrd Criticlll Th4wy

Rodolphe Gascht Dnd Mark C. Taylor, editors

ISBN 0-7914-0908-2
-:

STEP

'Ihmslated and with an Introduction

LYCETT NELSON

by

Suny Series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory

Rodolphe Gasche and Mark C. Taylor, editors

THE STEP NOT BEYOND

Translation of Le pas au-ckla by Maurice Blanchot.

Translated and with an introduction by

Lycette Nelson

State Universit y of New York Press ,

Originally published in French as

Le Pas Au-Dela Editions Gallimard, 1973.

Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
1992

State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles and reviews.
For: information, address the State University of New York Press.
State University Plaza, Albany, NY 12246
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Blanchot, Maurice.
[Pas au-dela. English]
The step not beyond I Maurice Blanchot : translated and with
an introduction by Lycette Nelson..
p.

em.

(Suny series. Intersections : philosophy and

critical theoryl
Translation of: Le pas au-dela.
ISBN 0-7914-0907-4 (alk. paper). -ISBN 0-7914-0908-2
(pbk.
:alk. paper)

1. Blanchot. Maurice-Philosophy. 2. Literature-Philosophy.

I. Title. II. Series: Intersections (Albany, N.Y.)
PQ2603.L3343P313 1992
91-13269

848' .912Q7-dc20

10

CIP
4

INTRODUCTION

In 1971 Maurice Blanchot published a major collection of es

says regrouped and, in some cases, revised, under the title
L'Entretien infini. L'Entretien infini announces the project of
"une parole pluriel
speech" and puts the project
into practise in its use of nu.1nerous .strategies to introduce
multiplicity into writing-the dialogue, the fragment, multi

ple typefaces-all forms of disruption, interruption and dis

continuity. The fragmentary is the one of these forms that
Blanchot develops the furthest in the two works that follow
L'Entretien infini: The Step Not Beyond, published in French
in 1973, and The Writing of the Disaster, published in 1980
(English translation by Ann Smock University of Nebraska
Press, 1986). To understand the plaee of The Step Not Beyond'(
in Blanchot's work, we must see it as the culmination of a long
development in Blanchot's thought centering around three
major ideas:._the fragment, the neuter, and the Eternal Re- _
turn._ This devel
enTcan be tracedthrough LEntretien

opm

infini, particularly in such essays as "Sur un changement

d'epoque: l'exigence du retour," "'Nietzsche et l'ecriture frag
mentaire" and "Parole de fragment." The Writing of the Disas
ter follows The Step Not Beyond in its use of the fragment and
of different typefaces. Blanchot's use of the fragment is part of ,
the overall project of L'Entretien infini to find a language that
is truly multiple and that does not attempt to achieve closure.
Blanchot's first use of the fragmentary in a full-length
work is in L'Attente l'oubli (1962), another pivotal text in his

1'

work as a whole. It is at once the first full-length fragmentary

work and the last that can be characterized as fiction. What

distinguishes Blanchot's use of the fragment in L'Attente

l'oubli from his more developed use of it in The Step Not Be
yond an<l,The Writingofthe Disaster is that its use in the later
texts seems to arise out of a much more marked necessity in
resulting from his readings of Nietzsche, and
particularly of the idea of the Eternal Return.
The fragment is, in the first place, a challenge to unified,
systematic thought. Fran;oise Collin notes in her preface to
the second edition of Maurice Blanchat et la question de l'ecri
ture.

his own thought

_since

the first edition of this book [1971] there have been

(displacements of themes and of forms in the work of Maurice

Blanchot, but not ruptures. Thus, reflection as taken the.-

place of fiction, and has gone further amtfurther

away from

com mentary without moving away from dialogue. It has de:-

vel oped itself more and more in the form of the fragmentin the fonn of the ai:Chipelage-thus affirming all the more

it.t_reU;tance oo ootality and thuystem.1

Roger Laporte also remarks a change in Blanchot's writing
beginning with L'Attente l'oubli and finding its achievement in
Le pas au-dela. He writes,
L'Attente l'oubli, a transitional work, marks the end of the
novels and recits ... Thus begins a third epoch marked by
the publication of two major wo'i-k s: Le pas au-dela

L'ecriture du cksastre. .

...

and

. In the same work alternate texts

called "fictional" (but fictional in a sense that no longer has

anything to do with the novelistic), texts printed in italics,
and the texts in which literature-before I would have said
writing"-with its dramas, its stakes, its intrigue, its enig

mas, bares itself ... -task not vain, but impossible, as if in

literature there were very little question of literature, but
always of something else.:

As Laporte points out, both The Step Not Beyond and The
Writing of the Disaster, while primarily theoretical fragmen
tary texts, have elements of fiction as well, disrupting the
disruptiveness of the fragmentary even further in. using mul
tiple typefaces and multiple voices. We will see that in The
Step Not Beyond t here is a kind of recit that goes on within the
vi

italicized fragments. Thus, the mixing of genres that has al

ways characterized Blanchot's work and made it impos13jble to
categorize continues and is further radicalized i n the later
texts. It is in this sense that the fragmentary texts mark a

shift, but not a rupture, in Blanchot's work, as remarked by

both Collin and Laporte.

If there is agreement that a change takes place in
Blanchot's writing, what brings about this change? From
Blanchot's own notes to the essays on Nietzsche in L'Entretien
infini, we know that he was very much influenced by several

works on Nietzsche that appeared in Frnce in the 1960s and

'70s, as well as by the writings of Jacques Derrida. Blanchot
writes in a footnote at the end of"Nietzsche et l'ecriture .fr!lg
mentaire": "These pages are written in the margins of several

recent works of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Eugen Fink,

Jean Granier, and of several essays by Jacques Derrida col
lected under the title Writing and Difference. "3 Another name

that he mentions elsewhere

as

being very important in his

understanding of the Eternal Return is

Klossowski.
In the essay

"Nietzsche

et

l'ecriture

that of Pierre

fragmentaire,"

Blanchot explores the place of the fragment in Nietzsche's

thought, as well as Nietzsche's relationship to Hegel and to

traditional philosophy. Blanchot sees two contradictory ten

dencies in Nietzsche's thought: one toward the other away

from, systematization. While Gilles Deleuze, in Nietzsche et la
philosophie, sees Nietzsche's relation to Hegel as oppositional,
Blanchot emphasizes the necessity of the hegelian system for
Nietzsche a__nd views the ambiguity of Nietzsche's position re

garding totality as the result of the impossibility of thinking I

apart fromthe system. Nietzsche's use of the fragment and
the aphorism, even while attempting to oppose hegelian di
alectics, represents for Bl anchot a recognition that the
hegelian whole has been completed. It is after the completion

of the whole, in the "beyond" of philosophy, that fragmentary

writing takes place.

The fragmentary does not precede the whole, but takes

place outside the whole and after it. When Nietzsche af
finns: "Nothing exists outside the whole" even if he means to

lessen our gui lty particu larity and to reject judgement, mea
sure, negation, it is still true that he thus affirrms the question of the whole as the only tenable one and thus restores
the idea of totality. Dialectics, the system,
thought as
.
thought of wholeness, are given back their rights, founding

philosophy as completed discourse. But when he says, '7t

seems important to me that one get rid of the whole, of uni
ty, ... we must smash the universe to pieces, lose our respect
for the Whole", then he enters the space of the fragmentary
and takes the risk of a thought that is no longer guaranteed
by unity."

What does it mean for fragmentary writing to come after the

whole, that is, after the completion of time as history?
Blanchot writes in The Writing of the Disaster, "If [fragmen
tary writing] claims that its time comes only after the whole
at least ideally-has been completed, this is because that
time is never sure, but is the absence of time .
"5 To under
.

stand the "after" of "after the whole", we must examine

Blanchot's idea of the Eternal Return and the enormous con
sequences that result from it for him.
,
In the essay "Sur un changement d'epoque: l'exigence du
retour,"6 Blanchot gives a brief catalogue of various commen
tators' responses to the Eternal Return, among them those of
Heidegger, Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski. For
and the
Heidegger, the Eternal
ower are the

two central ideas m Nietzsche's thought and are completely

dependent on one another. This relation is summed up, if in a
somewhat banalized form, in Nietzsche's famous "Will it if you
can will to live it eternally", in which what seems to be at
stake in the Eternal Return is the future as it is contained in
the present moment.
For both Bataille and Klossowski, what is essential in the
revelation of the Eternal Return is the revelation itself rather
than what results form it. According to Blanchot, Bataille
faulted Nietzsche for having tried to develop what was re.ally a
mystic experience into a scientific doctrine. Klossowski, on the
other hand, poses the question of how a doctrine of the Eternal
Return is even possible if the experience of it destroys the
subject in whom it occurs and marks a rupture in thought and
viii

in time. This question has great implications for Blanchot, as

he writes, "The question is developed in all its rigor, its
breadth, and its authority by Pierre Klossowski. It is not only
Nietzsche who receives new justice from this investigation,
but through it, what is decided is a change so radical that we
are incapable of mastering it, or even of sufe
f ring it. "7
In Blanchot's understanding of the Eternal Return, the
loss of identity of the subject occupies a central place. In
The Step Not Beyond he develops at length the relation of the
neuter, or neutral, to fragmentary writing and the Eternal
Return. The essential feature of the neuter in Blanchot's overall critique of }he idea of presence as all is its displacement of
the subject in writing, w ich ultimately displaces the whole
notion of the subject as the locus of self-presence. Beginning
from the neuter, Blanchot d!!Plfr
i st the subject, then

identity in general, and finally the present itself. ,

- -or what Blanchot calls in The Step Not Beyond

le "il", the "he/it," taking the place of the subject in writing,

detaches it from any relation to unity, displacing this relation
in substituting for the I, always attached to a place, the he/it
which is without place. The he/it can never be a speaking
subject, can never have the presence of an I. The neuter dis
places the subject as a rule of identity by introducing rupture
into the idea of the self as presence and self-presence. If the
he/it can substitute for any I, then the I is not full, living
presence, but only "a canonic abbreviation for a rule of identi
ty." Blanchot asks: if he/it replaces the I, does it not become
only another I, still determined by identity? Or does it, on the
other hand, put itself in dialectical opposition to the One,
"therefore including itself conveniently in the whole"? The
neuter maintains the law of identity unless, Blanchot an
swers,
... he/it, specified as the indeterminate term in order that
the self in turn might determine itself as the major determi
nant, the never-subjected subject, is the very relation of the
self to the other, in this sense: infinite or discontinuous, in
this sense: relation always in displacement and in displace
ment in regard to itself, displacement also of that which
would be without place. (SNB,5)

ix

In this relation the I is forced to accept itself, "not only as

hypothetical, even fictional, but as a canonic abbreviation,
representing the law of the same, fractured in advance ... "

(SNB,6)
The Eternal Return of the Same says that the same will
return to the same. If the same is always displaced in relation

to itself, however, there is no place to which it could return.

The same, in the form of the self, occurs as present to itself,
but, in Blanchot's formulation of the return, there is no pre
ent in which the self could be present. It is in this sense that

Blanchot's thought of the return is radical in its departure

from that of other commentators. What is terrifying about the
Eternal Return is not that what I live now I will live eternally,
but that there is not, and never has been, anynow in which to
--live anything.
To think the Eternal Return, one must think time as an

infinite recurrence of finitude, but if the return is eternal, the

circulation it brings about is never circulation of the same-of
a full present-but only repetition without origin. The law of

the return tells us that in the future will recur wllat has

bccurred, not in the present, but in the past, since everything

that can happen has already happened. The infinity supposed

by the return is not the eternity of the full present, but the

infmity of rupture that the lack of the present introduces into

time. Blanchot writes,
The law of the return supposing that "everything" would
come again, seems to take time as completed: the circle out

of circulation of all circles; but, in as much as it breaks the

ring in its middle, it proposes a time not uncompleted, a
time, on the contrary, finite, except in the present point that
alone we think we hold, and that, lacking, introduces rup
ture into infinity, making us live as in a state of perpetual
death. (SNB,12)

The impossibility of thinking the Eternal Return arises

from the necessity of thinking time as both finite and infinite
in order to think it. One must think time as completed in
order to think the Eternal Return. However, if time can only
realize itself i n the fullness of presence, time can never be
X

completed if the present is lacking. The circulation of the

re

turn becomes a circulation of a rupture always contained in

the time of the circulation-an absent moment that creates a
supplement of time. The completed time of Hegel gets recircu
lated in Nietzsche's Eternal Return, but in that very circula
tion it can never be thought of as fully realized. When
Blanchot says that Nietzsche can only come after Hegel, but
that "it is alYays before and always after Hegel that he comes
and that he comes again," he expresses the complete paradox
of the Eternal Return.
Nietzsche, (if his name serves to name the law of the Eternal
Return) and Hegel (if his name invites us to think presence
as all and the all

as

presence) allow us to sketch a mythol

ogy: Nietzsche can only come after Hegel, but it is always

before and always after Hegel that he comes and comes

again. Before: since, even though it is thought as absolute,
presence has never gathered in itself the realized totality of

knowledge; presence knows itself .

only as a present un

satisfied practically, unreconciled with presence as all; thus

is not Hegel only a pseudo-Hegel? And Nietzsche always

comes after because the law he brings supposes the comple

tion of time

as

present and in this completion its absolute

destruction, such that the Eternal Return ... freeing the

future of any present and the past of any presence, shatters
thought up to this infmite affirmation: in the future will
return infinitely what in no form and never could be present,
in the same way that, in the past, that which in the past
never belonged in any form to the present has returned

(SNB,22)

What is left of time when the p.re._sent is taken out of it? We

would seem to be left with one time that repeats itself over
and over-not two modalities of time that repeat and antici
pate one another, but only one. Yet we cannot think past and
future as identical without presence. The future, in repeating
the past, is never identical to it, says Blanchot, "even if they
are the same." Past and future are not interchangeable, but
-

disjunct.
The Eternal Return marks time as ruptured and leaves
the point of rupture unbridged and unbri dgeabl e It intro.

xi

duces a time that disrupts all of thought's tendencies to unity

and totalization. Fragmentary writing, as discontinuous and
disruptive, corresponds to this time and responds to the de
mand of the return. The relation of fragmentary writing to the
whole becomes clearer in the context of the Eternal Return.
Fragmentary writing occurs when knowledge becomes uncer
tain of itself, when the past cannot become present to con
sciousness. While it should know everything, because every
thing that can happen has already happened, it can know
nothing actually: As Walter Benjamin observes in comparing
mechanized labor to gambling, in any repetitive act, knowl
edge and experience are useless, since one can learn nothing

from one throw of the dice or one turn of the machine to the
next. When the future repeats the past without the intermedi
ary of the present, the past becomes useless for knowledge.
Knowledge takes on the structure of the phrase repeated sev
eral times in The Step Not Beyond: "I don't know, but I have
the feeling that I am going to have known," spoken both in the
future and in the past, as both a prophecy and a memory (I
remembered this phrase: "I don't know, but have the feeling
that I am going to have known."), but never as present knowl

edge.
The rupture of the present created by the Eternal Return
frees writing from any dependence on speech as presence by
destroying the foundation that presence would supposedly
provide for it. Without this foundation, it no longer plays the
role of follower to speech. Writing responds to the demand of
the return because, as Blanchot has insisted throughout his
theoretical work, writing never begins, but is always begin
ning again. The time of the Eternal Return is the time of
writing, which will be read in the future and will have been
written in the past.
The demand of the return would then be the demand of a
time without present, time that would also be that of writ
ing, future time, past time, which the radicaJ disjunction of
one from the other, even if they are the same, keeps from
identifying other than as the difference repetition brings.

(SNB,l6)
xii

Blanchot moves, through his thinking of the Eternal Re

turn, towards an idea of writing as dife
f rence. The Eternal
Return is repetition, not of the same, but of difference, a point
which Gilles Deleuze makes quite explicitly: "... identity in
the eternal return does not designate the nature of what
comes again, but, on the contrary, the fact of coming again for
f rs."8 Blanchot has, since his earliest writings,
that which dife
repeated the idea that writing is repetition without origin. ""
Through the Eternal Return he arrives at the idea of repetition
as the repetition of difference, and of writing as difference.
Blanchot writes in "Nietzsche et 1ecriture fragmentaire":
One can suppose that if thought in Nietzsche needed force
conceived as "play of forces and waues of forces" to think
plurality and to think difference... this is because it sup
ports the suspicion that difference is movement, or, more
exactly, that it determines the time and the becoming in
which it inscribes itself, as the Eternal Return would make
us think that difference is experienced as repetition and that
repetition is difference. Difference is not an intemporal rule,
the fixity of law. It is ... space in as much as it "'spaces itself

and disseminates itself" and time: not the directed homoge

neity of becoming, but becoming when "it scands itself, sig
nifres itself", interrupts itself, and, in this interruption, does
not continue, but dis-continues itself; from which we must
conclude that dife
f rence, play of time and space, is the silent ,'
play of relations ... that regulates writing, which is to af- '.
firm bravely that dife
f rence, essentially, writes.9

Blanchoes references to the writings of Jacques Derrida

evident here. Blanchot uses certain Derridean ideas to
make his own thought more precise, as we will see in his use of
the notion of the trace in The Step Not Beyond. While he uses
many of the same terms as Derrida, there are marked di
vergences in his use of them.
are

Without going through the whole history of the notion of

the trace as it is used first by Emmanuel Levinas and then by
Derrida,lO let us look briefly at what Levinas and Derrida
define the trace to be. Levinas defmes the trace in "The Trace
of the Other" as the trace of"... that which properly speaking
xiii

has never been there, of what is always past."11 The trace in

Levinas is related quite specifically to a transcendant being,
to an other who is absolutely-oth.er;-It is Levinas' trace which,
"reconciled to a Heideggerian intention" signifies for Derrida
"... the undermining of an ontology which, in its innermost
course, has determined the meaning of being as presence and
"12
the meaning of language as speech.
In the essay "Differance," Derrida articulates the relation
ship of the trace to the arche-trace and of the arche-trace to
the impossibility of an originary pressnce.What is constitu
tive of the trace for Derrida, as for Levinas,
erasure.

While Derrida poses the problem of how anything could ever

have been present in an originary way through the trace and
the arche-trace, Blanchot approaches the impossibility of an
originary presence through the Eternal Return and places the
tr.e-within the time of the return. Blanchot introduces the
trace thus:

/Etraced before being written. If the word trace can be admit/ted, it is as the index that would indicate as erased what
was, however, never traced. All our writing ... would be

this: the anxious search for what was never written in the

I present, but in a past

to come.

(SNB,l7)

The trace signifies for Blanchot, as for Derrida, the lack of

an

origin, because the trace never refers back to an original

marking. Blanchot distinguishes the trace from the mark.
. . . writing marks, but does not leave marks. More precisely,
there is between mark and traces such a difference that it
almost accounts for the uivocal nature oLwtiting. Writing

,bUt the traces do not depend on the

marks and leaves traceS

mark, and, at the limit, are not in relation to it. (SNB,53)

While Roger Laporte hazards the suggestion that the mark in

Blanchot, the trace in Levinas, and the arche-trace in Der
rida all refer to the same thing,13 it is hard to read this in
Blanchot's use of the terms "mark" and "trace". When he says,
for instance,
The mark, it is to be missing from the present and to make
the present lack. And the trace, being always traces, does
xiv

'

not refer to any initial presence that would still be there as

remainder or vestige, there where it

has disappeared.

(SNB,54)
there is nothing ofDerrida's idea of the trace as constitutive of
the present. What Blanchot really insists on in his use of the
trace is the idea of writing as effacement, as opposed to the
traditional idea that writing preserves what would otherwise
disappear. He begins his discussion of the trace with the
haunting claim, "Everything will efface itself, everything
must efface itself."14 In fact, it seems that one of the aims of

the fragmentary is to make writing efface itself all the more

definitively. The lack of continuity between the past and the
future means a forgetting that writing, rather than preserving anYfliliiiagainst it, only exacerbates.
Writing is not destined to leave traces, but to erase, by
traces, all traces, to disappear in the fragmentary space of
writing

more

defmite ly than one disappears

in the

tomb . . . (SNB,50)

One of the uses of the idea of the trace to whichDerrida refers,

in addition to Levinas' and Nietzsche's, is Freud's. For Freud,
the trace is the mark of difference as it can be seen by the
existence of memory. For Blanchot, the trace seems to have
more to do with forgetting than with remembering,"... as if
between past and future, the absence of present ruled in the
simplified form of forgetfulness." (SNB,16)
The trace takes on a particular significance in The Step

Not Beyond when seen in its relation to the pas of the title Le
pas au-dela, which refers to a whole series of ideas common in
Blanchot's thought: the thought of the limit, prohibition and
transgression, the negation of negation, which D,e.rrida analyzes in his essay "&a'. The trace is at once tracing and effacement, the pas at once prohibition and transgression. Blanchot
writes in The Writing of the Disaster,"Passivity, passion, past,
pas (at once negation and the trace or movement of an ad
vance), this semantic play gives us the slippage of meaning, /
but nothing that we could trust as an answer that would satisfy us."15 In "Pas," Derrida looks at the dissemination and inXV

,t(.

":>

terrelation of two words in Blanchot's work: viens and pas. He

focuses on the dissemination of the pas in the title Le pas au
dela, the work going by that name, and Blanchot's work as a
whole (the word or the sound "pas" appears in several of

Blanchot's titles: Faux pas, Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas,

L'Espace litteraire, La part du feu).
Derrida asks, speaking of the title, "How would you trans

late this displacement, this play of words and of things, I

mean, into another language?"16 The pas presents problems in
translation not only because its meaning is double and its use
in the phrase le pas au-dela ambiguous, but also because, as
Derrida points out, the play is not just a play of words, but of
words and things. The possibilities for translating the whole
title are actually quadruple, since both pas and au-dela can be
taken either as nouns or adverbs (pas is both a step and part
of the negative adverb ne-pas; au-dela means "beyond," but
also occurs as "l'au-dela," the beyond); the meaning of the
entire phrase changes depending on the semantic function of
each of its parts. However one chooses to translate pas, it is
impossible to preserve the two meanings at once, although the
simultaneity of meanings in the same word is important in
preserving the sense of prohibition and transgression occur
ring at the same time. As the trace is effaced as it is written,
so the pas both creates and erases the limit in its crossing.

This is perhaps even more clear in the use of the phrase faux

:{.

pas (false step) and its homonym {aut pas (do not, you must
not). Because of the double meaning of pas, every step be
comes a false step.
The phrase le pas au-dela appears within the text both as
le pas au-dela and as le "pas au-dela," the first seeming to
refer to the step, and the second to its injunction. However, as
Derrida points out, one can never tell exactly what the quota
tion marks in the phrase le "pas au-dela" refer to, nor when
this phrase is being cited even where there are no quotation
marks. The relation between signifier and signified is very
ambiguous-is what is signified in le "pas au-dela" a phrase
or a thing?-made doubly ambiguous both by the quotation
marks and by the definite article, which makes the prohibixvi

tionpas au-dela (not beyond, do not go beyond) into a substan

tive.
Derrida warns against taking thepas only in it function of
negating, even if this is understood to be non-dialectical.
Among several reasons he gives for not doing so, the most
important is that:
... in isolating ... the logical or semantic function of the

ne-pas, in separating it . .. both from the semantic of the

"pas" of walking and from the non-semantic (contamina
tions, anomalies, delirium, etc.) one forbids oneself all that
leads the problematic of logic, of dialectic, of meaning, the /
being of the entity (philosophy and its pas au-dela, thought)
towards a coming of the t (as distancing of the near)
[Ereignis, Entferrung, Enteignis] "before" which philosophy
and its pus au-dela, thought, forces itself, without ever suc

ceeding,

to close itself.17

Philosophy demands a beyond, a point of totalization, of com

pletion and closure. The pas does not simply negate such a
possibility, but puts into question the possibility of negation
necessary for closure to be accomplished. How can this pas
ever produce closure if it sets up a limit to be crossed even in
prohibiting its crossing?
The step beyond is never completed, or, if it is completed, is
never beyond. Transgression never really transgresses, but
only calls for another limit.
The circle of the law is this: there must be a crossing in order
for there to be a limit, but only the limit, in as much as
uncrossable, summons to cross, affir ms the desire (the false
step) that has always already, through an unforeseeable
movement, crossed the line.(SNB,24)

Transgression cannot be accomplished because there is no

present in which the prohibition against crossing the limit
could be pronounced or in which the crossing itself could take
place. Blanchot in fact suggests that the present is nothing
but this line to be crossed. The strange structure of thepas, of
prohibition and transgression, must be placed within the time
xvu

of the..EternalReturn. The law presupposes a trinary time in

which the prohibition is first pronounced, then recognized,
then broken. As the time of the return lacks this temporal
structure, the prohibition does not precede the transgression,
but occurs simultaneously with it and works in such a way as
to efface the limits imposed by a time structured by the pre
sent.

The transgression that is never accomplished is, pri-

); \narily, dying. Blanchot looks at the kinds of prohibition that

exist against dying and the kind of transgression that dying

represents. Dying is a transgression against and out of time,
because therejs no time for dying. Dying can never be com-

pleted because it lacks the solidity of an event. It does not

....{ occur through any decisiveness or action, but only through the
most passive passivity. Dying, like writing,

cannot

take place

in the present because the limit that dying represents cannot

be situated. Not only is dying in the present forbidden, but the
present, as prohibited, is what prevents dying from taking
place.
. . . one could affirm: it is forbidden to die in the present."
"Which means also: the present does not die and there is no
present for dying. It is the present that would in some way
pronounce the prohibition." ... -"Thus a time without

1 present would be 'affirmed' according to the demand of the

return."-"This is why even transgression does not accom
plish itself." (SNB,l07-108)
The prohibition can never be broken by a transgressive
act, whlch would only affirm the prohibitiveness of the pro
hibition. Instead it is only through the most passive passivity
that the prohibition would lose its prohibitive force. Dying is
the step/not beyond that is never accomplished, that one
seeks to accomplish in the other, dying in the other's death.

The pas au-dela transforms the pas of negation into the pas of
patience, passion, and passivity, taking its power of negation
away through the powerlessness of the unaccomplished. The
pas of the completely passive is transgressive without accom
plishing anything. Pure passivity is what is least allowed. We
seek passivity in the other, by dying in the place of the other.
xviii

Dying in the other sets us free from ourselves, but does not
change our relation to dying, which is anonymous, intransi
tive, disappropriating, and therefore without relation to any I,
be it mine or the other's.
Passivity, patience, passion open the relation to the other
in refusing the pas of the negative.
Patience opens me entirely, all the way to a passivity that is
the pas of the utterly passive, and that has therefore aban
doned the level of life where passive would simply be the

opposite of active.ta

Dying in the other is never accomplished, yet the attempt to

reach the other in his death makes me in some way responsi
ble for that death. Blanchot retus to this theme in a later
work; La communaute inavouable, where he writes,
To maintain myself present in proximity to the other who
distances himself definitively in dying, to take upon myself
the death of the other as the only death that concerns me,
this is what places me outside myself and is the only separa
tion that can open me, in its impossibility, to the Open of a
community.t9

The relation to the other is the main focus of the italicized

fragments of The Step Not Beyond, in which two unnamed
figures speak to one another about some anonymous and very ,
indefinite others whose approach they await. Their wait for
these others is a figure for the approach of their own deaths,
or death, since they attempt to die in one anothets place.
When "they''-these others-finally arrive, there is no time
for this event, as there is no time for dying, although death
r
has all time at its disposal. The attempt to reach the other, to
die in his death, is the attempt to "go beyond." If we cannot
accomplish this it is because we are never passive enough. The
passivity of dying is itself a "beyond," beyond negativity and
always beyond us. The limit it poses is effaced in dying itself.
When one of the figures of the italicized fragments finally
dies, it is as if nothing had happened. "He was so calm in
dying that he seemed, before dying, already dead, after and
forever, still alive ... thus having effaced the limit at the moXlX

,./

ment in which it is it that effaces." (SNB,l37) This event, how

ever uneventful nevertheless provides the basis for an appeal
to the ethical. Whether one qm take responsibility for an
other's death, what it means to live or di for others, whether
death is light or heavy-all of these are questions that are
given meaning only by the erasure of death as a limit. All of
the meaning that we give to such questions is given by the
anticipation of the event of dying, and not by the event (or
non-event) itself. It is only when dying is understood as the
limit that is efa
f ced "at the moment in which it is it that
effaces," that there can be an appeal to an ethics that is not
weighty, that does not give death a gravity it does not have,
that does not pose death as the ultimate prohibition.

NOTES

1. Fran"'oise Collin, Maurice Blanchot et la question de l'ecri

ture, Preface to the second edition, Gallimard 1986, p. 7
,

2. Roger Laporte, Maurice Blanchot: Ll\ncum. l'effroyablement

ancien, Fata Morgana, 1987, note 15, p. 66
3. Maurice Blanchot, L'Entretien infini, Gallimard, 1969, note,
p. 255
4. Op. cit., p. 229
5. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, translated by
Ann Smock, University of Nebraska, 1986, pp. 59-60
6. Blanchot, L'Entretien in{ini, pp. 394-418
7. Op. cit., p. 408
8. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie, P.U.F., 1962, pp.
54-55
9. Blanchot, L'Entretien in{ini, p. 242
10. For a discussion of the trace in Derrida and Levin as, and of
Derrida's relation to Levinas, see Robert Bernasconi, "The Trace Qf
Levinas in Derrida" in Derrida and Differance, edited by David
Wood and Robert Bernasconi, Northwestern University, 1988. For a
detailed discussion of Derrida's use of the trace and the archet:.-ace
see also Rodolphe Gasche, The Thin of the Mirror, Harvard Univer
sity Press, pp. 186-194

11. Emmanuel Levin as, '1'he Trace of the Other", in Deconstruc

tion and Criticism, edited by Mark Taylor, University of Chicago,
1986, p. 358
XX

12. Jacques Derrida, OfGrammatology, translated by Gayatari

Spivl\k, Johns Hopkins, 1976, p. 7
13. Laporte, Maurice Blan.clwt: Li1.ncien, l'effroyablement an
cien, note 19, p. 73
14. This is the subject of a recent essay by Roger Laporte in the
special issue of Lignes on Blanchot. See Laporte, "Tout doit s'etracer,
tout s'effacera" in Lnes, no. 11, September 1990
15. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 16
16. Derrida, Parages, Galilee, 1986, p. 53
17. Ibid.
18. BJanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 13
19. Blanchot, La communaute inavouable, Editions de Minuit,
1983, p. 21

xxi

Let us e

To death we are not accustomed.

Death being that to which we are not accustomed, we

approach it either as the unaccustomed that astonishes or as

the unfamiliar that horrifies. The thought of death does not
help us to think death, does not give us death as something to
think. Death, thought, close to one another to the extent that
thinking, we die, if, dying, we excuse ourselves from thinking:
every thought would be mortal; each thought, the last
thought.

Time, time: the

pof ond

that is not accom

plished in time would lead outside of time. without this out

side being intemporal, but there where time would fall, fragile
fall, according to this "outside of time in time" towards which
writing would attract us, were we allowed, having disap
peared from ourselves, to write within the secret of the an
cient fear.

+
From where does it come, this power of uprooting, of
destruction or change, in the first words written facing the
sky, in the solitude of the sky, words by themselves without
prospect or pretense: "it-the sea"?
It is certainly satisfying (too satisfying) to think that, by
the mere fact that something like these words, "it-the sea" is
written, with the demand that results from them and from
which they also result, that somewhere the possibility of a
1

radical transformation is inscribed, be it for a single one-the

possibility, that is, of its suppression as a personal existence.
Possibility: nothing more.
Do not draw any consequences from these words written
one day (which were, or could have been, at once and just as
well, some other words), nor even from the demand to write, to
suppose that this had been entrusted to you, as you persuade
yourself and sometimes dissuade yourself that it had: all that
you could hold onto of it would only serve to unify, in a pre
sumptuous way, an existence insignificant, and (by the propo
sition of this demand of writing itself) nevertheless removed
somewhat from unity. Do not hope, if there lies your hope
and one must suspect it-to unify your existence, to introduce
into it, in the past, some coherence, by way of the writing that
disunifies.

To write as a question of writing, question that bears

the writing that bears the question, no longer allows you this
relation to the being-understood in the first place as tradi

tion, order, certainty, truth, any form of taking root-that you

received one day from the past of the world, domain you had
been called upon to govern in order to strengthen your "Self",
although this was as if fissured, since the day when the sky
opened upon its void.
I will try in vain to represent him to myself, he who I was

not and who, without wanting to, began to write, writing (and
knowing it then) in such a way that the pure product of doing
nothing was introduced into the world and into his world.
That happened "at night". During the day there were the
daytime acts, the day to day words, the day to day writing,
affirmations, values, habits, nothing that counted and yet
something that one had confusedly to call life. The certainty
that in writing he was putting between parentheses precisely
this certainty, including the certainty of himself as the subject
of writing, led him slowly, though right away, into an empty
space whose void (the barred zero, heraldic) in no way pre
vented the turns and detours of a very long process.
2

In this city, he knew there were people who did not see

anyone, and so he had to ask himself: how did he know it?

Perhaps it was not something that he knew, but that was in
cluded in knowledge. Knowing anything else meant having to
know it in advance or not know it. How, given this, resist the
temptation-the desire-to go look for them? "How does one go
about meeting them?"-"Well, nothing could be more simple:
you will stumble upon them."
They were several, of that, also, he could be sure; several,
living together, or together and separate? Several-perhaps
this only helped him not to think of them in an overly deter
mined way: some people.
"You mean, by chance?"-But he repeated: "You will stum
ble upon them." Naturally, before even speaking of it to him
and especially since speaking of it to him, he had anticipated
another answer: "You know them." By which he would have
understood that to know them was not the best way to meet
them. But when he had decided, as though under the pressure
of common words, to ask, "Do you think I know them?", he was
surprised by the frivolity of the answer. "How could that be,
you don't see anybody?"
At least he saw him, even if, when he thought about it, he
could foresee how, saying this to him-but he would not say
it-he would have been answered: "Just as I was saying, you
don't see anybody."

Weak thoughts, weak desires: he felt their force.

The relation to the "he/it"1: the plurality that the

"he/it" holds is such that it cannot be marked by any plural
sign; why? "they" [ils] would still designate an analyzable, and
thus maniable, whole. "They" is the way in which ("he/it")
frees him-/it-self from the neuter by borrowing from the plu
rality the possibility of determining itself, thus returning con
veniently to indeterminacy, as if (he/it) could frnd the mark
adequate to fix it a place-that very determined one in which
every undetermined inscribes itself.
3

If I write he/it, denouncing it rather than indicating it, far

from giving it a rank, a role or presence which would elevate it
above anything that could designate it, it is I who, from this,
enter into the relation in which "I" accepts solidification into a
fictional or functional identity, in order that the game of writ
ing may be played, of which he/it is either the partner and (at
the same time) the product or the gift, or the bet, the stake,
which, as such, principle player, plays, changes, displaces it
self and takes the place of the change itself, displacement that
lacks placing and that is missing from any placing.

he/it: if I remain at the border of writing, careful not to

introduce him/it in capitalized form, more careful still not to
make it carry an excess of meaning that would come to it from
one's not knowing what it designates, this word that I main

tain, not without struggle, in the position I momentarily as

sign to it (at the border of writing), I not only have to watch
over it constantly, but, starting from it, by an impossible usur
pation or fiction, to watch over the change of place and the
configuration that would result from it for this "self", from the
start charged with representing the same and the identity or
permanence of signs in and by their graphism, while at the
same time having no other form than this function or punctur
ing of identity. The self is not a self but the same of myself2,
not some personal, impersonal identity, sure and vacillating,
but the law or rule that conventionally assures the ideal iden
tity of terms or notations. The self is therefore an abbreviation
that one could call canonical, a formula that regulates and, if
you like, blesses, in the first person, the pretention of the
Same to primacy. Whence, perhaps, the sacred character that
is attached to the self and that egoism confiscates, giving it
the privilege of the central place it would occupy, and making
it the fundamental trait of any movement to bring together, to
associate, to group, to unify, or even, negatively, to disunify, to
dissociate, to disassemble.
But does he/it, other than by subtraction, let itself escape
the limitless sphere where the attraction of the canonic abbre
viation of the self would exert itself, there where, under what4

ever form, identity rules? If he/it becomes the other, does it

not become only another self characterized by the indirect
(though in no way secondary) complex relation from which it
comes and which it supports, or does it only become, at best,
at worst, that from which the One would be absent, and which
readily marks itself as not-One (the negation ordering itself in
its turn by a rigorous sign of exclusion and thereby including
itself conveniently in the whole)? Unless he/it, specified as the
indeterminate term in order that the self in turn might deter
mine itself as the major determinant, the never-subjected sub
ject, is the very relation of the self to the other, in this sense:
infinite or discontinuous, in this sense: relation always in dis
placement, and in displacement in regard to itself, without
anything that has to displace itself, displacement also of that
which would be without place. A word perhaps, nothing but a
word, but a word in excess, a word too many, which for that
reason is always lacking. Nothing but a word.

Why does it exert this non-attraction on him? he/it: let

us admit that it is not content to take the place left empty by

the major determinant (the non-subjected subject). Is it con
tent to leave the place empty, marking it with an all too visible
blank, like a slot that is easy to fill? But it no more leaves it
blank by filling it with a seeming word, substitute of a sub
stitute, a pronoun that, indicating nothing but the void, would
signify it as all the more void in that the void would not ap
pear, being occupied by the non-term that is nevertheless not
simply undetermined.
Does "he/it" indicate "it"-self better in the double use that
this sentence has just made of it, either as a repetition, which
is not one (the second "it", if it restores the first, gives it back
to set the verb again in an unstable position-will it fall to one
side or to the other?-which is the interrogative position),
that is, an enunciation one might call "pleonastic", not be
cause it would be pure redundancy, but because it is as if
useless there, effacing itself, and effacing itself again, until it
becomes lost in the inarticulation of the sentence?
5


he/it: at the border of writing; transparency, as such,
opaque; bearing what inscribes it, effacing it, effacing itself in
the inscription, effacement of the mark that marks it; neuter
under the spell of the neuter to the point of seeming danger
ously to fix it and, if we were capable of"following" it up to this
border where what writes itself has always already disap
peared (see-sawed, capsized) in the neutrality of writing, to
seem to tempt us to have a relation to that which excludes
itself from any relation and which nevertheless indicates it
self as absolute only in the relative mode (of the relation itself,
multiple).
Whether capitalized or small, in the position of the sub
ject, in the state of a pleonasm, indicating some other or no
other, or indicating nothing but its own indication, the he/it
without identity; personal? impersonal? not yet and always
beyond; and not being someone or something, no more than it
could have the magic of being or the fascination of non-being
as a guarantee. For the moment, the only thing to say: he/it, a
word too many, which by a ruse we place at the border of
writing, or the relation of writing to writing, when writing
indicates itself at its own border.

Non-present, non-absent; it tempts us in the manner of

that which we would not know how to meet, save in situations
which we are no longer in: save-save at the limit, situations
we call "extreme", assuming there are any.

The relation of the self to the other, difficult to think

(relation that the he/it would "relate") because of the status of

the other, sometimes and at once the other as term, some
times and at once the other as relation without term, relay
always to be relayed; then, by the change that it proposes to
"me", "me" having thus to accept itself not only as hypotheti
cal, even fictional, but as a canonic abbreviation, representing
the law of the same, fractured in advance (thus again
according to the fallacious proposition of this morcellated self,
injured intimately-again a living, that is to say, full, self).
6

As if there would have reverberated, in a muffled way, a

call.

At the border of writing, always having to live without

you.

It was almost easy for him, there where he lived, to live

almost without a sign, almost without a self, as if at the border
of writing; close to this word, barely a word, rather a word too
many, and in that nothing but a word from which, one day in
the past, gently welcomed, he had received the salute that did
not save, the summons that had awakened him. That could be
told, even if, and especially if, nobody were there to hear it. In a
certain way, he would have liked to be able to treat it with the
gentleness he had received from it, a gentleness that held him
at a distance, because of the excessive power it gave him over
himself, and, by way of him, over all things. Over almost all
things: there was always this slight restriction, implied, which
obliged him-sweet obligation-to go back, often and as if by a
ritual at which he smiled, to these ways of speaking, almost,
maybe, barely, momentarily, unless, and many others, signs
without signification that he knew very well (did he know it?)
granted him something precious, the possibility of repeating
himself-but no, he did not know what would come to him
through them, "maybe" the right to cross the limit without his
knowing it, "maybe" the anxious, slovenly retreat in face of the
decisive affirmation from which they preserved him in order
that he still be there not to hear it.

As if there had reverberated, in a muffled way, this call,

a call nevertheless joyful, the cry of children playing in the
garden: "who is me today?" "who holds the place of me?" and
the answer, joyful, infinite: him, him, him.

The thought that had led him to the edge of awakening:

nothing was forbidden to him, ruses, frauds, habits, lies,
7

truths, save (another one of those words on which he was used

to relying), save-. And he was not fooled, even this law could
turn around, leaving it intact, safe, it also.

+
"We would give them a name."-"They would have
one."-"The name we would give them would not be their real

name."-"All the same, able to name them. "-"Able to make it

known that, the day they would recognize that they were ready,
there would be a name for their name."-"A name such that
there would be no place for them to feel summoned by it, nor
tempted to respond to it, nor even ever denominated by this
name."-"However, have we not assumed that they would have
one name that would be common to them?"-"We have, but
only so that they might more easily pass unnoticed."-"Then
how could we know we could address ourselves to them? They
are far away, you know."-"It is for this that we have names,
more numerous and more marvellous than all those that one
commonly uses."-"They wouldn't know it was their name."
"How could they know it; they don't have one."

It was like an eternal subject of pleasantry, an innocent

game: "You met them in the street?"-"Not exactly in the street:

near the river, looking at books, then leaving or losing them
selves in the crowd."-"That could not but be so; and, rather
young, aren't they?"-"Young?" One had to stop cz.t this word
which involved, demanded, and promised too much; he did not
concede it willingly until he let himself go ahead and answer:
"Yes, young, there was no other word; and yet, young without
anything that makes their age a moment of themselves, or
youth a characteristic of age; young, but as in another time,
thus not so young, as if youth made them ancient or too new to
be able to appear only young."-"How you have observed them;
did you have time? was it possible? is it possible?"-"It was
not, in fact, but neither was it possible to meet them."
It was true that, when he leaves him, following street after
street, streets bright, animated, not servile, he sees nobody, but
8

this is only a consequence of what he calls his immortality, and

that he could more generously call the kindness of all, who let
him pass, giving him their faces-how these faces are beauti
ful, would be beautiful if he saw them-a light, the burst of a
happiness, of a distress.

An imperfect remembrance? an absolute lie? a staggering truth? a silent desire?

. .

sick or simply meditative; forgetting by a gift of for-

getting that made each of his words, pronounced in a distinct

manner, a surprise, a final truth, perhaps a painful wait; still,
robust, unshakable.

He desired to say it to him: this way of thinking about

what he wanted to say even in saying it-to whom? or in say
ing that he would say it-to whom? even though he had gotten

this way of thinking or thought he had gotten it from this point

where it seemed he could fictitiously situate it, helped to hold
him back from saying it. For he had to be there-in this place
where it was given him to stay, like an assigned residence, in
order for the other to be over there, immobile, immovable, yet
always hard to recognize, as if the right to identity had been
refused him at the same time it was granted to him.
He desired to say it to him: but how desire to speak, with

out the desire, and always in advance, destroying speech, even

the most calm desire for the most calm speech? And still, he
desired to say it, he would say it.

By what right, by what usurped power, had he planned

this meeting, and, planning it, made it inevitable, or, on the

contrary, impossible? "It was only a thought."-"Of course."
"But also a desire, something that one could not think but in
9

desiring it."-"Without being able to desire it, without being

sure that one desired it."-"At the risk of speaking about it,
with the suspicion that to speak about it was always to speak
prematurely by an unfortunate indiscretion."-"Fortunate
also; it was necessary."-"Was it necessary?"-"We'll know
later."-"We'll know too late."
Speak, desire, meet: he realized that, playing with these
three words (and, in this way, introducing the missing fourth,
the game of the missing one), he could not produce one before,
or rather than, the other two, except if playing it first did not
in any way give it a primary role, not even that of a card
sacrificed with a view to a strategy. A game that would per
haps consist of holding them together, without being able to
hold them as elements of equal value, nor of unequal value,
nor as the related particulars of the same game-which de
stroyed the game from the start, unless this game, becoming a
game of destruction, in this way immediately acquired an im
mediately faulty preeminence. This remains true neverthe
less: he must have met them (in one way or another, it hardly
matters) in order to be able to speak about them; he must
have met them to desire to meet them (or to feel that he could
have desired it), and it was necessary, in order for him to meet
them (even if he never meets them) that desire prepare him
and speech dispose him to it, by the space that each of these
occupies, and without the void from which the meeting would
fill itself, would accomplish itself, in the way of an historic
event.

In the cold happiness of his memory, as if memory were

of everyone, forgetting of no one.

Had he then forgotten it, the meeting always to come

that had, however, always already taken place, in an eternal

past, eternally without present? How could he have come to an
instant of presence, if time's-their time's-detour was to de
prive them of any relation to a present? Strict Law, the highest

10

of laws, such that, itself being submitted to it, it could not find
the moment in which to apply itself, and, applying itself, to
affirm itself. With one exception? Was not this exception, pre
cisely and insidiously offered, temptation destined to tempt the
law, like the thought that he would come, euen with these three
words, to the end of this same thought?

+
Know only-injunction that does not present itself
that the law of the return, counting for all of the past and all
of the future, will never allow you, except through a misunder
standing, to leave yourself a place in a possible present, nor to
let any presence come as far as you.

+
'7 am afraid": that was what he happened to hear him
say, barely hauing crossed the threshold, and what was fright
ening was the calm speech that seemed to use the "I" only to be
afraid.

The Eternal Return of the Same: the same, that is

to

myself, in as much as it sums up the rule of identity, that

is, the present self. But the demand of the return, excluding
any present mode from time, would never release a now in
which the same would come back to the same, to myself.

The Eternal Return of the Same:

as

if the return, iron

ically proposed as the law of the Same, where the Same would
be sovereign, did not necessarily make time an infinite game
with two openings (given as one, and yet never unified): future
always already past, past always still to come, from which the
third instance, the instant of presence, excluding itself, would
exclude any possibility of identity.
How, according to the law of the return, there where be
tween past and future nothing is conjoined, leap from one to
11

the other, when the rule does not allow any passage from one
to the other, even that of a leap? The past, one says, would be
the same as the future. There would be, then, only one
modality, or a double modality functioning in such a way that
identity, dife
f red/deferred, would regulate the difference. But
such would be the demand of the return: it is "under a false
appearance of a present" that the ambiguity past-future would
invisibly separate the future from the past.

+
They knew-according to the law of the return-that
only the name, the euent, the figure of death, would giue, at the

moment of disappearing in it,

right to presence: this is why

they said they were immortal.

+
Let there be a past, let there be a future, with nothing
that would allow the passage from one to the other, such that

the line of demarcation would unmark them the more, the

more it remained invisible: hope of a past, completed of a
future. All that would remain of time, then, would be this line
to cross, always already crossed, although not crossable, and,
in relation to "me", unsuitable. Perhaps what we would call
the "present" is only the impossibility of situating this line.
The law of the return supposing that "everything" would
come again, seems to take time as completed: the circle out of
circulation of all circles; but, in as much as it breaks the ring
in its middle, it proposes a time not uncompleted, but, on the
contrary, finite, except in the present point that alone we
think we hold, and that, lacking, introduces rupture into in
finity, making us live as in a state of perpetual death.

+
For hauing always lacked the present, the euent had
always disappeared without leaving any trace but that of a
hope for the past, to the point of making the future the proph
ecy of an empty past.
12

The past (empty), the future (empty), in the false light

of the present: only episodes to inscribe in and by the absence
of any book.

The room was dark, not that it was obscure: the light

was almost too visible, it did not illuminate.

The calm word, carrying fear.

He knew it (in accordance, perhaps, with the law): the

past is empty, and only the multiple play of mirroring, the

illusion that there would be a present destined to pass and to
hold itself back in the past, would lead one to believe that the
past was filled with events, a belief that would make it appear
less unfriendly, less frightening: apast thus inhabited, even if
by phantoms would grant the right to live innocently (in the
narrative mode, which, once, twice, as many times as one time
can repeat itself, makes its evocation usable) the very thing
which, nevertheless, gives itself as revoked forever and, at the
same time, irrevocable. About this, he reflected (how, it is
true, reflect on it, reflecting it, restoring a certain flexibility to
it?). lr:.evocability would be the trait by which the void of the
past marks, by giving them as impossible to relive and as thus
already having been lived in an unsituable present, the ap
pearances of events that are there only to cover over the void,
to enchant it in hiding it, while all the same announcing it
through the mark of irreversibility. The irrevocable is thus by
no means, or not only, the fact that that which has taken place
has taken place forever: it is perhaps the means-strange, I
admit-for the past to warn us (preparing us) that it is empty
and that the falling due-the infinite fall, fragile-that it
designates, this infinitely deep pit into which, if there were
any, events would fall one by one, signifies only the void of the
pit, the depth of what is without bottom. It is irrevocable,
13

indelible, yes: ineffacable, but because nothing is inscribed in

it.

Irrevocability would be the slip that, by vertigo, in an in

stant, at the farthest remove from the present, in the absolute
of the non-present, makes what "just happened" fall.
What has just taken place, would slip and would fall right
away (nothing more rapid) through irrevocability, into "the
terrifyingly ancient", there where nothing was ever present.

iJrrevocability would be, in this view, the slip or the fragile fall
that abolishes time in time, effaces the difference between the

near and the far, the marks of reference, the so-called tem

poral measures (all that makes contemporary) and shrouds

everything in non-time, from which nothing could come back,
less because there is no return than because nothing falls
there, except the illusion of falling there.

"

Let us admit that events are only "real" in the past,

e functioning in such a way that we could bring to

mind, by a well-fitted memory, although with a slight doubt,

all that the future could promise us or make us fear. But isn't
the past always less rich than the future, and always other

than it? Certainly, except if, the past being the infinitely emp
ty and the future the infinitely empty, these were only the

'

oblique way (the screen otherwise inclined) in which the void

gives

itself,

imitating

the

possible-impossible,

or

the

irrevocable-completed; or except if the law of the Eternal Re

turn left no choice but to live the future in the past, the past in

, the future, without, however, the past and the future being
summoned to change places according to the circulation of the
Same since, between them, the interruption, the lack of pres
ence, would prevent any communication other than by the

interruption: the interruption lived either as the completed of

the past or the possible of the future, or precisely as the in
credible utopia of the Eternal Return. One cannot believe in
the Eternal Return. This is its only guarantee, its "verifica
tion". Such is, there, the demand of the Law.
14

If, in the "terrifyingly ancient", nothing was ever pre

sent, and if, having barely produced itself, the event, by the
absolute fall, fragile, at once falls into it, as the mark of irre
vocability announces to us, it is because (whence our cold pre
sentiment) the event that we thought we had lived was itself
never in a relation of presence to us nor to anything what
soever.

The. uoid of the future: there death has our future. The

void of the past: there death has its tomb.

In a certain way, the law of the return-the Eternal

Return of the Same-as soon as one has approached it by the

movement that comes from it and that would be the time of
writing if one did not have to say, also and at first, that writ-

ing holds the demand of the return this law-outside the 1

law-would lead us to take on (to undergo by way of the most
passive passivity, the step/not beyond) the temporality of

time, in such a way that this temporality, suspending, or

making disappear, every present and all presence, would
make disappear, or would suspend, the authority or the foundation from which it announces itself. The revelation of Surledj, revealing that everything comes again, makes the present the abyss where no presence has ever taken place and

cf

where the "everything comes again" has always already

ruined itself. The law strikes the present with muteness, and,
by way of the present, the present to come that the ordinary

future-future present-accommodates itself to being. In

such a way that: in the future will return what could not be
present (the poetic mode), in the same way that in the past
only what of the past never belonged to a present comes again
(the narrative mode).

On the one hand, "everything comes again" no longer

allows this rythmic scansion that tightens the relation to time
15

that is time itself in its temporality: time is every time "all"

time, at "the same" time, without "all" and "the same" being
able to maintain their directing power; past, present, future,
these would be "all one", if it were not precisely unity that, in
foundering, had not also modified the distinctions in turning
them over to naked dife
f rence. That first. But on the other
hand, "everything comes again" is not controlled by the shin
ing in all directions that an eternal present, become the com
mon place of space, would let us conceive. Everything comes
again, signifying "everything will come again, everything al

ready and forever has come again, on condition that it is not

and has never been present", excludes "everything comes
again" even in the form of a "nothing will come again".

r;:\, The demand of the return would then be the demand of

me without present, time that would also be that of writ

ing, future time, past time, that the radical disjunction (in the

absence of any present) of one from the other, even if they are
the same, prevents us from identifying other than as the dif
ference that repetition carries.
Between past, future, the greatest difference is given in
that the one would repeat the other without the common mea
sure of a present: as if between past and future the absence of
present ruled in the simplified form of forgetfulness.
What will come again? Everything, saue the present, the
possibility of a presence.

"You will come again."-"I will come again."-"You

won't come again."-"When you speak like that, I understand

what it means: I'm here by way of the return, I'm thus not here:
and I understand that this would be in the past, in a time so
ancient that there has neuer been a present to correspond to it,
that you haue been here."-"But I am here, you see that."
"Yes, he said seriously, I'm here on condition that I forget that
I'm here, remembering it one time, forgetting it another time,
andjust the same letting memory, forgetfulness, unfold them-

16

selves, close themselves back up, without anyone who remem

bers, who forgets.
n

Effaced before being written. If the word trace can be

admitted, it is as the mark that would indicate as erased what

was, however, never traced. All our writing-for everyone and
if it were ever writing of everyone-would be this: the anxious
search for what was never written in the present, but in a past
to come.

"I haven't seen you in a long time." He said this even if/
just
seen him; and it was true that it took time, however
had
small the room was-spacious, nevertheless-to reach him,
going the length of one table, then another, and perhaps yet
another, as if he had had to follow a narrow street crossing the
city.

+
"We'll love them."-"We love them already."-"They
don't know that we do."-1We're lucky they don't."-11They
know nothing about what we expect from them."-((They live in
ignorance: this is what makes them so beautiful, so lively."

((They're
frightening."-(We're frightening."- They
were
young, beautiful, lively: he accepted all these words, snares so
innocent even phantoms could not have let themselves be
caught in them, knowing as well that plenty of other words
could have been pronounced without attracting them the more
or reaching them in that which preserved them. The only dan
ger, danger of innocence, came from this right to be several,
right which, diverting them from being one or the other, risked
giving them up gently to the call that they could only hear as
several: together? "We won't see anything as beautiful as
them."-"Is this the right term?"-'They'll be too beautiful for
anyone to notice it."-"1 don't think they'd like our arranging
things in their place."-"This place that they don't occupy,
17

happily." Happiness was there, in fact: a happiness that pro

tected them from everything. "They won't know it, only together
will they be beautiful."

+
He caught himself-melancholy
fearing: at the limit of these two words.

surprise-hoping,

+
(to die): a far off legend, an ancient word that evoked
nothing, if not the dreamy thought that there was an un
known modality of time. To arrive at presence, to die, two

equally enchanted expressions.

+
The kindness of his welcome was perhaps in these words
that he began to remember just after he had left him: "If, com

ing here, you were to find this little room-all the same, not so
little, due to the three steps that made it possible to go down
towards the part where he waited for him, murmuring in the
corner-if you found it empty finally, then you could be sure
that, far from having neglected you, I would have shown my
self worthy of your friendship."-"But isn't it empty?"-"Not
completely, because we're here, and only as one can say of the
city that it's empty." It is perhaps ever since this day, and so as
not to expose him to such kindness, that he only rarely faced
the possibility of finding the room as it would have been if he
had not come there to greet the most silent of hosts.

A word twice a word, that is to say, mute, this word

gently lightened by that which strikes it with speechlessness,

would be a word too many that would not reverberate. (he/it)
has this dullness, although one could represent it, alternately
and equally awkwardly, either as a massive door, condemned
by the bolts that close it, that anyone could go around in order
to reach the inf1nite space whose access it opens while appear18

ing as its prohibition, or as who knows w)lat transparency,

what void of the universe where everything-and every
word-could disappear, if transparency were not the most un
crossable of crossroads.

+
He realized that he had to bear the truth of a self(with
out changing it into an;Ything other than the canonic abbrevia
tion of a rule of identity), if he wanted to help it maintain itself
in this transparency, as yet neuer crossed, which did not let
him accept any designation other than that which had been
chosen as if in play.

All words are adult. Only the space in which they

reverberate-a space infinitely empty, like a garden where,

even after the children have disappeared, their joyful cries
continue to be heard-leads them back towards the perpetual
death in which they seem to keep being born.

+
The transparency that does not let itself be crossed and
from which nonetheless no reflexion comes back, except as the
mark of inflexibility.

+
He remembered the first steps, the first warnings, the
first unforeseeable signs of friendship, th first temptations
that he hardly noticed. "Where did you leave them? What are
they looking for? What are you looking for?" No search, and the
room-with the tables placed end to end-freed him from the
desire to find anything. ,.The name that would fit ... the book
that has been opened ... the streets where they walk ..."It
was a murmur, the deceiful entreaty. And all of a sudden:
reflect. "I have reflected that we love the places in which some
thing has happened."-"You mean, things that one could tell
about. could remember."- "We're not that demanding:

19

somt:thing. "-'"Something that would reduce or enhance the

feeling of boredom."-"We re not bored."-"We're not capable of
it."

(he/it) the hidden opening: this was what the name

that was barely a word indicated and that designated him so
eminently in designating nobody and that, by an indirect
indication, which nonetheless seemed to relate itself more
and more indirectly to this precise point, determinf;ld
undetermined, a void of the universe. Forbidden opening; on
condition that one understand that it was and was not the
prohibition-in whatever form-that would release the infi
nite possibility of opening.
The most difficult thing: not to identify or arrest the (he/it)
as if it were the same and always in the very place where one
had decided to take hold of it. The fact that (he/it), even. iD the
most simple sentence, is somewhat apart from the sentence,
hlJ.t rathet in. each empty moment that the articulation sets
aside for its play, discharges it from the role of the subject that
it seems to accept. (he/it) thus doubles itself in redoubling
itself indefmitely: the subject he/it that has this function in
launching the sentence, is like the alibi of another he/it, which
would not play any role, would fill no function, except that of
putting itself out of work in repeating itself invisibly in an
infinite series that analysis tries to catch and to take hold of
again, after the fact, each time. But for that it seems neces
sary that there had been, at one end of the chain, to give itself
the task of figuring the rule of identity, a myself capable of
being there only to say "I".

The desire to meet them was as familiar to him as the

silence of the snow on the rooftops. But, by himself, he could
not keep the desire alive.

It is as if he had written in the margin of a book that

would be written only much later, at a time when books, long
20

since having disappeared, would evoke only a terrifyingly an

cient past, as if without speech, without any speech but this
murmuring voice of a terrifyingly ancient past.

As if it had been necessary t o respond to a demand so

+
much the more marked that it demanded nothing but this
infinite response.

+
In a certain way, it is necessary that presence
absolute satisfaction-realize itself by the accomplishment of
discourse in order for the Etfrnal Return to reveal, under the
veil of forgetfulness, the demand of a completely different
modality of affirmation. Nietzsche, certainly, can be born be
fore Hegel, and when he is born, in fact, it is always before
Hegel; from this comes what one is tempted to call his mad
ness: the relationship necessarily premature, always antici
pated, always not now, thus without anything that can assure
it by founding it on an actuality-whether this be of now, of
the past (original) or of the future {prophetic). When one is
content to say that madness is a reason ahead of reason, one
wrongs both madness and reason. Even the maxim: ..they
were mad so that we no longer had to be", which Nietzsche
might have accepted, still supposes simple temporal relations,
always unifiable and reconciliable in the conception of a time
essentially unique, itself, in as mueh as it is thought, with
draws from its own becoming, since it is dependent on a grand
system. In this light, he is crazy who is wise before being so,
before the letter. But the other madness-that which has no
name to enclose it-would be an infinitely multiple relation
that, even if called temporal, would hide itself from all that
would subject it to time, even as outside of time. Madness is
called so only by the language of the Law which, at best,
assigns it the role of that which would precede it, that which
would always be before the law, although the law in itself
implies the impossibility of anything that could be anterior to
it. That is why there is not madness, but there will be mad21

as a real possibility always having

to be put in parentheses and under a conditional without con
dition. Which "madness" admits as well, since the parenthesis
is its madness in which it would like to put everything, includ

ness, the existence of this

ing itself.

Nietzsche (if his name serves to name the law of the

Eternal Return) and Hegel (if his name invites us to think

presence as all and the all as presence) allow us to sketch a
mythology: Nietzsche can only come after Hegel, but it is al
ways before and always after Hegel that he comes and comes
again. Before: since, even if it is thought as the absolute, pres
ence has never gathered in itself the realized totality of knowl
edge; presence knows itself to be absolute, but its knowledge
remains a relative knowledge, because it has not realized it
self practically, and thus it knows itself only as a present
unsatisfied practically, unreconciled with presence as all;
thus, is not Hegel only a pseudo-Hegel? And Nietzsche always
comes after, because the law he brings supposes the comple
tion of time as present and in this completion its absolute
destruction, such that the Eternal Return, affirming the fu
ture and the past as the only temporal authorities, authorities
identical and unrelated, freeing the future of any present and
the past of any presence, shatters thought up to this infinite
affirmation: in the future will return infinitely what could in
no form and never be present, in the same way that in the past
that which, in the past, never belonged in any form to the
present, has returned. There, from that point on, for Nietz
sche, the demand to live and to think. And writing alone

can

respond to the demand, on condition that discourse as logos

having realized itself, takes away any foundation on which
writing could declare itself or support itself and exposes it to
the threat, to the vain glamour, of what no one henceforth
would dare name: mad writing.

+
The madness of the "euerything comes again": it has a
first simple trait, carrying within it the extravagance of forms
22

or of relations that exclude one another. It formulates in

Hegelian language what can only destroy this language; this
formulation is not, however, an accidental anachronism; the
anachronism is its necessity: the "ideological delay" is its just
hour; just as it could destroy only what realizes itself in it and
completes itself in it and by the rigor of the completion that
destroys it itself. "Everything comes again": this is the logos of
totality; for "everything" to come again, totality must have
received .from discourse and from practice its meaning and the
realization of its meaning. And the present must be the
unique temporal instance for the totality of presence and as
presence to affirm itself. But "everything comes again" deter

mines that the infinite of the return could not take the form of
the circularity of the all and determines that no return could
affirm itself in the present (whether this present is future or is
a past present), that is, could not affirm itself except by the
exclusion of any possibility and experience of a presence or by
the affirmation of a time without present; a time without pre
sent would bear the weight of this exclusion, freed from any
affirmation. The thought of the everything comes again thinks
time in destroying it, but, by this destruction that seems to
reduce it to two temporal instances, thinks it as infinite, in
finity of rupture or interruption substituting an infinite ab
sence for present eternity.
Saying that, we say almost nothing. We do not have the
language to affirm the return by way of the detoured demand
that would come to us from it, and language fell apart in
\

Nietzsche, when he, with a mortal desire, desired to carry it to

the impossible affirmation.

7b awaken his attention: there was nothing to that; he

was always awakened to the point that all that seemed to

remain of him was the emptiness of a vigilant wait, the dis
tracted absence, nonetheless, of inattention.

The hope of transgressing the law was tied to the decep

tion that, in this uery movement of tran.sgression, led him to

23

pose an equal law, although of a higher power, which he then

had to transgress anew, without any hope ofbeing able to do so
except by posing a new and always higher law, which made of
this infinite passage from the law to its transgression and from
this transgression to another law the only infraction that up
held the eternity of his desire.

+
Luck and grace, in being compared, help to determine
certain relations to the law. Grace is unjust, an unjustified
gift that does not take what is right into consideration, while
confirming it nonetheless. The law, without grace, would be
impossible to respect, that is, to maintain, even at a distance.
But the law, in its always absolute demand and by the limit
that it determines and that determines it, does not allow a
gracious rescue to intervene and make possible its impossible
observance. The law is empty authority, before which no one
in particular can maintain himself and which could not be
softened by mediation, the veil of grace that would make its
approach tolerable.
The law cannot transgress itself, since it exists only in
regard to its transgression-infraction and through the rupture
that this transgression-infraction believes it produces, while
the infraction only justifies, renders just what it breaks or
defies. The circle of the law is this: there must be a crossing in
order for there to be a limit, but only the limit, in as much as
uncrossable, summons to cross, affirms the desire (the false
step) that has always already, through an unforeseeable
movement, crossed the line. The prohibition constitutes itself
only by the desire that would desire only in view of the pro
hibition. And desire is the prohibition that frees itself in desir
ing itself, no longer as desire itself forbidden, but as desire (for
the) forbidden, which takes on the brilliance, the amiability,
the grace of the desirable, even if it is mortal. The law reveals
itself for what it is: less the command that has death as its
sanction, than death itself wearing the face of the law, this
death that desire (against the law), far from turning itself
away from it, gives itself as its ultimate aim, desiring until
24

death, in order that death, even as death of desire, is still the

desired death, that which carries desire, as desire freezes
death.The law kills. Death is always the horizon of the law: if
you do this, you will die. It kills whoever does not observe it,
and to observe it is also already to die, to die to all pos
sibilities, but as its observance is nevertheless-if the law is
Law-impossible and, in any case, always uncertain, always
unrealized, death remains the unique falling due that only
the love of death can turn away, for he who loves death makes
the law vain in making it lovable. Such would be the detour of
grace.
Grace does not save from death, but it effaces the mortal
condemnation in making of the saltus mortalis-the bound
without discretion and without precaution-the careless mo
tion that concerns itself neither with condemnation nor with
salvation, being the gift that has no weight and that is not
weighed, gift of lightness, gift always light.
But isn't grace always the gift made by someone, gift
unique and from the Unique? Would it not be characteristic of
it to be grace only through the memory of its origin, through
the always personal and always revocable relation, lived as
fleeting and happy, with the power to give? Grace would be
gracious only in this movement in which sovereignty grants
itself by lovingly reminding of and recalling to the one who
grants it. In this way it is different from the law. Because the
law, even given as the gift par excellence (the gift of theTa
bles), affirms itself as law and without reference to anything
higher: to it alone, pure transcendence.This is why it does not
authorize any questions about it or beyond it, it awaits only
answers, answers precise, sober, austere, not mechanical, but
reflected on, studied, made always more right by study, pa
tience, obedience without end.The law, law unique and from
the Unique-is law only in the forgetting of its origin and by a
demand that is proper to it, although it tends to have no other
exteriority than itself: in this sense it is anonymous, designat
ing the source from which it would have sprung only by the
drying up which, at the limit, it represents.
The law says "in spite of you" ["malgre toi"] familiarity3
that indicates no one. Grace says, "without you, without your
25

being there for anything and in your own absence", but this
familirity which seems to designate only the lack of anyone,
restores the intimacy and the singularity of the relation.Luck
joins these two traits. Luck come"S only through playing. And
the game does not address itself to anyone in particular. He
who is lucky i s not lucky and is not so for himself or because of
himself. The "without you" of luck frees, through the familiar
address, f<lr the anonymous.

Luck is only another word for chance.4 Good, bad, it is

still luck and, always, good luck. Similarly for grace, which
can be disgrace without renouncing the extreme good grace it
owes to its "transcendence"."I am lucky" means then "I have
chance" or, more correctly, there is between "me" and the ne
cessity of a law this relation of prohibition that surely comes
from the law, but has always already turned back on it to the
point of prohibiting the law itself, provoking a kind of rupture.
Prohibition strikes the law. This is a scandalous event. The
law strikes itself with prohibition and, thus, in the most de
ceitful way (the august deceit of the law), restores another law,
higher, that is, more other, in a more decisive relation with
otherness, from which the prohibition is then supposed to
come. Chanceeither luck or grace that puts the law in pa
rentheses, according to the time outside of time-is then re
introduced under the jurisdiction of another law, until, in its
turn, this one-then, in its turn ... It remains to determine
in what relation neither lawful nor fortuitous would be the
movement that would always pose an other law starting from
the transgression, as from the law and as its other
transgression-movement of otherness, without law, without
chance, movement that we in no way name by the negative of
these words.
"I am lucky." Fonnula as strong as it is bold, since luck
dispossesses and disappropriates. That which, oh gambler
who pretends to speak in the name of the game, would end up
saying: I possess what dispossesses, being the relation of dis
possession. Which is to say that there is no luck for luck. and
26

that the only luck would be in this anonymous relation that

itself could not be called luck, or Qply this luck that does not
fall due, witlt which the neuter would play in letting itself play
in it.

Transcendence, transgression: names too close to one

t
another not to make us distrustful of them. Would transgres
sion not be a less compromising way to name "transcendence"
in seeming to distance it from its theological meaning?
Whether it is moral, logical, philosophical, does not transgres
sion continue to make allusion to what remains sacred both in
the thought of the limit and in this demarcation, impossible to
think, which would introduce the never and always accom
plished crossing of the limit into every thought. Even the no
tion of the cut in its strictly epistemological rigor makes it
easier to compromise, allowing for the possibility of overstep
ping (or of rupturing) that we are always ready to let ourselves
be granted, even if only as a metaphor.

t
It is not only with the law that luck has a remarkable
relationship. With desire, it has and does not have the same
relation of ambiguity. On the one hand, that should not sur
prise us, since, sometimes and at the same time, the law pre
tends that there would be desire only in the space of the game,
where it attracts it by the stake aod the prohibition, and,
sometimes and at the same time, desire pretends to make the
law its game or the game its own law or again to make the law
only the product of an absence or abatement of desire. (Which
again leads to this question: would desire not always already
be its own lack, the void itself that makes it infinite, lack
without lack?). But, on the other hand, luck and desire are far
from being able to take one another's place. Desire is always
ready to affirm that there is no luck but by desire and that
desire is the only luck: which conforms to the "law" of desire
and to what is left of the law in desire-the non-desiring. As
for luck, even if it does not renounce its relation with the
27

mortally desiring passion, it is only to affirm it in another

way: desire must desire luck, it is thus that it is pure desire.
Luck plays with us, however, through that which names it,
except if, in the same movement, we "succeed" in playing with
it. When one writes: "To write is to seek luck", the one who
writes braves, with the inappropriateness that is appropriate
here, all the vigor of uncontrolled oppositions; because one
must first write this and thus establish, with the proposition
opened by the affirmation of writing, an already hidden rela
tion with luck; and as luck is what cannot be sought, to write
is to make of the search not the movement that would lead to
luck, but rather luck's stake-this closed unclosed circle of the
game in which lawless luck rules-rules, nevertheless, with
the strict, regulated rigor that delimits the space where writ
ing plays, when, seeking luck, it never attains it otherwise
than as that which, in its turn, seeks writing in order to be
luck.
1

To write is to seek luck, and luck is the search for writing,

if it is only luck by the mark that, in advance, invisibly, re
sponds to the line of demarcation-the interval of irregularity
where luck-bad luck, game-law, are separated by the nil or
infinite cesura and at the same time exchanged, but without a
relation of reciprocity, of symmetry, nor even of a standard.
Luck is in search of writing, let's not forget it, and let's not
forget that what it finds in the form of writing is, "luckily",
bad luck, the fall of the dice thrown endlessly to fall again only
once (and in this unique instance scratching out the unity, the
totality, of the throws), since it is in falling and only in falling
that they set the score.
Luck is the name by which chance attracts you so that you
are not conscious of the unqualifiable multiplicity in which it
loses you and with no other rules than those that always raise
the multiple as a game: game of the multiple. Game whose
stake it is, in suppressing that which divides into luck and
bad luck, to raise the plurality endlessly. To play is thus al
ways to play against luck and bad luck-binary logic-for the
plurality of the game. But play? yes, play, even if you cannot.
To play is to desire, to desire without desire, and already to
desire to play.
28

The question he did not ask him. rwhat would you do if

you were alone?"-<Well, the question wouldn't be asked."
"You mean there'd be no one to ask it."-"And no one to answer

it."-"There'd be

no

time for that."

For there to be a play of questions and answers, time

must keep its unitary structure with its three variables. The
predominance of the present as thought and as life (the intem
poral present and presence to oneself in the living distant) is
perhaps all the more marked by the near impossibility of not
relating past and future to an actuality that has become or is
to come; that is, of not thinking one and the other as a present
that has fallen due or will fall due. The accomplishment of
history would be this taking back, in a present henceforth
actual, of any historical possibility: being always thinks itself
and speaks itself in the present. When the affmnation of the
Eternal Return of the Same imposes itself on Nietzsche, in the
revelation that overwhelms him, it seems at first that it priv
ileges, in giving it the colors of the past and the colors of the
future, the temporal demand of the present: what I live today
opens time to the depths, giving it to me in this unique pre
sent as the double infinity that would come to reunify itself in
the present; if I have lived it an infinite number of times, if I
am called upon to relive it an infinite number of times, I am
there at my table for eternity and to write it eternally: all is
present in this unique instant that repeats itself, and there is
nothing but this repetition of Being in its Same. But Nietz
sche came very quickly to the thought that there was no one at
his table, neither present in the Being of the Same, nor Being
in its repetition. The affirmation of the Eternal Return had
provoked either temporal ruin, leaving nothing else to think
but dispersion as thought (the open-eyed silence of the pros
trate man in a white shirt), or, perhaps even more decisive,
the ruin of the present alone, henceforth stricken with pro
hibition and, with it, the unitary root of the whole torn out. As
if the repetition of the Return had no other function than to
put in parentheses, in putting the present in parentheses, the
number 1 or the word Being, compelling thereby an alteration
29

that neither our language nor our logic can admit. For even if
we dared to designate the past conventionally in numbering it

0 and the future in number it 2, while postulating the sup

pression, with the present, of any unity, we would still have to
mark the equal power of the 0 and the 2 in the unmarked and
unmeasurable distance of their difference (such as the de
mand by which the future and the past would affirm them
selves as the same supposes it, if, in the catastrophe of the
Eternal Return, it were not precisely any common denomina
tor or numerator that had disappeared with the form of the
present) and to mark that this equal power would not allow us
to identify them, nor even to think them together, but not to
exclude them from one another either, since the Eternal Re
turn says also that one would be the other, if the unity of
Being had not, by an inadmissible interruption, in fact ceased
to order the relations.

+
The past was written, the future will be read. This
could be expressed in this form: what was written in the past
will be read in the future, Without any relation of presence

being able to establish itself between writing and reading.1

"I can do no better than to entrust myself to your

loyalty."-You do better, nevertheless, and rightly, because

even if I am loyal, how would we put up with a loyalty without
law?n

I am not master of language. I listen to it only in its

effacement, efa
f cing myself in it, towards this silent limit
where it waits for one to lead it back in order to speak, there
where presence fails as it fails there where desire carries it.

+
A speech without presence, the perpetuity of dying, the
death of eternity from which the church song appeals
30

forcefully to free us, recognizing in it the space of speech al

ways deprived of God, that is, freed from presence.

Let us think of the obscure combat between language

and presence, always lost by one and by the other, but all the
same won by presence, even if this be only as presence of
language. Even if speech, in its perpetual disappearance, car
ries death, the void, absence, it always resuscitates with it
+

what it cancels or suspends, including at this limit where it

itself disappears, whether it does not succeed in exhausting
presence, or whether, exhausting it, it must then, through
negation, affirm itself anew as presence of speech that thus
vainly exhausts presence. Perhaps here only he who does not
fight wins. It is because it accepts language that presence
affirms itself in it, making it accessory and propitious, exalt
ing it to the point of opening it from top to bottom, so that it
coincides with the opening that is presence. It is thus also in
struggling for presence (in accepting to make itself naively the
memorial of something that presents itself in it) that lan
guage treacherously destroys it. This happens by way of writ
ing. In appearance, writing is there only to conserve. Writing
marks and leave marks. What is entrusted to it remains. With
it history starts in the institutional form of the Book and time
as inscription in the heaven of stars begins with earthly

traces, monuments, works. Writing is remembrance, written

remembrance prolongs life during death.
But what remains of presence when it has to hold on to
itself only this language in which it extinguishes itself, fixes
itself? Maybe only this question. It is not certain that pres
ence maintained by writing as writing is not completely for
eign to "true", "living" presence, that which is in fact always
the source of presence, truth of presence, vision of presence.
The only relation that writing would then maintain with pres
ence would be Meaning, relation of light, relation that the
demand to write tends precisely to rupture in no longer sub
mitting itself to the sign.
The defeat that writing would seem to inflict on presence
in making it no longer presence, but subsistence or substance,
31

is a defeat for itself. From this point of view, writing alienates

presence (and alienates itself). An instrument, and, as such, a
bad instrument; serving to communicate, even if it communi
cates imperfectly. And if presence alienates itself in it, it is
because, even in the expression from which it does not set
itself free and that encloses it, it maintains its right to declare
itself without expressing itself. That would be enough for its
triumph.

Writing, the demand to write, does not struggle against

presence in favor of absence, nor for it in pretending to pre

serve it or communicate it. Writing is not accomplished in the
present, nor does it present, nor does it present itself: still less
does it represent, except to play with the repetitive that intro
duces into the game the temporally ungraspable anteriority of
the beginning again in relation to any power to begin, as if the
re-present, without anticipating a presence yet to come, with
out assigning it to the past either, in the excessive multiplicity
that the word indicates, played with a plurality always sup
posed by the return. To write in this sense, is always first to
rewrite, and to rewrite does not refer to any previous writing,
any more than to an anteriority of speech or of presence or of
signification. Rewriting, doubling which always precedes uni
ty or suspends it in unrnarking it: rewriting holds itself apart
from any productive initiative and does not claim to produce
anything, not even the past or the future or the present of
writing. Rewriting in repeating what does not take place, will
not take place, has not taken place, inscribes itself in a non
unified system of relations that cross paths without any point
of crossing affirming their coincidence, inscribing itself under
the demand of the return by which we are torn from the modes
of temporality that are always measured by a unity of pres
ence.
Rewriting is a surplus, the supplementary relation which,
at the limit, could not defme itself by anything in regard to
which it would add itself-excess of nothing and still exces
sive. Thus all considerations of influence, of causality, of mod
el, of makes and counterfeits are rendered vain-except in
32

that "plagiarism" such as Lautreamont's irony proposes it to

us, could not come after a text given as initial, even to initiate
it to itself, but would repeat it as unwritten or would repeat
the text about which there is no way to know if it had been
produced before, since it is always and in advance reproduced.
The "re" of the return inscribes like the "ex", opening of
every exteriority: as if the return, far from putting an end to
it, marked the exile, the beginning in its rebeginning of the
exodus. To come again would be to come to ex-center oneself
anew, to wander. Only the nomadic affirmation remains.

"Always, I come again."-"In as much as you find in

yourself the ability to remain at the furthest remoue."-alt is

only here that I would find the distant."

"Already I see you come, coming back slowly, there

among others who help us with their solitude."

Was there still an obstacle that he could not get past to

reach the immense uncertain space, or did this obscure and
devastated space (serial desert) constitute the only impedi
ment, the last obstacle?

The voice without voice, a murmur that he did not know,

hearing it no longer, if he still heard it, sometimes a vibration

so sharp that he was sure of it-was the grating tracing of the
chalk on the slate.

W hat they know, they know from us. And what we know
is for no one or for nothing.

In the view of the demand to write, in the multiplicity

in which it disseminates itself, nothing is either friendly nor
33

sacred, events are useless, days unsanctified, men neither di

vine nor human. Those who carry this demand are trans
ported by it and disappear in it: even if their name then serves
to name it, they are neither important nor great. In their
disparate plurality, even though they belong to the multiple
and are real only as multiple, they remain strangers, separate
from one another, crossing paths without meeting: this is
their solitude, a plurality that constitutes them neither out of
their own singularity nor in view of a superior unity.
Should the demand to write seek itself in the existence of
those who seem to consecrate themselves to it: there is no
biography for writing. Should it seek itself in works: these,
closed in their magnificence, pretend to shine only for them
selves whose central secret accepts no translation, while,
open, works have always already let pass the act of writing
that goes through them, using these works only to fill them
momentarily. Or again, letting itself be affirmed in a more
general knowledge, the knowledge proper to the necessity of
marks, of inscriptions, of gestures, even of traces, knowledge
by which it would end up judging scientific ideology or even
giving its opinion on the ability of the sciences to attain a
certain scientificity. In doing this, it risks immersing itself in
a badly defined problematic that eternal metaphysics has no
difficulty taking up in introducing it into the hopeful confi
dence of its books. What then to do with this movement that
does not recognize itself in anything it does not contest? Per
haps maintain it as a demand always previously exhausted,
that is, as non-living repetition, forgetting that there is no
time for writing, if writing has always preceded itself in the
form of a rewriting.

+
Friendship for the demand to write that excludes all
friendship.

+
The anonymous after the name is not the nameless
anonymous. The anonymous does not consist in refusing the
34

name in withdrawing from it. The anonymous puts the name

in place, leaves it empty, as if the name were there only to let
itself be passed through because the name does not name, but
is the non-unity and non-presence of the nameless. (he/it),
which does not designate anything, but awaits what forgets
itself in it, helps to question this demand of the anonymous.
Would it be enough, however, to say that (he/it), without hav
ing value or meaning in itself, would allow whatever inscribes
itself in it to affirm itself in a determination that is different
every time? Or again, to attribute to it the function of an
"analogon", a mode of absence in which every image would be
caught, the void of a symbol, always ready to fill itself with
diverse possible meanings and always in default? {he/it) is not
such that it would only receive the indetermination of its
proper meaning in letting itself be determined by all that
would be said beyond it, through it (even though the word
being is perhaps lit by the light of the meaning that rises up
when it is pronounced, only if something that is, would be or
would not be-this happens all the time, but could just as well
not happen-comes face to face with itself in language and
then obscures it and covers it up without covering it.) (he/it)
welcomes the enigma of being without being's being able to
lessen its own enigma. (be/it) pronounces itself without there
being a position or deposition of existence, without presence
or absence affirming it, without the unity of the word coming
to dislodge it from the between-the-two in which it dissemi
nates itself. (be/it) is not "that one", but the neuter that marks
\

it (as (he/it) appeals to the neuter), leads it back towards the

displacement without place that robs it of any grammatical
place, a sort of lack in becoming between two, several or all
words, thanks to which these interrupt each other, without
which they would signify nothing, but which upsets them con
stantly to the very silence in which they extinguish them
selves. The anonymous is borne by the (he/it) that always
speaks the name forgotten in advance.

We write to forget our name, wanting it, not wanting it,

and we of course know that another we is necessarily given in

35

return, but which is it? The collective sign that the anony
mous addresses to us (since this new name-the same one
expresses nothing but nameless reading, never centered on
some denominated reader, nor even on a unique possibility of
reading). Thus, this name that we are proud of or unhappy
with is then the mark of our belonging to the nameless from
which nothing emerges: the public nothingness-inscription
that efa
f ces itself on an absent tomb.

The vain struggle for the anonymous. Impersonality is

not enough to guarantee the anonymous. The work, even if it

is without author and always becoming in relation to itself,
delimits a space that attracts names, a possibility of reading
that is determined every time, a system of references, a theory
that appropriates it, a meaning that clarifies it. Of course, we
have dispensed with these (although again this is not sure)
with the great names. At the same time that Nietzsche
again a very great name-lets us know that the work, that of
the artist or of the philosopher, invents only after the fact he
who, having created it, must have created it, we know that the
work, in its historical necessity, is always modified, trans
formed, traversed, separated from itself, delivered to its out
side, by all the works that seem to come only after it, accord
ing to a movement of recurrence whose model Hegel provided.
We are not dupes of the present that would make us believe in
an authority we have or in an influence we exercise, still less
are we concerned with the past, still less presumptuous of a
future. We penetrate the pretended impersonal responsibility
of groups in which is affirmed, secretly or directly, the right of
some to lead in aggrandizing their name with that of the
group. The "cult of personality" does not begin with the person
who places himself above others to incarnate a historical
truth. It begins with this truth itself, whether it is that of the
party, of the country, of the world, truth always ready, once it
immobilizes itself, to unify itself in a name, a person, a people,
an epoque. How then does one arrive at this anonymous
whose only mode of approach is haunting intimacy, uncertain
obsession that always dispossesses.
36

The exteriority that excludes every exterior and every in

terior, as it precedes their succeeding, ruining for them every
beginning and every end, and in such a way that it hides itself
in the revelation that represents it at once as law there where
every law is failing, as return there where every arrival is
lacking, as eternal Same when non-identity unmarks itself in
it without continuity without interruption, as repetition there
where nothing is counted: this is the "concept" (non
conceptualizable) that should help us to maintain ourselves,
we the named, close to the inhospitable host who has always
preceded us into our house or into our self, even though he has
always withdrawn us from our best or most faulty intimacy to
relate us, half complacent, half moribund, to this very relation
that collapses into anonymous passion.
Let us be clear that we will never have gotten away from
the name, even if we are marked by the pre-original anony
mous. The anonymous is given to us in the name itself, not
freeing us in any way from ourselves, from our identity and
from this face that needs, to refuse itself to any access, the
faceless, the gheless, mask that transforms everything into a
mask and that nothing unmasks. The more strong and justi
fied the name, the more it gives hold to the perversion of the
anonymous; the more that greatness, creative force, indubita
ble truth present themselves in a name, the more it is ready to
denounce itself as the error or the injustice which has thrived
at the expense of the nameless. But, in return, everything
happens as if the anonymous, shadow of which light would be
unaware that it shines only to project it, arranged the whole
comedy of glories, of powers, of sanctities, in order to bring
itself near to us, signalling to us across signification and pre
cisely there where every sign would be lacking.
When we sign, affirming our identity, we become responsi
ble well beyond this signature, to the point that this responsi
bility has forever put us aside, signing to disappropriate us,
like a forgerer who would not try to pass as true, but would
make the true shine out as false. The element in-signiates:
that which can never appear alone and which the act of
signing, of designating, of signifying, introduces as fraudu
lent, clandestine cold that never lets itself be taken by sur37

prise, double anterior, shadow without light in that the

shadow always makes use of some clarity to show itself or to
hide itself, seeming thus to follow it.

Do we approach the anonymous if we yield (supposing

that there were enough passivity in us for such a concession)

to the attraction of dying, indeed, of thought? If to think were
to sink into nothingness, as we would think with happiness,
with fright. But, sinking through thought, we are imme
diately carried to our highest possible.

I think of the calling of the names in the camps. Nam

ing carries the mortal play of the word. The arbitrariness of

the name, the anonymous that precedes it or accompanies it,

the impersonality of nomination bursts forth in the manner of
something terrible in this situation in which language plays
its murderous role. The proper name-a number-is disap
propriated by the very power that designates it and by the
power of interminable language. What does "proper name"
signify here? Not the right to be there in person; on the con
trary the terrifying obligation by which what would like to
preserve itself in the name of a private unhappiness is drawn
out into the public square, into the cold and the impoverish
ment of the outside, with nothing that can assure any refuge.
The prohibition against having anything of one's own and
against keeping anything having to do with oneself is pro
nounced by the proclaiming of the name or of that which holds
its place. The call in the camps makes appear, certainly in a
way that leaves no room for any decent camouflage, the mean
ing of any civil-state formality (as of any verification of identi
ty, which gives place, in our refined civilizations, to all police
violences and deprivations of liberty). Language does not com
municate, it makes naked and according to nakedness-the
placing outside-that is proper to it and that one can only
temper, that is to say, pervert, by the detour which is the
game of this always oblique outside, a game that is also and in
38

the first place a game of language without right or direction,

indirect as through a game.

They appear disappearing, like in the multitude of

+
likes: unique in as much as repeated. Without residence or
town, they go, indiscernable among all. Marchers to infinity, if
they leaue no trace, in that you will recognize them without
discouering them.

If it is true that there is (in the Chinese language) a

written character that means both "man" and "two", it is easy

to recognize in man he who is always himself and the other, .'
the happy duality of dialogue and the possibility of com
munication. But it is less easy, more important perhaps, to
think "man", that is to say, also "two", as separation that lacks
unity, the leap from 0 to duality, the 1 thus giving itself as the
forbidden, the between-the-two.
We can borrow this thought from Confucius, speaking of
measure and mean: "Measure, mean, are the extremes of
man." If the middle is the extreme, the center is never in the
middle. Nobody who is in relation only to nobody keeps the
measure.
To give words back their meaning? Not to give words back
to meaning?
If, thinking the mean as just mean, we take advantage of
this to exclude the extremes and to refuse the "last things" the
right to be thought, then it is the mean that becomes the limit,
and to think the measure is to think at the limit. Not to think
the One is just the same to let oneself be led by the One to the
edge of indifference.

+
Not to write a line (like Socrates) is perhaps not to
privilege speech, but to write by default and in advance, since,
in this abstention, the space of writing in which Plato already
works is prepared and is decided.
39

To think the Eternal Return is to seduce thought in

+
tempting it with the appearance of a tautology-the dream of
the Same, the aridity of a logical identity, promise of a
coherence that breaks down thq: the promise itself takes
place in a language, while the coherence sought needs another
language which, in its othrness, revokes the promise and
ruins the speech that was supposed to fulfill it.
"A promise was made.-But already ruined by the speech
that proposes it, since it promises, suspending any present,
the impossibility of an ordinary future1 appropriate to the
order in which it could fulfill itself, could show itself as pro
mise."
The formulation of the Eternal Return is necessarily made
in another time than that in which it "would verify itself": in
the language, ours, in which one must always speak of time as
future, present, past, Nietzsche i s mad each tfme he seeks t o
affirm his affirmation rigorously; but, in the silent language of
his madness in which he seems to us to suffer the conse
quences of this passage to another language removed from the
ordinary forms of temporality, he is still mad, mad in view of
his madness itself taken as a "new reason" where he appears
to us naively reconciled with the coherence of a thought, as if
he were always lagging behind, b y a madness, by a language,
the language in which the formulation of the return has al
ways already engaged him. Mad?-But of a madness other
than ours, other than his.

With Hegel, if, as he says, the concept is established

as

that to which nature could not be sufficient, how content

oneself with the concept as absolute contentment? The Eter
nal Return marks the surplus that every mark of identity
produces, without the mark of this surplus suspending identi
ty, and without this surplus ever being, marked, free of the
mark, acquitted by it.

"Here we are then once again. "'-"This is what we have

rejoiced at saying every time and the first time."'-"Euery meet-

40

ing was already a meeting again for us.,-"I understand that,

I would understand it better if I didn't know that it's always
too late for us to meet."-"Too late, it's true, because there is no
right moment."-"Did you hear the sound of their voice?"-"As
I don't

euen

hear my own."-"Ah, they will always surprise

us."

He enters, he speaks with the words that are already

there to welcome him, feeling an equal pain whether he speaks

or remains silent.

"What I learned from them is that, already, before, they

were close to us, separated only by a little, perhaps only in that

they could not be late, at least not in any form of the present
that exists."-"They pass."-"They have always already
passed, but we don't miss them by much."-"We miss them all
the more."
"Nothing is important to them ..,-"I wouldn't say that, I
.

would say that it's importance that's rwt important to them."

There was, in this way of speaking, in presence through
speech, something true to which even silence was not sufficient
to respond, unless to open itself again onto silence.

The Eternal Return of the Same: the having been, repe

tition of a will take place as having been, does not signal any
presence, even that of old. The Eternal Return would say this,
it would say that in what has been, no present is retained,
except in this speaking of it, if it were spoken.
In this sense, the necessity of thinking what has been and
of coming after it without reference to presence has always
apart from any proximity-put us far away as a distance from
any distancing. The far away that distends every mode of
absence, as of presence.
If one says, like Parmenides, "that has never been and will
never be because it is", one quickly frees the past and the
41

future of any present, since "it is" gives itself as never re

presenting itself in the "having been" or the "will be".
(Even in the law of the Eternal Return, the past could not
repeat the future as the future would repeat the past. The
repetition of the past as future frees for a completely different
modality-which one could call prophetic. In the past, what is
given as repetition of the future does not give the future as
repetition of the past. Dissymmetry is at work in repetition
itself. How then think dissymmetry in terms of the Eternal
Return? That is what is perhaps most enigmatic.

The fragmentary: what comes to us from it, question,

demand, practical decision? To no longer be able to write ex
cept in relation to the fragmentary is not to write in frag
ments, unless the fragment is itself a sign for the fragmen
tary. To think the fragmentary, to think it in relation to the
neuter, the two seeming to pronounce themselves together,
without a community of presence and as outside one another.
The fragmentary: writing belongs to the fragmentary when
all has been said. There would have to have been exhaustion of
the word and by the word, accomplishment of all (of presence
as all) as logos, in order that fragmentary writing could let
itself be re-marked. Still, we cannot, thus, writing, free our
selves from a logic of totality in considering it as ideally com
pleted, in order to maintain as "pure remainder" a possibility
of writing, outside of everything, useless or endless, whose
study a completely different logic (that of repetition, of limits,
and of the retum)-still difficult to disengage-claims to
guarantee us. What is already decided is that such a writing
would never be "pure", but, on the contrary, profoundly al
tered, with an alteration that could not be defined (arrested)
in regard to a norm, not only because it always coexists with
all forms of existence, of speech, of thought, of temporality,
which alone would make it possible, but because it excludes
the consideration of a pure form, excluding even an approach
to itself as true or proper in its very disappropriation; even all
the reversals which we easily use up-beginning again as
42

beginning, disappropriation as authenticity, repetition as

difference-leave us within the logic of validity.
The fragmentary expresses itself best, perhaps, in a lan
guage that does not recognize it. Fragmentary: meaning nei
ther the fragment, part of a whole, nor the fragmentary in
itself. The aphorism, the proverb, maxim, citation, thoughts,
themes-verbal cells in being further removed than the infi
nitely continuous discourse whose content is "its own con
tinuity", continuity that is assured of itself only in giving itself
as circular and, by this turn, submitting itself to the prelimin
ary of a return whose law is outside, which outside is outside
the law.

He followed them, uncertain that he did not push them

in front of him, like great impassioned shades. Following

them, following only the attraction he felt in common with
them, attracted only toward the attraction. "Keep attacking
us."-"Discourage us." He compares them to careless words,
united by chance, mad, and mad to be together. "Neuer, before,
did you use such a word."-"But what would this word be?"
"You know it."-"Then I wouldn't use it this time."-"'t comes
to us from them.,_"Or they come to us from it."-"And it,
from where would it come to us?"

In a serious tone, as if to remind him that they were

there without any right other than to use up this right in

speaking, to use up the right to speech. "We are beyond being
able to hold on for a long time."-"Yes, in the time to which we
do not hold."-"But which gives us this hold in the form of a
conversation."5

"You are their moderator."-"In their immobility, they

moue about constantly."-"They represent such an insistence
in such an absence of present that their reappearance could
only be our own.,
43

"Would they attach importance to our words ?n-"Th an

swer is beyond our power. n-"But answer to what question, if
not to that which goes beyond all powers, our own included. n

The demand of the fragmentary, not being the sign of

+
the limit as limitation of ourselves, nor of language in relation
to life or of life in relation to language, offers itself neverthe
less, hiding itself, as a play of limits, play that does not yet
have any relation to any limitation. The demand of the frag
mentary: play of limits in which no limitation plays; the frag
mentary, a dissociation of limit and limitation, even though it
marks a separation of the law, such that this separation is not
taken back, included, in the law, the law that is understood,
nevertheless, as a separation.

+
"What you propose would be a dangerous and even diffi
cult undertaking, if indeed you were proposing it, but no more
so than our having proposed to live without asking ourselves if
we had the means

necessary

to do so-as soon as we ask it,

they are lacking-, you didn't ask yourself if you had enough
strength to see your venture, if it is one, through.-'7 did ask
myself and I ask myself constantly. And the answer: I don't
have enough strength, I have enough emptiness for it. n

+
Violence is at work in language, and, more decidedly, in
the speech of writing, in as much as language conceals itself
from work: this action of concealing itself again belongs to
violence.

+
Madness: let us suppose a language from which this
word would be excluded, another in which it would be forgot
ten in relation to all the other words, another where the ter
rified search, forbidden, for this one word, lost and constantly
44

threatening, constantly interrogatory, would suffice, orienting

all the possibilities of speech, to submit language to the only
word that had deserted it. A supposition (mad, it is true), but
also easy: on condition that we make use of a language in
which madness would be given by a name. In general, we ask
ourselves, by the intermediary of experienced practitioners, if
such or such a man falls under the judgement of such a word.
Strictly, we maintain this word in the interrogative position:

Holderlin was mad, but was he? Or else we hesitate to special

ize it, not only with scientific doubt, but in order not to, by
making it precise, immobilize it in a certain knowledge: even
schizophrenia, in evoking the madness of extremes, the dis
tance that distances us in advance from ourselves in separat
ing us from any power of identity, always says too much about
it, or pretends to say too much about it. Madness would thus
be a word in perpetual incongruance with itself and interroga
tive throughout, such that it would put into question its possi

bility and, through it, the possibility of the language that

would admit it, thus would put interrogation itself into ques
tion, in as much as it belongs to the play of language. To say:
Holderlin is mad is to say: is he mad? But, it is, starting from
there, to make madness so foreign to any affirmation that it
could not find a language without putting it under the threat
of madness: language, as such, gone mad. Mad language

would be, in any speech, not only the possibility that would
make it speak at the risk of making it non-speaking (risk
without which it would not speak), but the limit that detains
all language and which, never fixed in advance, nor the

oretically determ!hable, still less such that one could write:

"there is a limit", thus outside of any "there is", could inscribe
itself only on the basis of its own crossing-the crossing of the
uncrossable-and, from this, prohibited. Whence (perhaps)
the astonishment with which we are seized when we learn,
learning it from HtHderlin and from Nietzsche, that the
Greeks recognized in Dionysis the "mad god": expression that
we make more familiar to ourselves in interpreting it: god who
makes mad or madness that makes divine. But the "mad

god"? How do we accept what comes to us by the force of such

an irregularity? A god, not far away, responsible for some
45

general irregularity, but present, presence itself, in its revela

tory suddeness: presence of the mad god? The mad god: pres

ence of the outside that has always already suspended, forbid

den, presence. Such is the riddle of the Eternal Return.

+
That madness is present in every language is not
enough to establish that it is not omitted in them. The name
could elude it in that the name as name gives to the language

that uses it for a peaceful communication the right to forget

that with this word outside of words language's rupture with
itself is introduced: rupture that only another language would
allow to speak (without, however, communicating it).
But the madness that shatters language in leaving it ap
parently intact, leaves it intact only to accomplish in it its
invisible destruction.

To write is perhaps to not write in rewriting-to efface

(in writing over) that which is not yet written and that rewrit
ing not only covers over, but restores obliquely in covering it
over, in making us think that there was something before, a
first version (a detour) or, worse, an original text, engaging us
thus in the process of the illusion of infinite deciphering.

Speech is always the speech of authority (to speak is

always to speak according to the authority of speech). But

there is no sceptre for the one who writes, even disguised as a
beggar's stick: nothing to lean on and no moving along.

+
"The ever alluring secret of life is that life, which is for
all of us without secrets and which has taken away all pos
sibiHties, remains alluring.-By its mortal limit.-By the
limit of which one does not know if life would not be death's
limit. So that in living we would know the extreme limit of
46

death, on condition that we go through life-the crossings of

life-in an unlimited way, with mortal desire.-Yes, it is in
deed that; we are in relation, in life and through the desire to
live, to the limit that death, without succeeding, pretends
to break. Life would be the forbidden of death: forbidden to
death? except in that the forbidden would be death itself."

"Let's not speak about them too much. It's about us that

we might end up speaking."-"Knowing them, through our

selves, better than we know ourselves, even if we know our
selves in every way."

To say, to say according to what there is to say, implies

a distance that we

cannot

interpret temporally, even if it is

prepared in a sort of passive future, and it is also to say again

according to the already spoken formula, thus to demand the
impossible coexistence of past and future as such: or to involve
oneself in the affirmation of the return.
The separation put to work in the act of writing: how much
passivity, how much worklessness are needed to respect it,
and, doing so, to betray it. In the ethical obligation, in the
demand of the historical struggle, in the eschatological affir
mation, nothing allows one to decide if the altered manner in
which the distance seems to propose itself does not restore it
to the demand that excludes it from any affirmation, pure or
impure. Yes, why would "morality" not be the silence that
imposes itself in any speech-what is obligatory in it-such
that every speech would be moral, but always impossible to
get hold of in morality (lost by it, which cannot say anything
about itself), escaping it in remaining unknown to it?

Even though there is no reason for you to come here, it

seems that every time you come, you have an extraordinary
reason to come."
47

+
The name of God ignifies not only that what is named
by this name would not belong to the language in which this
name occurs, but that this name, in a way that is difficult to
determine, would no longer be a part of this language, even
apart from it. The idolatry of the name or only the reverence
that makes it unpronouncable (sacred) is related to this disap
pearance of the name that the name itself makes appear and
that makes us give more importance to the language in which
it makes itself obscure, to the point of giving it as forbidden.
Far from raising us to lofty significations, all those that theol
ogy authorizes, it does not give place to anything that is prop
er to it: pure name that doe not name, but is rather always to
be named, the name as name, but, in that, hardly a name,
without nominative power, attached as if by chance to lan
guage and, thus, transmitting to it the power-a devastating
one-of non-designation, that relates it to itself.
God: language speaks only as the sickness Qf language in
as much as it is fissured1 burst open, separated, failure that
language recuperates immdiately as its validity, its power
and its health; recuperation that is its most intimate malady,
of which God, name always irrecuperable, who is always to be
named and never names anything1 seeks to cure us, a cure in
itself incurable.

Between them, the fear, the fear shared in common, and,

through the fear, the abyss of fear over which they join one
another without being able to do so, dying, each alone, of fear.

If, in order to deny, it is necessary to speak, and speak

ing, to affirm; if, consequently, language seems not to be able

to free itself from a first affirmation, so that, once you speak,
you are already the prisoner, always belatedly struggling
against it, of an enunciation that affirms itself in speech, one
would still have to know what this affirmation, enunciation,
means. Does it only say what is (the sky is blue)? Or, in saying
the sky is blue does it say: before enunciating and in enunciat48

ing, I have transgressed the silent prohibition in turning it

into a positive prescription, speaking then according to what
there is to say (the must-say). Yes, something always precedes
us when we speak: the very separation that is nothing positive
or enunciative, that wol.lld be rather the distance of the
saying-between that we know only, having already fixed it, as
prohibition. The must-say of the trangressjon (which is not a
negation either, the simple refusal of a limitation), this is
what, seeming to speak in every speech, makes it weighty to
the point of silencing it.
Speaking is, forcing oneself to speak, to speak the obliga
tion of the must-say (the right to speech, right without right)
that pronounces itself facing the prohibition.

Each knowing that the other was going to die, every

enlarged by a generosity of space. Nocturnal
provocation, when wakefulness is not preoccupied with time.
+

thing was

The fragmentary. There is no experience of it, in the

sense that one does not admit it in any fonn of present, that it
would remain without subject if it took place, thus excluding
every present and all presence, as it would be excluded from
+

them. Fragments, marks of the fragmentary, referring to the

fragmentary that refers to nothing and has no proper refer
ence, nevertheless attesting to it, pieces that do not compose
themselves, are not part of any whole, except to make frag
mentary, not separated or isolated, always, on the contrary,
effects of separation, separation always separated, the pas
sion of the fragmentary efe
f cts of effects.

As if a feeling indep endent from them were coming from

them.

49


Writing is not destined to leave traces, but to erase, by
traces, all traces, to disappear in the fragmentary space of
writing, more definitively than oue dii,lppears in the tomb, or
again, to destroy, to destroy invisibly, without the uproar of
destruction.
Writing according to the fragmentary invisibly destroys
surface and depth, real and possibl. above and below, man
ifest and hidden. There is then no hidden discourse that an
apparent discourse would preserve, not even an open plurality
of significations awaiting interpretive reading. To write at the
level of the incessant murmur is to expose oneself to the deci
sion of a lack that marks itself only by a surplus without
place, impossible to put in place, to distribute in the space of
thoughts, wot:ds and books. To respond to this demand of writ
ing is not only to oppose a lack to a lack or to play with the
void to procure some privative effect, nor is it only to maintain
or indicate a blank between two or several affirmative enunci
ations; what then? perhaps first to carry a space of language
to the limit from which the irregularity of another speaking,
nonspeaking, space comes back, which efa
f ces it or interrupts
it and which one approaches only through its alterity, marked
by the effect of effacement.

Free

me

from the too long speech.

The fragmentary not being experience, not being form

or subject of writing, not being another order in comparison to
the order of the book, even as passage to a disorder; still,
obscure demand under the attraction of which the space of
writing gives place to marks or points of singularity through
which pass multiple (irregular) lines that make the points
disappear as unique even in maintaining them in a position of
singularity, so that a quasi-infinite multiplicity of crossings
can repeat itself in it, without the repetition supressing the
mark of singularity nor dissolving this in identity. It is as if
this space were given as correlative or supplementary or even
50

secondary (in this sense inessential), even in repelling, in

burstjpg open, that of which it would seem to be the correlate
or supplement, secondary then without any priority. Whence
the work of obscurity that the beginning again copducts and
conducts always more obscurely. Reading, writing are ex
changed in favor of this "corrlate" that they struggle to pre
vent, struggling also against the power in them to produce it
or to restore it.
It is not a matter of substituting reading for writing or of
privileging one over the other, but of redoubling them so that
the law of one is the prohibition of the other. Through the
fragmentary, writing and reading change functions. As long
as writing is writing a book, this book is either completed or
maintained by reading, or threatened by that which tends to
reduce it or alter it, even though it is always and again, by its
essence, supposed to be und!Ullaged in the unreal totality (the
work, the masterpiece) that it has once and for all constituted.
But if to write is to arrange marks of singularity (fragments)
from which routes can indicate themselves without reuniting
nor joining the marks, but as their separating-separating of
a space of which we know only the separatjon: the separation,
without knowing from what it separates-there is always a
risk that reading, instead of animating the multiplicity of
.
them, or,
crossing routes, reconstitutes a new totality from
worse, seeks, in the world of presence and of sense, to what
reality or thing to complete correspond the voids of this space
given as complementary, but complementary of nothing.

Characters: they are in the position of characters, and

still these are points of singularity (local or site specific fires),
immobile, although the route of a movement in a rarified
apace, in the sense that almost nothing can happen in it,
traces itself from these to others, multiple routes by which,
fixed, they do not cease to change places, nor, identical, to
change. Rarified space, which the effect of rarity tends to
make infinite to the very limit that does not bind it. The effect
of rarity is proper to the fragmentary. Death here, far from
51

making a. \;Vork1 has already done its work: mortal workless

ness. Through tb.is, writing according to the fragmentary, al
ways taking place there where there is a place of dying and
thus as according to perpetual death, brings on the scene, on a
base of absence, semblance of sentences, remainders of lan
guage, imitations of thought, simulations of being. Lie that no
truth upholds, forgetting that supposes nothing forgotten and
that is detached from every mell)ory: with no certainties, ever.
Desire turned back into desire. Like a colli&ion of lights.

Meanwhile, between them and us, there is a relation of

fraternity, close to one another to the point of living only when
exposed to dying for one another, as in a reciprocal suicide in
which one would prolong his life so that the other dies in it
more gently, that we are called upon to maintain ourselues up
until the end.

Fraternity: we love them, we can do rwthing for them, if

rwt help them to reach the threshold.
The threshold, what indiscretion nd weight there would
be in speaking of it as if it were death. In a certain way, and
forever, we have known that death was only a metaphor to
help us crudely represent the idea of a limit to ourselves,
while the limit excludes any representation, any "idea" of the
limit.

"Do we really want to occupy ourselves with them?"

"They have already fallen into our worklessness."- ''We watch
over them."-"But it is they who keep watch."-''We observe
them, we guard them."

The idea of the threshold, in as much as it is a regula

tory idea, and in the way of a concept, is all the same general,
52

while the "'threshold" does not allow us to designate by the

same word "ethical threshold". "political threshold", "artistic
threhQld", without reintrodqcing the threshold into the com
mon space and dissolving it there.

"They do not love

us,

"That is their way of loving

knowing nothing about

us,

"
us. -

they are at our side."

They did not say: "I am afraid", but: "fear". And at once
fear filled the universe.

"We live for those who know nothing about u.s."-"Ah,

they also live for us, and even more so since they don't know
it."-"But what do they have to do with our life?"
There was something disturbing about feeling them thus
exposed and as if giuen up by the care which we supposed they
took to avoid us.
Impenetrable, as if they concealed themselves by their
transparency.

Everything must efface itself, everything will efface it

self. This is in accordance with the infinite demand of efface

ment that writing take place and take its place.
Even if writing leaves traces, and, leaving them, makes
traces engender themselves and produce themselves out of
the life of traces? One can answer: to write is to go by way of
the world of traces, towards the effacement of traces and of all
traces, since traces are opposed to totality and always already
disperse themselves. Another response: writing marks, but
does not leave marks. More precisely: there is between mark
f rence that it almost accounts for the
and traces such a dife
equivocal nature of writing. Writing marks and leaves traces,
but the traces do not depend on the mark and, at the limit, are
53

not in relation to it. The trces do not refer to the g1oment of

the mark, they an: without origin, but pot without end in the
very permanence that seems to perpetuate them, traces
which, even in becoming confused and replacing each other,
are there forever, apd forever cut o[ from that of which they
would be the traces, having no other being than their plu
rality, as if there were not a trace, but traces, never the same
and always repeated. The mark of writing. To mark is in a
certain way not tQ leave marks and Qnly, by this active lack of
marks, failure to distribute plurally in a well delimited space,
already to demand the line of demarcation not to cross and yet
to demand it as from its crossing in view of a completely other
space. To mark is, by this separation o{ mark and traces, to
make the traces not refer to the mark as to their beginning
and always multiply and superimpose themselves, traces by
traces, not to be deciphered, but to efa
f ce themselves plurally.
The mark, it is to be absent from the present and to make
the present be absent, And the trace, being lways traces,
does not refer to any initial presence that would still be pre
sent, as remainder or vestige, there where it has disappeared.

+
we

As attentive as they

can

do not know it-they ask

be-and to such

nwre

degree that

attention of us than we will

ever grant them.

A brusque and fortuitous speech, unjust and refined

(always taken out of the exchange): sinister possibility that is

like the gift of innocent language.

"Ah, we no lCJnger speak like we used to speak."-"You

find me worse?"'-"Very bad. "-'Well, 1 won't change any

more: there's only one possible change left."-"We've been dying

for so long and for so little time."
54

+
The time when all these truths are stories, wlum all
stories are false: no preseJ)t, nothing but what is actual.

+
To write: work of the absence of work, productjon that
produces nothing except (or out of) the absence of a subject,
mark that unmarks, infinitive in which the infinite would like
to play itself out even to the neuer: to write does not depend
on the present and does not make it raise itself. And yet to
write, if it is not declined, if it also rejects, and with even less
ambiguity, the past mode and the future mode so that have
written or will write can only be written, tends, in order to
lighten itself, to maintain itself in a conditional without condi
tion (would write, would have written), letting itself thus be
projected into the sky of the ideal, where the unreal would
reali7;e itself dangerously and illusorily. That is dangerous
indeed: writing could not write itself in the conditional (Mal
lanne and all of us with him, have we not felt this attraction?
''Who knows what would be needed for that?"); the modesty of
the conditional is misleading in seeming to put into question
only personal failure or to attest to writing's position of impos
sibility (which would be impossible, not as the "real" is, but as

the pure Good would be, except in heayen), while writing

takes place, whether this be never, rarely, at every instant in
the absence of time, but precisely as place that precedes every
"taking place", mark of which we know only the traces because
of which we give it as lost, effaced, or .as unrepresentable
efa
f cement. When these formulation_s with which we play: to
write is not to have written, but would be, in the suddeness
that leaves no trace, to have always already written as that
which will always write itself anew. Formulation not without
authority, since, through it. we seem to shatter the articulated
modes of the present, future, past, but through their use itself.
From this, once again, to write as response to the affirmation
of the return and, immediately, as that to which the return,
which could affirm itself only in the form of writing, responds.
55

t
"To write.-Later.-Later: slowly, according to the
plain gentleness o( the interrupted that never relates itself to
a future of time, no more than it poses itself in the present
moment."

t
The "not yet" of thought, thi!i failure of the present in
regard to what there would be to think, always implied in
every presence of thought, the ambiguity of such a "not yet"
could not distribute its resources, once it is a matter of writ
ing.
Writing carries away, tears away, through the plural dis
persion of its practice, every horion as well as every founda
tion, carrying away through a carrying away that does not
have time to unfQld itself, which one could thys say was sud
den, like a mark that would not have time (having all tjme) to
leave traces, taking away the limit that is only such under the
demand of an "always already", forbidden through its trans
gression or uncrossable if or as soon as already crossed, and

immediately and at the same time diverted from every cross

ing (from every openness)6. The "not yet" of thought, the "al
ways already" of writing inscribe themselves according to the
intervals that each maintain or sets free, but that do not su
perimpose themselves on one another.

+
It would seem that writing has life as its support, even
though thought would hold on to time as the process of its
accomplishment.

+
The essential power to neglect the fact that writing
would have life for support, finds itself facilitated and the
oretically justified by the resource of books. Books seem to be
there to preserve writing and to allow it to constitute itself in
its own space, separate and as if separated from any life.
Writing, forced to give itself as the expression or affirmation of
56

life, has never satisfied either writing or life. The refined

categories, those Qf existence, the play of being al}d of time,
offered to the question of writing, have been able to serve to
keep such a question "alive", but without giving us any illu
sion about this "borrowed" life. Life contests writing tQilt con
ceals itself frorn lif or reduces it. But the contest comes from
writing that leaves plenitude to life and unexceptionable pres
ence to the Uving, bearer of life, while writing can certainly

propose itself as that which would exhaust life j.n order to

inscribe itself at the limit of life; finally the proposition makes
room for this other, completejy other: writing only writes itself
at the limit of writing, there where the book1 although still
there, is the pressure of the end (without end) of books.

To write at the limit of writing: but everytbipg is played

out in the difference of these repeated terms. Difference held

by the very repetition whose possibility escapes, being given
over to the difference that has necessarily always already re
peated itself, even though it will always repeat itself, without

being able to be spoken in such a way that it repeats itself in

the present.

When he crossed it. the city murmured in him con-

stantly: I am afraid, be the witness of fear.

He carries fear, fear does not belong to him: intransport

able fear, without anyone to feel it, destitute of all, fear, the
lack of fear.

+
Fear for the one who is afraid, who does not know it: the
collapsed center of empty fear.
Fear, that which does not have death as a limit, even the
infinite death of others; neuerthlet;;s, I am afraid for the others
57

wlw are afraid of dying, who will die without me, in t'M dis
tancing of th self which would vainly replace theirs.

+
Let fear leave me to interrogate fear: "But why are you
afraid?"-"Don't ask me: I'm afraid."-"Are you afraid, in
this way, even to the point of fear?"-"You ask me this, you
slwuldn't have asked me this."-"But I ask it in the same way
that you're afraid: my question is your fear. n

Fear, we call it mortal, while it hides the death towards

which it attracts us from us; but fear, always exceding the self
in which it entrenches itself, absent from the one who carries
it, as from the language that pronounces it, making us
strangers to ourselves, is the fear for someone who does not let
himself be approached and whom death already turns away
from our rescue, although it is called for, awaited.

sofi'I6Jne who is afraid does not know it, does not call
for help."'-"But it is for him that I'm afraid, one time and

always from t'Mn on. n

We say pain, we say unhappiness. But fear?

Fear, as if he recalled this word that made him forget

everything.

Fear, it is this gift that they would give us in the

posthumous city; the possibility of being afraid for them: fear
given in the word fear; fear not felt.
58


Neither of them was given to w;ing tricks: he, being a
part of his plans that supposed a life that was still intact, the
everyday life promised to all, and he, hearing nQthing but the
speech that was already failing, incapable of speaking except
by default. Btween them, the responsibility of fear.

"It's true, I am afraid."'-"'You say this so calmly."

"Saying it, however, does not alleviate the fear: on the contrary,
it the word fear that henceforth makes me afraid; having said
it no longer allows me to say anything else."-"But, 'I am
afraid', I also: because of this word, spoken so calmly: as no
one, as if no one were afraid."-"From now
language that is afraid."

on,

it is the whole

+
This fear of language, it was incumbent on him not to
see in it anything but the possibility, always open, that any
word, belonging to the order of words that are only such by
their belonging to language, could turn on this language in
order to detach itself from it and to raise itself above it in
mastering it, perhaps in shattering it, at least in pretending
to assign it a limit. Fear does not signify that language would
be afraid, even metaphysically, but that fear is a piece of lan
guage, something that it would have lost and that would make
it entirely dependent on this dead piece: entirely, that is, pre
cisely in reconstituting itself without unity, piece by piece, as
something other than a collection of significations. Certainly,
metaphor intervenes finally to hold in suspense, making it
inoffensive, the possibility of language's being other than a
process of meaning. Through metaphor. the fear of language
becomes the fear of speaking or the fear which, being the
essence of any speech, would make any use of speech, as any
silence, frightening. The fear of language: the fear that strikes
language when it loses a word that is then a surplus word, a
word too many: fear, God, madness. Or the "he/it" displaced
from its rank and role of subject.
59

+
Why these names so heavy, toQ charged with them
selves, as charged with all the surcharge of language, over
which they are called to stand? God is thus a name, pure

materiality, naming nothing, not even himself. Whence the

perversion1 magical, mystical, literl. of the name, the opacity
of God to any idea of God. And still, like fear, like ro.a.dness, it
disappears, if only as a messenger of another language, of

which such a disappearance could not take the place of a

benning. The "death of God" is perhaps only the help that

historical language vainly brings to allow a word to fall out

side of language without another announcing itself there: ab
solute slip.

And we do nothing but repeat. Nocturnal repetition, rep

etition of the one who says: is it this, to die, is it this, fear?

He who, in the street, stops the unknown woman with

the dark eyes and says to her: "I am afraid, don't you want to
accompany me for a moment?", gives her the movement of fear
as a companion forever. But he entrusts his thought to her,

the safeguard of this endangered thought, replacing itself in

the unknown-the unknown that nevertheless has a face, the

face of the unknown-by a call that escapes not only the pro
priety of relations, but the human relation of relations, and
thus is a mark of what one must call unreasonableness. One
must, then, go by way Qf madness, here maintained within the

limits of an initiative that is only hazardous, to take a step

outside of madness, in the slip that brushes the outside. There

is certainly something unreasonable in forgetting-in not

being aware-that every human being is not immediately the

other whose thought-that is, whose madness-could be par

doned each time, by a word (barely a word, a murmur difficult
to hear). And since the unknown one welcomes in such a sim
ple way, taking gently by the hand he who has stopped her

and helping him cross the night, as one helps a blind person
cross the street, that one can conclude nothing from such a
60

movement of vylcoming, from this improbable possibility

open between beings, open through that which coujd not be
shared {the separation of ..madness"), this is what makes rea
son vacillate anew, even in giving it to keep, on condition that
one does not conclude anything from it (does not make sense
of it) this disturbance that does not belong to it.
Any conclusion, any interpretation, would be a delirious
one, a temptation of thought to reestablish a relation of equi
librium between itself and its Other. To say: that is a sign of
Goodness, somebody does Good for me, is to deprive this hu
man girl, who would probably have refused to be called good or
to have done apything good, of herself, a& she is well on this
side of and well beyond any goodness. To say: that would be so
in a perfect society, everyone welcoming everyone else wit)lout
asking for anything, i!2 to forget that madness pr fear would be
in some way forbidden in this society or restored to the com
munity itself, in order that it take care of them, without any
particular person being able, except by mistake, to accept this
sick particularity and to allow it a refuge. To say: he who
entrusts himself absolutely finds already in the limitlessness
of trust a response to the enclosed speech, having carried his
fear as far as friendship-fraternity without law-, is to
make a law of that which, having taken place only once and
still, from that, taking place aU the time, announces itself

as

impossible, real in a.s much as impossible. He who has re

ceived this sign knows immediately that not only is there no
right, but that all those who, far from being welcomed as he
was, have been rejected, drag this after them from then on
with no recourse but the great river. How then pretend to
acquit oneself of the ..event" in speaking of luck or of chance,
word at once reduced to its poverty, especially when the other
is in play in it.

Is it this, to die, is it this, fear? The silent dread, and

this silence, like a cry without words; mute, although crying
endlessly.
+

61

+
Dread. "Do nothing, and it is still too much."-"Then let
me cease to be."-"Do not tamper wit/l yqur being."
What is left for you to ckJ: to undo yourself in this nothing
that you do.

If I am in dread as in truth, it is a truth that already

deceives me and that I, meanwhile, can leave behind only in

deceiving myself.
Once we have passed a certain threshold, never knowing
we have done so although knowing it, in an uncertainty which
is already its mark, everything belongs to dread, including
non-dread, it is a trap, and still it is without ru_se, there is a
loyalty, a simplicity, a tranquility of dread, perhaps because it
escapes every law; wildness with the calm of the forests, the
calm of a wait for sqmthing that will not take place.

A double meaning: the noise of the city with its inter-

pretable richness, always ready to be named, then the same

TWise like the sound of the waves, monotonous, wild, inaudible,
with sudden and unforeseeable bursts being a pq..rt of the mo
TWtony.

There is an "I don't know" that is at the limit of knowl

edge, but that belongs to knowledge. Always, we pronounce it

too early, still knowing everything-or too late, when I no
longer know that I don't know, saying nothing and thus
saying it.
I know less about it than I know about it; it is over this
being behind itself of knowledge that I must leap to reach
not attaining it, or ruining myself in it-unknowledge.

Dread-horror of all that names it, and, naming it,

identifies it, glorifies it. It wants this: that one not speak of it,
62

and that, since as soon as one speaks it is it that speaks, one

says nothing.
Dread of letting dread speak or, silencing it, letting it oc
cupy all of the silence.
Dread-this w9rd that cannot be pronounced, that one
would like to silence in crying out, with its inappropriateness,
its philosophic and pathetic pretension; butJ t11rned away
from me, 'T receive it from others as the unknown of all pain,
the supplication of a powerless care.

Dread makes reading forbidden (the words separated,

something arid and devastating about them; no more texts,
every word useless, or else foundering in something that I do

not know, attracting me to it with resistance, understanding

as an injustice). To write, then, effect of a negative hallucina
tion, giving nothing to read, nothing to understand.

When dread forbids dread, preventing my being aban

doned to it in order to better hold on to me. "You will not

transgress me."- "I will not sanctify you." The unsureness of
certain dread.

t
It is like a {lgure that he doesn't see, that is missing
because it is there, having all the traits of a figure that would
not figure itself and with which the incessant lack of relation,
without presence, without absence, is a sign of a common soli
tude. He names it, although he knows that it has no name, even

in his language, this beating of a hesitant heart. Neither of

them lives, life passes between them, leaving them on the edge
of space.
Wordless in the midst of words.

The favorable fragment.

63

He could no longer ask; dread is also this detour of the

question, the obstacle to its being a question about dread. The
+

unknown of dread interrogates us, J]ut does not lt itself t>

interrogated: the failure before that which does not let itself
be interrogated.

Would they live without the strength and energy that the

desire to die gives them?

+
Dread does not keep busy, preventing one from doing
anything, preventing the very enjoyment or complaint of
boredom.

He is not skeptical enough to hope. He does not hope

enough to stop at nihilism. The unknown without hope.
Dread: the unsureness that excludes the uncertainty of doubt,
what decisiveness is left for doubt to exert itself.
Inattentive as if in the power of a constant attention. A
thought that he does not identify, even knowing it, holds vigil.
One would say that it is there to prohibit mortal surprise,
being this surprise itself.

+
The desire to die growing weary, there remained for
them nothing but to die.
Not entreating the stars for anything, to die thoughtlessly.
7b desire, to cease to have any relation to the gaze, to turn
oneself away from heaven; desire is this detour by which "I"
stop thinking about myself; it thus has a relation to the night
without stars, this night of slowness, of insuffu:iency: drifting
without shore.

At night, towards the night. Future dream, sleep

done. To die of night.
64

un-

It is in the 11Wrning, in the brief mist that eternalizes itself,

that he expires of night.

He

The temptation: the fragment favorable, as if, in its

no

longer delimits himself, he fragments himself

non-unity, this could be alone, the last, the last, without brevi
ty, without place, obstinacy in reverse, its speech of the infi
nite at last dissuaded, taken back into its gentleness.

A word chosen by the dread foreign to any choice in its

immense oscillating work, the work of dread, its hammer of

ruin, dread seeking refuge in dread.
The distant always near to dread, its trace effaced, re
traced: never whole, morcellated, hammered, with something
young about it that is frightening.

Sparse brevity, perservering, become slowness that in

terrupts itself, like a suffering has always returned and that

does not reognize me. Its arrogance is my supplication.
The smallness of dread, my whole always surpassed-that
which keeps me from being whole with myself, with you. The
incessant intermittence.

Silence, I know you by hearsay.

+
He is in a closed world whose closing is the only event
that produces itself in it.

+
What decision had he made that put him out of reach,
although friendly, close?
66

'

+
Between the silence and the silence, exchanged wordinnocent murmur.

Sedentary dread.

+
Turned away from the unique, under the fascination of
the multiple, he does not carry several ideas or an infinity of
contradictory ideas: the multiple rarefies, singularizes.

+
In me there is someoru! who does rwthing but undo this
me: infinite occupation.

To the one who has asked so many questions, death

comes softly as the lost question.

+
To die would be, every tim_e there where we speak, that
which holds back from affirming, from affirming itself as from
denying. That is heard, understood: we believe
it is tacit; even the rustling of dread stops. .

we

hear it, but

At the limit, to die; but it is life without dread.

Alone again, offered to the multiple, in the plurality of

dread, outside himself, signaling without calling, one dis
suaded by the other. Solitude is evidently space without place,
when presence calls itself non-presence, where nothing is
one-challenge, without distrust, to the unique. Solitude
hides me from solitude, sometimes.
66

Alone again, challenge to the unique, one lost for the other.

The trait of dread: it repels any why, it does not respond

+
to a lack; the absence of a why of dread does not, however, lead
to restfulness, nor to any glory, but to a risk so great that

dying no longer seems an outlet to escape from it; what risk?

the risk of the unknown without question, wt.bout risk.

+
Supposing that dreijd is innocence itself, an innocence
apparently unknown, man feels guilty for not being able to
bear innocence, guilty of this innocence that anguishes him.

Dying "frees" us from dread (dying, this re-emanating

of impossible death, the distant proximity) as dread is un

aware of dying; both, however, faultless: the unknown that
differs.

+
Unknowledge would like to pass itself off as a response
to dread's absence of why. But it is its empty echo, its immo

bile repetition, unless repeating it or preceding it, it is this

night in which dread has already lost itself under the attrac
tion of the loss that it maintains and that maintains it, night

without speech of the night without image.

The sad mouth spoke peacefully.

+
"Enter into the destructive element," we do not write a
word that does not contain this invitation and, sometimes,
another that is superfluous: let you destroy yourself.
67

There are no words in the language of dread to say: that is

possible .

..

Defiance or derision: he listens to the silence with

words.

What can be repeated is only what could not be, the

unreplaced, the singular in which the One has disappeared in

its simulacrum. As if there were repetition only there where
there would be absence of law. Repetition of the extreme: gen
eral collapse; the neuter, that which expires without produc
ing itself.

Dread without suspicion, openess of the detour, unbur

dened of fear, raising itself above protests, accepting every
refusal: thought; loss of thought.
Dread, if it desubjugates the subject, not authorizing it,
refusing it authority (experience), is dread through and
through in that it is not felt.

I do not know; there is no "I" to not know.

Loss is impossible.-It passes through the impos

sible.-It is in this that it is really loss, loss of thought, never
compensated.-Loss is demand, it demands of thought that it
be un-thought?, loss of loss (without annulment of return):
only repeating, falling due (luck that does not fall due) of the
neuter.
The leap of questioning would have the neuter as its sup
port, leaping over itself, in an immobile fall.
68

But we can always ask ourselves about the neuter, in

terrogating it through the dread that turns the question away,
repeating it, throwing it back into silence, the silence which
+

does not silence itself.

enter/between: enter/between/neuter/not being8. Play,

+
play without the happiness of playing, with the residue of a
letter that would call to the night by the lure of a negative
presence. The night radiates the night to the very neuter in
which it extinguishes itself.

The enigma of the neuter, enigma that the neuter re+

duces even in making it shine in a name.

"Is it you?"-"Yes, it's me."-"You, in broad daylight."-

"In the broad daylight of darkness."

When he came to his house, in broad daylight, exchanging
the greeting for darkness.

+
\

Crossing the distances, alone to hear, not to hear, giving

the voice a voice, voice of no one once again. "Listen.""Listen." In the silence something was speaking, something
was being quiet. Truth gives no news.

To cross the distant, to turn the distant back toward the

distant without approach.

+
The distant calls to the near, repelling it, not to defme
itself in it by opposition, nor to form a couple with it by re69

semblance and difference, but in such a way that the separa

tion between the two still belongs to the cllstant. The near,
repelling it, calls to the immedi.,ate that consumes it. The near
is always only near. The proximity of presence does not make
itself present, because presence is never near, it has always
already affirmed the absolute of presence which is there one
time and for all without relation nor progression, nor dawn
nor dusk. The near, through presence, belongs to the distant,
and through the distant, belongs to the indefinite play of sepa
ration and limit. Indecision is what brings tQgether niir and
far: both unsituated, unsituable, never given in a place or a
time, but each its own variation of time and place. Where the
distant, where the near? To distance oneself, to approach: let
us admit that the verb has significance beforE: the noun; dis
tancing oneself supposes a fixed point in relation to which
there would be distancipg; this fixed point is once again pres
ence; distancing does not stop distancing itself, because there
is no term to distancing, even though there is no beginning to
the distant. One can certainly say: he distances himself, but
he is still near, one can say this, even though one has the
feeling that the infinite power of distancing gets in the way of
any determination of the "near", which has as a point of refer
ence not the distant, but rather the vicinity of presence that
excludes any neighboring. The near is thus repelled by the
absolute of presence and held apart, taken back into the sepa
ration of the distant: unable thus to mediate the two terms or
even to "bring them closer together", still less able to maintain
them together in a necessity of thought. The near would not
bring near, it lacks the being of presence, lack that is its mark
and that is not only a lack of presence, but the lack that the
multiple distant carries.

Approaching is distancing's game. The game of distant

and near is the game of the distant. Approaching the dis

tances is the formula that tries to make the distances burst in
contact with a presence thus characterized by distance, as in a
certain way it always is; thus again presence and distance are
70

linked; distant presence, distant of presence, the distances

would be present there. Th near alone, then, would be safe
from contamination by a presence. To be near is tQ not be
present. The near promises that it will never take hold. Praise
for the approach of that which escapes: the next death, the
distance ofthe next death.

To distance oneself: he <tistances himself, btt I never

+
distance myself. "I" entails being there, decisive presence that
does not let itself be affected by any distancing. Whoever says
"I" still says presence. Divine ubiquity is this power of pres
ence which has always already annexed itself to being
present; certainly god is the distant par excellence, but the
distant that has presence for its truth, a distance of pure
presence. The distant and the near are dimensions of what
escapes presence as well as absence under the attraction of
the "he/it". He/it distances him-/it-self, he/it approaches, the
same spectered affirmation, the same
presence.

premises of non

There would be a separation of time, like a separation

of place, belonging neither to time nor to place. In this separa
+

tion, we would come to the point of writing.

"'I would like to attract them in their name."-"An excel

lent natm?, certainly."-"A name forgotten, no longer in use."

"We forget nothing."-'When they take on this natm? that is
under any name, they will walk with a sure step, crossing the
distances, towards

us. n

+
The lips suspended from the night, they did not speak
the night.
71

Proximity once again sys &,qmething agnst presence

(dissuades presence): what is near is too near for it to be only

presence; through proimity, I can say "you" [toi] (even if this
is in the night of words), thus can pronounce an intimacy that
makes presence burst to pieces, abolishing it in some way or
making it great tQ th point that it is destroyed. So I can say:
"You are so near that you are not present"1 but near to whom?
precisely near to whom and not to me: thus, I know that, in
the figure of a "you" falsely called forth, what fs said is once
more: he is so near that he is there outside among the signs
borne by the distant.

He lived there, the house reconstructed itself around

him, I saw him behind the window, waiting without hearing
me, exhaustin8 the overfullness of our words through the wait.

t
He concluded from this, in the course of his always more
rare comings and goings, that they would never be there, even
in passing, but soberly, austerely, there below, prescribed (pro
scribed) by their name: near or far, with the approval of that
which gives no approval-chance.

We can always ask ourselves about the neuter. The neu

ter is first of all attested to by certain grammars. The Greek to

is perhaps the first occurence in our tradition, surprising for
its lack of clamor, which marks with a sign-it is true, among
others-the decision. of a new language, a language later
taken over by philosophy at the price of this neuter that intro
duces it. The neuter in the singular names something that
escapes nomination, but without making any noise, without
even the noisiness of an enigma. We call it, modestly, thought
lessly, the thing. The thing: because, from all the evidence,
things belong to another order and things are what are most
familiar, without being transparent, making us live in our

72

environment of things. 'l'hings are illuminated, but do not let

light pass through them, even if they are themselves made of
grains of light, thus reducing the Jight to opacity. The thing,
like the he/it, like the neuter or the outside, indicates a plu
rality characterized by singularizing itself and by appearing,
by default, to rest in the indeterminate. That the Thing has a
relation to the Neuter: outrageous and finally inadmissible
supposition, insofar as the neuter cannot arrest itself in a
subject noun, even if this be collective, having also this move
ment of dive.1ting anything to which it would apply itself from
jts momentaneous essence, its meaning and its definition.
"The thing is in relation to the Neuter" forces us immediately
to think that the neqter changes the relation into non
relation, and the Thing into another thing, and the neuter
into what could not be the Neuter itself, nor that which neu
tralizes. Perhaps-a perhaps that would also mean
certainly-we are wrong, naming the neuter, to name it, as if
it were not "itself" in the neuter, forgetting, besides, that even
in being a grammatical category, thus belonging primarily to
language, it is borne by the whole language, as if language "in
general" were neuter, since, on the basis of the neuter, all the
forms and possibilities of affirmation and negation unfold
themselves in it. The neuter is thus implicated in the func
tioning of every language, even in occupying its silent other
side and preventing it from being reduced to a complex game
of interminable structures, or to the sedimentary presence of
some living speech. The neuter, authorized by grammar, in
complicity with all languages and, in language, with the p.a.rt
of it that is neither active nor passive neither transitive nor
intransitive, indicating in the fonn of a noun, a verbal way of
holding back the demand to speak, continues to swarm in a
mythology in which, if it is in play, it is never definitively
committed. The neuter: we think we grasp it if we invoke
forms of passive action as marked and remarkable as those,
precisely, of chance, of the random, of the unconscious, of the
trace and of the game. And many other forms could be pro
posed without ever satisfying: the sacred in relation to god;
absence in relation to presence, writing (taken here as non
exemplary example) in relation to s peech, the other in relation
73

to me (and to this me that the other is as well), being in

relation to existence, difference in relation to the one. The neu
ter, without letting itself be known (though it were at the price
of an absolute knqwledge), recognizes itself, or rather, plays,
in each of these terms characterized by their not being easily
conceptualizable, and, perhaps, not being so because with
them is introduced a negative possibility of a type so particu
lar that one could neither mark it with a negation nor affirm
it. The Neuter, by a simple literal affinity, inclines toward the
Night, although there is no closeness between them seman
tically. The Neuter does not have the ancient mythological
names that any night carries with it. The Neuter derives, in
the most simple way, from a negation of two terms: neuter,
neither one nor the other. Neither nor the other, nothing m,ore
precise. What remains is that affinnation already has, in ad
vance, and before any denegation, its part in the neuter: the
one the other-quluter, which of the two?-signifies also one
of the two and in some way that which is never only one. "One
and the other" seems, by this bipartition-unequal and at the
same time badly determined, although of very ancient
usage-to allude to the archaic necessity of an apparently
binary reading (as if everything had to begin by two), but of a
binarity that at once loses its dual value and pluralizes itself
to the point of indeterminacy: one, yes, this can be indicated
with the finger; but other is the other, entirely other and
always other; it flees itself in fleeing us. Obviously, the ex
pression, "one and the other", even in indicating a division
that is meant to clarify (one/all the rest, but at the same time
only the other, including the other of all the rest), thus indicat
ing a reading that reads by going back and forth constantly,
from one term to a second term. is marked, "altered" by the
perverse predominance of the other, which is not to say by a
play of words. The neuter perhaps does nothing but take in
this perversity of the other in making it still more perverse by
the obscurity that covers it without dissipating it, without
attaining a true negation (nor ever, redoubled and not re
versed, a negation of negation) capable of repose or clarity.
The neuter takes the other back into itself under a light (but
impenetrable) veil that seems only to force out of the other its
74

incessant affinnation that a negative alone allows us to grasp:

the otller of the other, tbe un-known of the other, its refusal to
let itself be thought as the other than the one, and its refusal
to be only the Other or the "other than". The neuter puts all
that to rest, even in silently withdrawing repose. The neuter,
by its nominal, thus positive, form, allows to be juxtaposed
makes play themselves out-an affirmation and an indefinite
series of negation: it does not put them together for a dialecti
cal reversal; this is in fact one of the peculiarities of its con.
tribution, the affirmation by which what is in play would be
neither one nor the other-affirmation that endlessly makes
an echo of itself to the point of dispersion, dispersion going
even to the very silence dispersed,-is not really affirmative
or operative; its work, which consisted of veiling the other in
showing it off under the veil and also in putting a stop to the
bad infinite (at work in the other), in putting it back into play
though a negative scansion, is only pseudo-work. Something
is at work by way of the neuter that is immediately the work of
worklssness: there is an effect o f the neuter-this says some
thing of the passivity of the neuter-that is not an effect of the
neuter, not being the effect of a Neuter pretendedly at work as
a cause or a thing. There would then not be a work of the
neuter as one speaks of a work of the negative. The Neuter:
paradoxical name: it barely speaks, mute word, simple, yet
always veiling itself, always displacing itself out of its mean
ing, operating invisibly on itself while not ceasing to unwind
itself, in the immobility of its position that repudiates depth.
It neutralizes, neutralizes (itself), thus evokes (does nothing
but evoke) the movement of Aufhebung, but if it suspends and
retains, it retains only the movement of _s.Jspending, that is,
the distance it creates by the fact that, occupying the terrain,
it makes the distance disappear. The Neuter, then, designates
difference in indifference, opacity in transparency, the nega
tive scansion of the other, which can reproduce itself only by
the averted attraction-omitted-of the one. Even the nega
tion of the Neuter is concealed. The neuter that would mark
"being" does not thus refer it back to the crudeness of non
being, but has always already dispersed being itself as that
which, giving itself neither as this nor as that, also refuses to
75

present itsel f i n simple presence, letting itself be grasped only

negatively, under the protective veil of the no If being reads
itself, writes itself in the neuter, it is not, however, the case
that the neuter comes before being, nor only that the neuter
.

would give itself under the veil of the dife

f rence between being
and beings, neither being nor beings (rather the beyond of the
two or the hither of the between-the-two), but that the neuter
averts it in gently disuading it frQm any presenc. even a
negative one, neutralizing it to the point of preventing it from
being called the being of the neuter, even while leading it into
the infinite erosion of oegative repetition.
The Neuter marks being, effect of every mark: the being
marked in the neuter is not remarked and always forgets, in
the brilliance of being, this mark of which even the brilliance
is only an effect.
The Neuter does not come first, eternal follower tht pre
cedes, so that the neuter is nowhere, functioning in language
in every place as play of the mark, if that which marks un
rnarks, and, in the end, neutralizes as far as the line of demar
cation that there could be no question, crossing it, of crossing.
The transgression that is accomplished as not being accom
plished, if it is also affirmed in the neuter, in the neutrality of
a never present lure, could not, at least not as a proposition,
mark the neuter as that which, always at play in transgres
sion, would be precisely that which was to be transgressed. As
if writing, the incessant movement of writing, freed us from
the game of writing.

The Neuter, the gentle prohibition against dying, there

where, from threshold to threshold, eye without gaze, silence
carries us into the proximity of the distant. Word still to be
spoken beyond the living and the dead, testifying to the ab
sence of testimony.

'We are there together as forgetfulness and memory; you

remember, I forget; I remember, you forget." He stopped for a

76

moment: "It's

as if they were there at the threshold, going from

threshold to thre$hald. Or,.e day they will eTJter, they wiJJ }mow
that we know. The time comes when the time will come.
n

''We know only their

name."-".
"
us.

in which they do enter

but by which they attract

The Neuter, would it be neuter, would it be that which

+
conceals itself in concealing and concealing even the act of
concealing, with nothjpg of what disappears in this way ap
pearing, an effect reduced to the absence of effect: the neuter,
in the articulation of the visible-invisible, inequality, still, of
the equal, a response to the impatient question (that which
classes and determines in advance by dividing in two, without
precaution: which of the two?), but a response that, imme
diately and unnoticably, although appearing to welcome the
question, modifies its stNcture by its refusal not only to
choose, but to submit itself to the possibility of a choice be
tween two terms: such as one or the other, yes or no, this or
that, day night god or ma..n. "Which of the two?"-"Neither
one nor the other, the other, the other", as if the neuter spoke
only in an echo, meanwhile perpetuating the other by the
repetition that difference, always included in the other, even
in the form of the bad infinite, calls forth endlessly: the bal
ancing of a man's head given over to eternal oscillation.

The improper of the neuter is, perhaps, in the con

tinuity of meaning that any name propQses, while this word

does not stop echoing within itself in order to withdraw itself
from the continuity. The neuter is improper, but even that is
not its property.
The neuter wears down the sharp edge of the negative,
wears out the dull affirmation of the neuter; would the neuter
in its disinterestedness be the mark of the desire understood
as the error of that which, always in advance, in its omitted
attraction, has separated itself from any desire?
77


Since their coming, meanwhile, the essential had been
the astonishing character of everything, because if he had
thought, generously and lucidly, that he WfM capable of regis
tering a shock that would have found him ready to let himself
be moved from top to bottom, he realized that, failing presence,
and with the exception of a change in the way in which they
had to get used to speaking to one another from now on, he
could not decide what would make him capable of letting him
self be astonished among all the unmodified things. It is true
that this friend had disappeared. Since when, he could not
say; they had for so long been used to speaking to each other
from afar, from near, through the rumors of the city, or even
through the repetition of an ancient lartguage, always ready to
give them a place in its game. The fact that they saw each other
was, they realized, only a derivative mode of their right to
speak to one another, right that it was up to him not to let
prescribe. They spoke to each other, they saw each other, there
was in this a sort of good use of their constant cordiality, itself
an expression, but to a much higher degree, of the relations
each could not help having with all. Still, did he not have to
recognize the exceptional character of relations that were not at
all friendly, nor Qnly trusting, that were, on the contrary, diffi
cult, forbidden each time and almost private, even if it were
convenient for him to make them count as personal conversa
tions, known and recognized in advance as such among so
many others? Exceptional, this word resonated like a low
pitched sound in several registers at once, always below the
lowest vibrations, those which he still liked to muffle. Excep
tional, he remembered the complacency with which, not with
out a certain derision always implied in their seriousness, they
agreed to act as if these relations could be deserving of this
title, if only to make them more acceptable. That was not delib
erate, at least on his part-but what was his part, what did he
get outside of his role, which was, moreover, interchangeable,
in exchanges that were never imposed on him except in his
being haunted by memories over which he had so little control
that he began to believe that they did not belong to him, memo
ry of nobody, rather? He remembered, no doubt, memory so
ancient of a Thing that could not be called present, nor to
78

come, only less ancient than the memory which he felt strike
f ctionately, in the way that
him-strike him gently, almost afe
at night, in the night, timid words crossed his sleep: sudden,
nevertheless. It was, further, of sleep that he must have
thought when, paying him the usual visit, he must have no
ticed the room that was suddenly immense, surrounded by
books, as if to accentuate the emptiness of the space, where it
$eemed that the whole town, if it had lJ)anted to, could have
spread itself out, with the great central river and its immobile
borderers, derangement of perspective that was corrected by
the slightness of the person, seated very far away in a corner on
a chair, very old-like a reminiscence rather than a memory
shrunken, as someone who had waited too long might have
shrunk, without ones knowing to what wait he still hoped to
respon-d. This had reawakened his ancient fear, a fear re
pressed by the memory of his fear, and while he prepared to
cross, as he had crossed the outlying areas of the town, the
great bare rooms where-in what pla{;e?-it would have been
granted him to meet his friend, he came up against the words:
"I was not sure of the time of our meeting", by which the rules,
or, as he would have said, the necessary conventions, were
affirmed once more. "Yes, I'm late."-"Late, you are always
perfectly punctual."-"Still, lagging behind my memory: as if
it happened thatJ following the eterru1l straight road, I found
myself alone and suddenly, as, however, I had always feared
would happen, tested by the risky words that we had inten
tionally pronounced about them: dangerous words, words of
the blind."-'Words of the blind, indeed; these are what are
needed; but haven't we agreed to take on the risk together?"
"Yes, together, but the risk also threatens us in this.,.-"Has it
occurred to you that the risk could begin by refusing to leave us
together to speak?"-"The risk that such words, such voices
without regard, propose to us, is too great for us to have been
able to formulate it with the same words.""But whatever had
happened, it would have been necessary, since it had already
been said, that you come around to saying it."-"To saying it
again, but not necessarily to saying it and even less to saying it
to you."-"To me, of course, before you."' And while he listened
as if there had been something there not to hear, he added:
79

"Say it, be brave, let the words go. Tell zne what happened.
"It's that you had disappeared." To his surprise, he did not take
this lightly: he remained silent, pushing this answer, already
completely prepared, autay, and only saying, a little later, with
some agitation: they arrive, they arrive. It is from this that
got the feeling he should no longer leave him.

he

the straight road. eternal, under a scratched out sky

"But what shadow

of presence would I have if I had not

at each moment already disappeared?" What a strange empti

ness is the lack of an answer.

They remembered, but what they remembered was al

ways less ancient than their memory.

"I know."-"[ know."-"We don't know.

Page unfolded by the void of' writing

Later on he maintained-although it was perhaps

an

way of maintaining himself among the words in

front of a friend-this affirmation that, at present, called
forth by an exhortation to courage, did not simply constitute a

indiscreet

new possibility of relations with this friend, but opened the

way to something that it was not possible for him to establish
alone. He had bravely confirmed that he would not abandon
him, but that their good alliance, not being a lasting or regular
pact, did not put a privilege to which they could refer at any
80

moment into their hands. 1b which he answered that perhaps

the ruse that had allowed them to say that they were close had
slipped into their game of words, words les conve'ltional, ca
pable of making any attempt to discourage them fail. "I know
what you think: you hold me solidly in your memory."-"On
condition that you remember me:" While he watched him, now
that he was at the end of his voyage, unable, although he was
certainly very near him, to help confusing him with the
shrunken person whom he saw in th(l distance of the straight
road, like a figure that space, after having played with it a lot,
would have had to abandon on the shore, he affirmed his
agreement anew; they are coming, not without adding: the
Thing

remembers

us.

When he crossed it, the city, as if it had been deserted

and without distance.

Distancing oneself appears to be determined in relation

to a fixed point that would be presence. But presence, in the

absolute of the immediate in which, great instantaneous fire,

it consumes itself endlessly, could not be fixed or included in
the game of a relation. Presence, lightning of presence, which
has always already devastated the space in which the ap
proach takes place, does not enter into the clarity of the vis
ible, no more than it lets itself be present. Presence lacks
presence, destroys the present of presence.

The only way, it seemed to him, not to make too tangible,

without, however, effacing its efe

f ct, the affirmation that he
had brought him, an affirmation like the junction of all kinds
of decisions having different meanings, which did not grant
him any respite, was to let it do its work in taking it up again
endlessly into their language and as a simple moment of this
language. For, euen if he still felt apprehensive to speak about
81

it, since apprehension was accessory to it, he felt above all

surprise, to hear the word claim some kind of brilliance: that
this friend had disapgeared, carried, carried off, by the great
wave of his perpetual memory, did not prevent him, with his
usual benevolence, from answering for the disappearance him
self, both as if nothing had happened and if he had had to
draw out, in his presence, all the consequences of his unfortu
nate admission. The consequence developed slowly, but also
immediately, with the suddenness of an unforeseeable resolu
tion. While it seemed to him that he would from now on have to
make an effort to join him, as the other was maintaining him
self in a fu:tion of distancing even when he was present, it
would be his person that bore the intensity, be it as a being
unalterably shrunken, he saw him behind his tqblt:, fieated
comfortably and sumptuously, majestic character who greeted
him with his customary good will, although this time a little
frozen with immobility. But what W(l$ most traordinary was
that by reason of his grandeur called majestuous-anqther
way (he soon noticed), no less miserable, of ending up removed
from space-he had to be aware of the impeded speech that
henceforth, like a grave profoundly opened around him, a fail
ure of words in words, seemed destined to preserve his isola
tion. Who was responsible for it? Must he linger over such a
thing happening? Should he, speaking of it to him, confiding it
to him as an element of their relationship and perhaps a sign
of life, sign of death, risk lessening its importance? As discre
tion necessarily meant saying everything in advance, how
could he, in the game of their discreet silence, introduce this
new indiscretion that claimed, in some form, by some wild
muteness, to modify the course of what had been said? Im
peded speech that found its equivalent in silent ease, inexor
able, leaving room only for the continuous murmur of the river
crossing the room between the immobile hills. Ease as of a
thing already written and nevertheless always still to be writ
ten and always not writing itself "There you are-this time it's
you-sovereign over speech."-"For the benefit of age." Accord
ing to his conviction, the monumental character that was sud
denly visible, that of a dead sovereignty, of a name sovereignly
alive, vicissitudes that attracted them towards one another, in
82

a deep past, placing them on tM plateaux of a powerful scale,

was also tm!ant to make material, by contrast, what lightness
there would be in this coming that no one had any intention
or perhaps only episodically-()( marking in the present in
saying, murmur held by a flowing speech: they're coming, they
arrive, since speech rebounded, as from brink to brink, from
past to past. Which did not stop them, in their elegant shyness,
freer every day, from denying us our own discourse about them
in reducing us to this solemn, venerable manifestation.

The power to name the neuter was, as always, the

t
power not to name it, to dedicate to it, from closer and closer,
all language, all that is visible and all that is invisible of
language, and yet to withdraw it from language precisely by
this donation that reduces the neuter tQ being only the recip
ient of its own message. As if the dusk where night and day
seem t9 trade places, in favor of a darkness that illuminates
and of a clarity that dissipates itself, .iJl n indifferent equal
ity, were not the interval impossible to fill up, nor the differ
ence always previously marked, out of which there could be an
eternal day, an eternal night, and their perpetual exchange.

The City, always alive, animated, imperturbable, com

pletely foreign to the idea that one could die in it: yet, in this
room in which he was seated, dreamy, I crossed it, as one
passes distractedly over the graves in a cemetery.

The neuter can be named, since it is named (even if this

is not a proof). But what is designated by this name? The
desire to dominate the neuter, a desire to which the neuter
t

immediately lends itself, all the more so as it is foreign to any

domination and as it has always already marked, with its
passive insistance, the desire that thus infects its object and
every object with it.
83

What frightened us was the point to which they needed

needed
our g
us,
i norance, our disappearance, our ardent com
plicity, that of a dead thing signalling to them and attracting
the m .

.,.

Grafted on to every word: the neuter

It is as if he had said to him, saying it in such a friendly

way: friendship withdraws from us.

Entwined, separated, witnesss without testimony, com

ing towards us, coming toward one another also, in the detour
of time that they were called upon to make turn.

Immobile, stricken with dignity, as one would be strick

with
death, inclining slowly toward one another, as one
en
inclines to greet another (greeting thought), we were awaiting
our common fall.

That this was impossible did not prevent a mere noth

ing's being required for it to be produced-but precisely a

mere nothing.
For such a long time, we had been preparing ourselves to
celebrate the event which, now that it was coming, there was
no longer time, so that we were not yet ready and so that it
was not coming anyway.

While he went to his daily appointment, knowing, with

a knowledge from the depths of the ages, that he was seated, or
84

perhaps leaning towards the large, heavy marble table, while

at the same time, from the other side" the strange man-the
man whom he had not decided in what terms it would be
appropriate to call to-remained dreamy and with nothing
that might change the vision of him, he was startled to hear

him speak with his usual voice, clear, neuter, so that one would
have had to say that it stressed and cut off every word, if what

it said so clearly had not failed to correspond to any particular

word. "It's the impeded speech, he said to reassure himself, a

long animal sob"; but he had, indeed, to admit that he could

not get himself out of it so easily, since everything invited him
to save the triumphant affirmation that came to him by way of

his stammering. It was to confirm it to him that the other one

offered him his hand, as usual, faithfully, in a friendly way,
saying: "Pardon me, I didn't recognize you." Yes, this was said
in such a convincing way that there was nothing left to do but
torment himself by not believing it.

+
The room, shrunken or immense, according to the time
the words took to cross it and to come back to him; sometimes
he said to himself: they will not come back.

Let us admit-in a way that is all the more pressing

since we cannot admit it, arbitrarily then, with the shameless

beauty of the arbitrary- let us admit that the neuter does
not belong to the language of the living, and without belong
ing to the language the dead do not speak, would constitute
the only word, perhaps because there is no other, which would
have come to us from the border region, infinite, where the
silence of some, the silence of others, skirt one another, al
though no translation between them is possible because of
their absolute identity, no less than because of their absolute
difference. So that it is not heard on either side, but only
murmured or borrowed-and perhaps one must say that it is
the people of the dead who would repeat it with the most
reticence, certainly not because it would be a nostalgic echo of

85

the world of the living (nothing living in it), but because, lis
tening to it, they might )earn that there is something more
dead than death.

Dead desire: desire immutably changed into desire

through death and death as an adjective.

begging to receive what had always been given him

(winning over the complaints, the sighs, the murmurs that all
escaped from him).

To beg: to beg thought, to refine it to the point that it

crumbles.

How can it be that one speaks, speaking, thus? The idea

of losing what one does not have, days, nights, then of losing
this loss, awkwardly known as death. To lose the ability to lose
is not, by the play of the negative, t o have, but rather, and not
even, to attain non-power in some form that inscribes itself
against any form.

Listening, not to the words, but to the sufe

f ring that

endlessly, from one word to the next, runs through words.

"What would

we

do

if

we

were forbidden

to

do

anything?"-"What we do now, but to such a degree of inaction

that the prohibition would fall away on its own.

"I speak so that you don't have to speak, and, neverthe

less, so that no one suspects you of being deprived of speech

but all this unintentionally.

86

+
Even without being resolved to it, they advanced to
wards what with(lrew any certainty from them with a gran
diose assurance.

The impeded speech: the speech that returns to us from

+
muteness without passing through the assuaging of silence.

+
"... innocent, you alone have the right to call yourself
innocent."-"If I have the right, as I believe, I am not innocent,
innocence is without right."

There where

we

were without fear, without suffering,

without desire, because of this given over to perpetual fear,

desire and suffering.

Speaking to him while he slept, it was in a deep sleep

+
sleep seeking sleep-1 that he asked for an answer: and the
answer, each time, was the waking of this friend.

He does not renounce living, he only closes his eyes.

+
Who says: breath of nothingness, would never dare say:
truth of the neuter or knowledge of the neuter,-this simply
because language, in saying it, would experience the brilliance
of a victorious language.

+
All that is crude in the crudely repeated affirmation by
which the anonymous tries to reach us, there where we would
87

be placed outside of the game by the relation qf inaccessibility

that the morcellating demand of writing, like the fiction of
this badly unified word death, seems to hold by default, takes
on all its caricatural strength when a writer receives from his
disappearance a new energy and the glamour of renown. This
second immortality exalts his weakness, the power he no long
er has (power always usurped from his living self), to be still
behind his work to defend it, to defend himelf in it, to make
himself illustrious in its shadow and hold it in the advan
tageous light that is appropriate to it. The author dead, the
work appears to live from this death. The author was super
fluous. At present, this superfluity, until then dissimulated
(the author, however decided he was about losing himself in
the impersonality of the book, did not stop speaking, speak
ing, sometimes indirectly, about his book), takes on this
character of a lack which, fortunately or necessarily1 calls for
commentary, the desire of others to make themselves the au
thor of this authorless work, ironically given over by its soli
tude to the interest of "all". But the s\lperfluousness, once
sadly or joyously represented by the author, soon finds itself
again at work in the work "in person.", which is always super
fluous as well, not only in regard to the indefinite series of
works already written in which it always necessarily takes its
place, by a surplus necessity, but also in relation to itself, as if
all that it lacked could only inscribe itself outside of the work,
which does not exist. Whence the appeal to a morcellating,
repetitive demand: the three knocks of the traditional theater
that would seem to announce that something is going to hap
pen, while instead they reverberate in the eternal empty
tomb.

The work, after death, is sent, like the dove of Arche, to

give recognition to that which has survived, in carrying back
the branch green with meaning, and it comes back-it always
comes back, perhaps once or twice-, changed, by the return,
into the dove of before the flood, antdiluvian.
88

l!e who speaks does not, through speech, have a rela

to
being nor in consequence to the present of being: thus
tion
he did not speak.

What torments you, poor word that no one pronounces,

except by mistake?

Dying as if to verify that he was dying.

To repeat what one has not heard and what has not
been said: to repeat t4is also-and to stop suddenly, pretend
ing to see in thjs the essence of repetition.

+
If writing, dying, are words that would be close to one
another through the distance in which they arrange them
selves, both incapable of any present, it is clear that one can
not be satisfied with simple phrases putting into play simple
relations that are also too immediately pathetic to maintain
their relational character-phrases like these: when you
speak, it is already death that speaks, or: you die writing and
dying you write; all formulations destined to show what is
almost laughable in carelessly manipulating unequal terms,
without the medium of silence or the long preparation of a
tacit development or, even better, without eliminating their
temporal character. (And yet our culture lives on these simple
relations, only reversed: the idea of immortality assured by
the work, or the idea that to write is to preserve oneself from
death, thus to keep it in reserve, or the idea that the death of
the writer would liberate the work in casting a new light on it,
a light of shadow, and so on, the work always suspected of
being the life of death itself.) Dying, writing, do not take place,
there where someone generally dies, where someone generally
writes.
89

One must thus erase, withdraw the word death in dying,

like speech in writing. Speech evokes death too naturally, too
immediately. To speak is to lose rather than to retain; to en
trust to forgetfulness rather tban to memory; to give up
breath (to run out of breath) rather than to breathe. To speak,
in this sense, an ironic sense, is indeed to have the last word,
to have it in order no longer t o have it: to speak with this last
word that nobody pronounces or takes up as the last. From
which it results-and it is the beginning of a very long and
ancient certainty-that writing seems invented to make more
lasting what does not last or to prevent this loss of speech that
is still speech from being lost: in other words, writing, essen
tially conservative, would mark, in assuring the safeguard
and identity of marks. Will one answer that it is then a matter
of a second writing, the one which agrees in following speech,
by tranquil temporal succession and repose in books, to con
serve speech? One can say this, on condition that one also says
that writing is always second in the sense that, even if nothing
precedes it, it does not pose as firt. instead ruining all pri
macy through an indefinite reference that leaves no place
even for the void. Such is, then, barely indicated, the dis
persed violence of writing, a violence by which speech is al
ways already set apart, effaced in advance and no longer re
stored, violence, it is true, that is not natural and that also
prevents us, dying, from dying a natural death.

Past, future, neither was ever given; what has been as

unforeseeable as what will be. Death, this badly unified word,

interrogation always displaced.

Words had meaning only because meaning, introducing

suspicion, filtering, invisible uapor, harmful, from a place

without origin, did not cease, even in seeming to give them life ,
to break up, to mortify, words.

90

When we say: it is madness, or, more seriously, he is

mad, to say this is already madness.

+
Fear, fear of the fear that is produced by nothing in
particular, except nights without sleep, days without wakeful
ness, desire for that which provokes the fear that nothing pro
vokes.

He speaks the truth, otherwise he thinks he would go

mad, but he does llQt notice-or only too late-that the truth is
that he is mad. This mad truth, he closes his mouth so as not to
have to speak it, hoping-this is what is frightening-all the
same to remain in the true without saying anything.

+
Immobile before this unmoving friend, still he is never
immobile enough; the feeling of a threat comes from this, and
the fear-the fear that nothing provokes; one of the two moves,
it is not completely life; one goes to get up perhaps, it will be
night, the other will continue to mount guard with these vac
illating words.

"You torment yourself in speaking."-"If not, I would

torment myself in not speaking. n

W hile they waited on the threshold, far away, yet per

haps already leaning towards us, and watching us as if we
were a single thing, he saw, falling ouer the face of the young
girl, as the night falls, the dark hair that completely hides it.

"We speak, we speak, two immobile men whom immo

bility maintains facing one another, the only ones to speak, the
91

last fu speak. "-"Do you mean that from now on we speak

because our words are without consequence, without efe
f ct, <i
stammering from the depths of the ages?"-"Stay calm, look
how I'm calm. n-''Yqu're not calm, you're afraid as I'm afraid,
fear makes us majestuous, solemn."-"Solemn, majestuous."

If we could, through a reduction or a preliminary dissi

dence, separate death and dying, speech and writing, we

would obtain, although at great expense and at great pains, a

sort of theoretical calm, theoretical happiness, this calm and
this happiness that we grant, at the bottQm of their happy
tomb, to the great dead-the dead

are

always momentarily

great-who are also, and par excellence, the marking figures

or supports of the theory. This badly ordered network-the
entanglement of speech and writing-cannot be cut apart ex
cept on condition that it be restored each time and ma<!e even
more difficult to disentangle by the practice (impracticable,
sovereign, blind, piteous, in every case) of writing, that knows
only after the fat. only ever knowing it with borrowed
knowledge, that the knot is cut by it, although it was not yet
tied, and that it is this decisive violence of practice alone that
makes a gordian knot. It is thus this cutting, preliminary
violence of writing, that assures, extremely ironic effect, the
unity of writing-speech in allowing us to read it in these two
terms Oike an open book, with a text said to be a translation
on one side, and a text called original on the other, without
one's even being able to decide which side is which, nor even if
it is a question of a text in two versions, so much do identity
and difference cover one another up)-duality that it un
makes and remakes each time in giving rise to a more artful
speech.
Speech is artful, in proportion to its weakness, its ability
to efface itself, all the more itself the more it impedes itself,
held back to the point of stammering, (nobody would look for it
from speech specialists; it is more "natural" for it than for
writing not to have any relation to beauty, to the good: "he is a
beautiful speaker"; while "he who writes well" is only the heir
92

r.

of "he who speaks well"; value judgements come to writing in

as much as, substit1,1te for speech, writing completes and
fulfills it). In this way, one would say, still living and even
failing in order to be as close as ppssible to life that never
shines more brilliantly than at the moment of losing itself.
But the morib1,1nd speech (speech not dying, but of dying it
self) has perhaps always already passed the limit that life
does not pass: passing unbeknownst to it by the route that
writing has traced out in marking it as untracable.

+
Let us suppose that dyiug is .JlPt illuminated by that
which seems to give it meaning, being-dead. Death, being
dead, certainly unsettle us, but as a gross or inert event (the
thing itself) or even as the reversal of meaning, the being of
what is not, the painful non-meaning that is, nevertheless,
always taken up again by meaning, there where, in its heavy
and reassuring way, the power of being continues to dominate.
After all, "being dead" is able to make the word death take the
attributive position1 like one of the memorable attributes of
being, only a disconcerting sign of the omnipotence of being
that still always governs non-being. But dying, no more than
it cannot finish or accomplish itself, even in death, does Jlot let
itself be situated or affirmed in a relation of life, even as a
declining relation, a declining of life. Dying does not localize
itself in an event, nor does it last in the way of a temporal
becoming; dying does not last, does not end, and, prolonging
itself in death, tears this away from the state of a thing in
which it would like to retreat peacefully. It is dying, the error
of dying without completion, that makes the dead one suspect
and death unverifiable, withdrawing from it in advance the
benefit of an event. And life knows nothing of dying, says
nothing about it, without, however, confining itself to silence;
there is, suddenly and always, a munnur among words, the
rumor of absence that passes in and to the outside of dis
course, a non-silent arrest that intervenes, there where the
noise of writing, order of the somber curator, maintains an
interval for dying, while dying, the interval itself perhaps,
93

cannot take place in it. Dying: that which dQes not rely on life;
but it is also death that prevents us from dying.

+
If the worklessness of the neuter is at work somewhere,
you will not find it in the thing that is dead, but there where
without life without death without time without duration the
drop by drop of dying falls: noise too strident tQ let itself be
heard: that which munnurs in the resounding burst, that
which stammers at the height of beautiful speech.

+
The words did not communicate themselves, did not
know themselves, playing among themselves according to the
limits of near and far and the unknown decisions of difference.

Dying, in this sense, does not have the crushing solidity

+
of non-being, the irrevocability of what has happened, of being
in th& past. It is nothing more than a simulacrum, something
that pretends and pretends to efface it&elf in effacing us. The
"pretending," the disintegration of dying, it is that which, at
each instant outside of th_ e instant, parallel with the sinuous
line of life, makes us slip along a perversely straight path.

To die: as if we only died in the infinitive. To die: the

reflection in the mirror perhaps, the mirroring of an absence

of figure, less the image of someone or something that was not
there than an effect of invisibility, touching on nothing pro
found and only too superficial to let itself be grasped or even
recognized. As if the invisible distributed itself in filigree,
without the distribution of points of visibility being there for
anything, thus not in the intimacy of the design, but too much
on the outside, in an exteriority of being of which being bears
no marks.
94

The proverbial formula: '"as soon as someone begins to

live, he is old enough to die,'' is indeed impressive in as much
as it distributes mortal possibility uncertainly the whole
length of life, in an unexpected relation with duration. All the
same, through this formula, there is still a facile relation be

tween life and death: dying remains a possibility-a power

that life attributes to itself or that is verified in it and con
firms itself in death-determined in this way between two
terms (one begins to die with this beginning that is life's
debut-the expulsion of birth being metaphorically recovered
as an overwhelming encounter with a sort of death-, and one
ends by that which finishes life, cadaveric equality or, to go
further to the ultimate repose, the entropic equiility of the
universe). But perhaps dying has no determined relation to
living, to the reality, the presence of "life". A pure fantasy
perhaps, a mockery that no trace would make milterial in the
present, or again a madness that would overwhelm being from
top to bottom and, at the same time, would only reach us as an
imperceptible neurosis, escaping any observation, invisible
because too visible. Thus perhaps to write: a writing that
would not be a possibility of speech (no more than dying is a
possibility of life)a murmur nonetheless, a madness none
theless that would play at the silent surface of language.

Dying (the non-arrival of what comes about), the pro

hibited mocking the prohibition, there where it would be, in

some way, forbidden to die and thus where dying, without ever
coming to a resolute act of transgression, would disperse in its
indecision (dying being essentially indecisive) the moment in
finitely divided by it due to which, if this moment reassembled
itself, it would be necessary to die outside the law and always
clandestinely.

Among the people of the dead passes the shudder of the

rumor: it is forbidden to die.
95

+
The death that is sudden, proper, optative: that which
acquits dying.

The work of mourning: the inverse of dying.

The death that strikes in the fullness of life, as in a

place removed from the movement of dying (a death without
dying): analytic, as from a practice that would separate the
inseparable, writing-speech. But dying was already invisible
there, yet nowhere, without effect, without relation to this
suddeness that is death's own, even if it is slow.
+

The unforeseeability of death, the invisibility of dying.

+
The unique blow of repetitive death. If death takes
place only once, it is because dying, reiterating itself endlessly
through its essential unaccomplishment, the accomplishment
of the unaccomplished, repeats itself, without this repetition
being numbered and without this number being numbered,
like a beating heart whose every beat would be illicit, unnum
bered.

+
"It is forbidden to die," we hear this in ourselves con
stantly, not as an appeal to the obligation of life, but as the
voice of death itself, breaking the prohibition each time (as if
all too clear to the one who, giving himself death, dies forbid
den).
Perhaps one punishes the act of killing all the more de
cidedly as one cannot reach, much less sanction, the imper
ceptible movement of death. To kill, to kill oneself: like a right
over dying. But the horror of the death camps, of those dying
96

by the thousands, suddenly and unceasingly called out, num

bered, identified, makes each dying person guilty of his death
that was never more innocent and condemns him to dying of
the very abjection of death, in making appear, through a ma
jor indiscretion, what should not let itself be seen.
Where is the event of death? Where the obscurity of dying?
Like two speeches never pronounced that, boringly repetitive
and frightening, would resonate only at the moment-at each
moment-of the collapse of every language.
I

+
"I die not dying" does not only express the mortal desire
that arises, as unrealizable, from death's attraction: it lets us
foresee the movement of dying, its incessant and simultane
ous redoubling, in a relation that eats away, of different signs,
in which the game of difference mortally plays itself out.
Dying of not dying dramatizes, makes shine for an instant,
through the paradox of the formulation, the impossibility of
maintaining in a solely affirmative or solely negative position
the difference that carries the word death.

Dying-dying in the cold and dissolution of the Out+

side: always outside oneself as outside life.

Suicide, temptation of defiance so prolonged and so

clear (too clear) that it seems difficult-almost embarras

sing-to resist it. Act of transgression: the prohibition not
pronounced by a law or by "nature", but by the mortal inde
cisiveness of the act itself, this prohibition broken as soon as
affirmed, transgression accomplished at the same time as
suppressed, and the passage of transgression-the "not be
yond" [le "pas au-dela"], there where nevertheless one does
not pass-dangerously symbolized, offered in the name of
"personal representation": the trespassed, one would say. Act
unhoped for (without hope) of unifying the duplicity of death
97

and of reunifying in one time, through a qecision of impa

tience, the eternal repetitions of that which, dying, does not
die. Then, the temptation to name, in attributing it to oneself,
the anonymous, that which is spoken only in the third person

and in the neuter. Or again the power to enlarge, as if in

proportion to it, in localizing it and dati11g it, the infinitely
small of death, that whih always escapes-all this in exalta
tion, fatigue, unhappiness, fea.r, uncertainty, all movements

that end up covering up the indiscretion of such an act, how

ever obviously and essentially committed: ambiguous refusal
to submit oneself to the requirement of dying silently and
discreetly. Respecting silence in the act of being quiet. The
impossibility of suicide is alone able to attenuate the frightful
indiscretion: as if one had pretended to pretend, there in
broad daylight, but in a light such that, despite its ostenta
tion, nobody sees anything, nobody knows anything of what
happens.

+
Dying, like the hand that not far from the paper would
hold itself immobile without writing anything or would even
move ahead without tracing anything (perhaps because what
it writes will be revealed only later by the unrefmed processes
of the sympathetic ink).

Dying, in the discretion that this word attributes to

itself in distinguishing itself from the obviousness, the vis

ibility of death, makes itself in turn extremely visible, like an
entity (Dying) dissimulating its capitalized form that illness,
aging, help us to reveal; like the effect of a reactive or of a
reheating-the fever of life. Dying of an illness or of old age,
we do not die only ill, old, but deprived of or frustrated by
what would seemingly be secret in dying itself: thus reduced
to not dying.
98

No defiance perhaps in the defiance by which we would

give ourselves death, gift always undeserved, but only this

UJ}noticed defiance that any desire supposes, the attraction
without attraction which, all of a sud9en and in spite of us (no,
I do not desire to die), illuminates and burns, consuming, rav
aging the secret patience-the obstinance-of dying, and be
traying the unrevealed, the undesirable desire that the move
ment of death would carry (without carrying us to dying and
more in the form of a refusal, of an infinite arutiety that the
thought of the final falling due vainly makes concrete).

The vulgarity or obscenity (the bad omen) of death: its

lack of circumspection that comes from its exposition, that is,

from that which makes it, in spite of verything, public: given
up to morcellating, to the dissolution of the Outside-that
which, by an association that is difficult to avoid, difficult to
accept, tends to let mortal innocence ;;tnd sexual innocence be
thought together in their reciprocal inappropriateness, in the
perversion that "is appropriate" to one and the other (perver
sion of what is never correct), in the modesty that this perver
sion requires or rejects (while still requiring it); both of them
are things, things called dirty and decomposing themselves
through a plurality that would be nore dirty than every dirty
thing (but plurality immediately taken back, obfuscated
how otherwise?-while we pursue our work of unification in
the necessity of speaking and of thinking sexuality as a unity
of sexual things-all that runs, rends itself, undoes itself,
without any personal property or appropriation-and death
as the unity of mortal effects). What is left is that the pas
sivity of death makes appear, in contrast, all that remains of
action, of impulse, of living play in sexual diversion or expen
diture: we do not enjoy death in dying even if we desire it,
while desire, in sexual play, even if it is mortal, and even if it
separates itself from any jouissance and makes it impossible,
still promises us and gives us the movement of dying as that
which may be rejouissance-jouissance9 infinitely repeated
of life, at its expense.
99

+
We expose death hurriedly, we bury it hurriedly, hiding
what we have shown at once, as if under the pressure of a
publicization or the demand of a definitive bringing to light.
Death is always public, it asks to be publicized, thus com

pleted and holding us free of it once we have identified the

unidentifiable: whence these mocking ceremonies to which
the public hurries because it is a part of them, as it is itself a
part of what is publicized in them, in a public sovereignty in
which it recognizes itself in enchanting itself, in lamenting
itself, conscious, busy, mortally agitated, participating in
every way (even if it takes no part in them) in these funerary
rites and at once affirming its right: obsequies.

On the threshold, coming from the outside perhaps, the

two young names like two figures behind the glass about whom
we could not say for sure whether they are inside or outside,
since no one, except the two figures, who expect everything from
us, could say where we are.

When he would resume his walking, getting up once

more to cross the room and go before them, he would be called

to at once, would come back at once, would sit down in order to
answer more easily and would notice that he had never
stopped being immobile; there would remain the terrified feel
ing of the return.

Thank you for all these words that have not been

spoken.

Knowing uses our strength, but not knowing exhausts it.

+

100

Transgression does not transgress the law, it carries it

+
away with it.

Night, still more nocturnal, more foreign to the night:

+
the night of words. Where are you going, you in the lack of
night?

To no longer be able, such that after these words one

+
could no longer even know what one is no longer able to do.

+
To write, when one is no longer able to live, is not even
as absurd as to write that in these conditions one feels this.
Each is given the right to add a codicil at the very last mo
ment.
The very last moment, this fluttering of a heart that no
longer beats to life.
The very last moment, we would, writing this word, vainly
have felt all the fraudulence there is in writing it, even if we
add that it does not belong to the moments, that it is thus not
the very last-yet (must we then thank you for this "yet",
supplementary word that nothing follows this time, except,
except this pure gratitude?)

+
"There is no more fraudulence here than before; we are
speaking of the last moment, precisely because it prevents us
from speaking, even if we have not been speaking of it for a
long time."

+
If death, by way of capricious falling dues, magnifies
the dead person, is it not for this convenient reason that the
latter's silence, having passed, from now on, from the inside to
101

the outside, sollicits a forceful public speech that each one

feels he has the right to make heard: the right to speak in the
dead one's place, through a right of deputeeship that is dele
gated to him and of which he acquits himself, making his own
eulogy in this eulogy, assuring his survival, the survival of
speech, in advance: eulogy, the good speech, which says only,
repeating it, alas.

+
He slept the sleep that demands attention, precisely because nothing can any longer interrupt it.

+
A hoax, no doubt, final hoax, the deception of what is
supplementary, of what adds itself with no right at the end,
"sovereignty"-yes, all that can be said, but on condition that
we think that such a lure comes to us from death, that great
misleader, so deceitful that we deceive ourselves again in
qualifying it as such.

+
The more he encloses himself, the more he says that he
belongs to the Outside.

Attempt to delimit a certain territory again with the

absence of any limit.

But the deception of the public death (that which

makes the mocking presence sublime, which exalts what is no

longer there, makes a gift to all of loss itself) is already at
work in the simulacrum of dying, the insinuation and the
perfidy by which we are summoned: "you die, and yet you do
not die, and yet you die."
102


Dread, dread there anew, he had to write this word that
did not let him write anything else, and not even this word, all
of a sudden forbidden, unpronounceable, so excessive that
there was nothing in his life vast enough, vain enough, to
contain it, and so he had-there was the catch-to enlarge this
life even to the false consciousness that he was not living, that
he was dying.

There was something like a word that could not be pro

nounced, even when one succeeded in saying it and perhaps
precisely because one had, at every instant, and as if there were
not enough instants for the purpose, to say it, to think it.

One can write it once, live it once: even if strictly, and as

if inadvertently, one could in a unique way reach madness
what happens when madness comes back a second time? One
would have the right to think oneself better defended, facing a
more familiar adversary, with whose tricks, with whose atro
cious contact, with whose weaknesses, also, one is familiar
(what a strange familiarity). However, one thinks only of this
one thing: what had been impossible-madness-even in the
memory one retains of it, is possible again, and what had once
been possible, the grace of liberating oneself, is now the impos
sible, the more so as one could not appeal to it for the same help
(one is allowed to have been weak one day; weakness that is
repeated, even if it is unhappiness that is repeated in it, does
not deserve any respect). What is left? Once again the extreme
possibility, that which is offered by madness for one to defend
oneself against it, and on which it has placed its mark-a
forbidden possibility? certainly, but is not madness, which was
not less forbidden, also there, without right, not freeing from
all legitimacy, but condemning every life, every death to a sup
plementary illegitimacy?
103


If writing, dying are in relation to one a:pother, relation
always broken in this relation and still more shattered as soon
as a writing would pretend to affirm it (but it affirms nothing,
it qnly writes, it does not even write), it is because: under the
influence of the same deceit (which, deceiving on all !:!ides, is
never the same), these wot:ds enter into resonnance. And one
can then enumerate affirmations in order: one can say that
the book is to writing what death would be to the movement of
dying; one can say that writing, dying are what are most
discreet, although always made known by the public Last Act,
the great tomblike rock of the Book, the sovereign publication
of absent presence; one can say that dying, writing, without
falling under the prohibition already pronounced by a law,
both have to do with a prohibition that cannot be promul
gated, as with an empty transgression. Obscure center of fal
lacious relations. We do not die ofe
f nding, no more thau we
write guilty; nevertheless, there is a rupture there that the
term finitude illuminates badly and of which religious myths
make us overly conscious. Dying is a "law of natul'e"1 and yet
we do not die naturally. We cannot do otherwise, and this
necessity about which we are sure without believing in it (al
ways surprised, at the final moment, by the unbelievable),
puts the mask of infidelity, eyes closed, on each of our faces:
we abandon ourselves, we abandon those to whom we should
not be absent, we abandon "life", and that by a sort of distrac
tion, as if, had we been. more attentive, we could have avoided
the inevitable. However, it is certainly more than a betrayal: it
is a. false betrayal. All is falsified, when dying comes into play;
even error is a lure, fal
i ure that finally fails nothing and that
does not fail life, which always takes advantage of it. The
same for writing, perhaps, form which, by another lure, the
movement of dying proposes to us as a compensation, a detour
of illusion, finally, the trap: as if, writing, we have to die sup
plementarily, and more unjustified, with a supplementary
loss of innocence that is itself innocent, but which involves us
in becoming responsible for the movement
transgression that transgresses nothing.

104

of

dying


This character of prohibiting without prohibition: be
coming more and more visible even to this singularity in
which i t denounces itself in madness.
Dread always and everywhere guilty, and, from this fact,
unconcerned.

These peculiarities distributed the length of a perver

sely straight line, to die, to go mad, to write. Dying lets us

understand: a normal anomaly; the rule, irregularity itself;
and not" an exception to the rule but, in as much as regular,
that which could not appertain to a law. It happens, in certain
societies, that those who let death-the thing-be seen in
dying, which is unreality, leave or are deported out of the
territory: social exclusion banishes, in accusing it, the obscene
transgression, even the fact that henceforth the anomaly,
ceasing to dissimulate itself, appears, or again that what
shows itself is indecisiveness itself, about which one must
decide by exclusion. The dead are not good company, but are
at once reclaimed by the rites: the great funeral ceremonies_,
the minute rules of protocol, mourning, always collective and
always public, establishes them in a social site, even if it is set
apart: cemetery, myth, family or legendary history, religion of
the dead. Mortal indecisiveness has no place, nor any mitigat
ing status. Even when dying seems to fill the being to the
point that we call it, not without difficulty, a dying one, we do
not know, facing the indecisive strangeness, what it expects
from us who are there, idle, close to the place where chance
plays, spectators to non-presence, touched in our most inti
mate loyalty: our relation, in ourselves to a. subject. And, in
conformity with the customs of the day, we bustle about
nothing, we help the living one, we help him to die, but
not help dying, something accomplishes itself there, in
absence and by default, which does not aceomplish

doing
we do
every
itself,

something that would be the "step not/beyond" that does not

belong to duration, that repeats itself endlessly and that sepa
rates us (witnesses to what escapes witnessing) from any ap
propriateness as from any relation to an I, subject of a Law.
105

And we can easily understand and say that the silent speech,
this infinite murmur, thus also pronounces itself in us, that
we die with the one who dies, as he dies in our place, in the
place where we think that we sojourn-not dying because we
lose a part of common life, but rather because it is "dying",
intransitive loss, that we share with him, in a movement of
pure passivity that passion without tears sometimes seems to
assume. This we can say, and no doubt rightly. Still, nothing is
said, if we do not force ourselves to think that which even the
evidence of agony does not reveal, the invisible rupture of
prohibition, the transgression to which we feel we are accesso
ries, because it is also our own strangeness: something over
whelming, but also completely shocking. In the narrow space
where this is accomplished without being accomplished, there
is no longer any law, nor society, nor alliance, nor union-and
yet nothing free, nothing safe: only beneath the appearance of
a devastating violence and of a suffering that extinguishes
itself, a secret that is not spoken, an unknown word that bears
silence away with it.

"I do not know, but I know that I am going to have

known": thus dying speaks through the suffering silence of the

dying one.

A hand that extends itself, that refuses itself, that we

cannot take hold of in any way.

Empty transgression, image of the movement of every

transgression that nothing prohibited precedes, but which
also does not place the limit by the crossing of the uncross
able. Neither before, nor during, nor after. It is as in another
region, the other of any region. In the day's domain reigns the
law, the forbidden that it pronounces, the possible and the
speech that justifies. In the nocturnal space, there are viola106

tions of the law, the violence that breaks the prohibition, the
non-possible, the silence that refuses what is just. Transgres
sion belongs neither to the day nor to the night. Never does it
encounter the law that is nevertheless everywhere. Trans
gression: the inevitable accomplishment of what is impossible
to accomplish-and this would be dying itself.
"It is forbidden.11-"It is inevitable.11-"Still, always to be
avoided according to the movement of duration and as if there
were no present moment appropriate for the falling due."
"From this comes the need, without justification, to have al
ways to gain an extra moment, a supplement of time, not for
life, but for dying that does not produce itself in time.

II

"Dying defers, without asking for a delay, nor, failing the de

lay, letting itself be marked by an offense; stranger also to this
future present that retains time as a succession of
presents."-"You die and yet you do not die and yet: thus, in a
time without present, the dying that defers speaks to you.11"Perhaps again according to the demand of the return: that
will always take place, because that has always already taken
place. 11-"As if dying let us in some way live in the eternal
detour of a past and the eternal detour of a future that no
present would unify. 11-"To die is not declined. 11-"This inert
infinitive, agitated by an infmite neutrality that could not
coincide with itself, infinitive without present.11-"So that one
could affirm: it is forbidden to die in the present.

"Which

11-

also means: the present does not die, and there is no present
for dying. It is the present that would in some way pronounce
the prohibition.

"While the transgression of dying, which

11-

has always already broken with present time, comes to sub

stitute, in the unaccomplishment proper to it, for the trinary
duration that the predominance of the present unifies, the
time of difference in which this would always take place be
cause

it has always already happened: dying, coming

again."-"The prohibition remains intact: one does not die in

the present."-"It remains intact. But, in as much as it is the

present that pronounces it and in which the transgression is
unaccomplished in a future-past time, removed from any affir
mation of presence, the transgression has always already
withdrawn the present time of its pronouncement from the
107

prohibition: has prevented it or prohibited it in dislocating

it."-''Thus a time without present would be 'affirmed', ac
cording to the demand of the return."-"This is why even
transgression does not accomplish itself."

Dying in the multiple doubling of what does not take

place in the present. One does not die alone, and if it is hu

manly so necessary to be the fellow man of the one who dies, it
is, although in a mocking way1 in order to share roles, to al

.. :

leviate dying of this prohibition that awa.its it in leaving to it

the attainment of the immobile transgression. We hold back
the dying o.ne by the most gentle of prohibitions: do not die
'
now, for there is no now for dying. Not, the ultimate word, the
defense that pleads its case, the stammering negative: not
you will die.

If the prohibition "thou shalt not kill" is written only on

tablets already broken, it is because it makes the Law pre

dominant all of a sudden in substituting for the impossible
encounter with the forbidden and th& transgression the affir
mation of a successive time (according to a before and after)
where there is first prohibition, then recognition of prohibi
tion, then refusal by the guilty rupture. What do the broken
tablets signify? Perhaps the shattering of dying, the interrup
tion of the present that dying has always introduced into time
beforehand. "Thou shalt not kill" obviously means: "do not kill
he who will die in any case" and means: "because of that, do
not infringe on dying, do not decide the indecisive, do not say:
this i s done, claiming for yourself a right over this 'not yet'; do
not pretend that the last word has been spoken, time com
pleted, the Messiah come at last."

Thought, death: one sometimes quicker than the

other, sometimes the former, the infinitel.y small, more di108

minished tqan the latter, the infinitely small, both outside the
present, falling into the void of the future, the void of the past.

We can ask ourselves about the neuter, knowing that

the interrogation does not go beyond interrogation; this would
already be neutralized, and "what?" cannot be its form, even if
it then leaves the place of the questioned void in questioning
only this empty place; maybe because the neuter always
comes into the question that is out of the question. We can
always ask ourselves about the neuter, without the neuter
enteringinto the questioning. As for the response, the repeat
ed echo of the neuter, it is not even pw-e tautology, since it
disperses the speech of the same. The neuter, the neuter: is it a
repetition, or something like the ricochets which, to infinity,
by the .slipping of that which slips, decline multiple series: the
pebble, propulsion, the surface that carries, the surface that
hides itself, time the straightness that bends and makes a
return up to the fall that results, without being a part of them,
from all these moments and thus cannot be isolated, even in
taking place apart, in such a way that the singular point that
would mark it, remains, in its singularity, oubide the reality
of the whole: unreal and unrealized?

Each of us awaits the speech that would authorize it:

"Yes, you can do it."-"1 can't do it. "-"Then what are you
waiting for?"-((I am waiting for what I do not desire.,
"There is no speech that would authorize; all that authorizes
concerns life; you are thus authorized to live."

Dying without authority, as suits the one who usurps

the name of author and, not ceasing to die, without continuity

and without end, authorizes himself to defer dying.
Dying defers, without one's deferring to die.
Dying does not authorize dying.
109

'Wow, you can do it."-"Then I can no longer do it."

"Now does not pass, it maintain.s itself"-"Now grvws smaller

each time you pronounce it, always smaller and more fragile
than your speech or your thought."- "Go then from threshold
to threshold, poor dying."

Dying's difficulty comes in part from the fact that we

think it only in the future and that, thinking it in the past, we

immobilize it in the form of death. Dying in the past would be
being dead. Or else the past of dying would be this weighti
ness that would make death yet to come, always more heavy,
more bereft of a future. As if dying lasted and, finally, s it is
useless to denounce the illusion of it, lived, doublet of the word
to live. Only, and immediately, we feel that these two series
are not correlative: perhaps because dying, in its repetitive
singularity, does not form a true series, or, on the contrary,
forms only one series, while living escapes serial dispersion,
in appealing always to a whole, a living all1 the living pres
ence of the all of life.
The demand of the return, impossible to think, empty fu
ture, empty past, helps us to welcome (in the impossibility of
thinking it) that which could be the always already completed
of dying, that which passes without traces and that one has
always to await from the infinite void of the future, wait ex
cluded from the present that would be only the double fall into
the abyss, or the double abyss of the fall, or, to speak mo.re
soberly, the duplicity of difference. To die, to come again.

To die too light, lighter than any fantasy in its phan-

tasmatic heaviness.

To die according to the lightness of dying and not by the

anticipated heaviness of death-the dead weight of the dead

thing-, would be to die in relation to some immortality.
110

Transgression, this lightnes of immortal dying.

Haunting obsession, to bring dying hack to itself, as in

+
crossing the city, one leads the passerby back to his passage.
Dying in this return to dying. There is no guardian of dying.

The house haunted the phantoms: here aud there, a

+
threshold where there was no ground.

They would come, going from threshold to threshold,

+
looking for us, letting themselves be looked for, the young
names.

+
"Don't forget that we don't haue to do anything in order
for them to come."-"Nothing in order for them not to come."
11Not look for them."-"Not flee from them."-"That is too sym
metrical: you can, without looking for them, without fleeing
from them, still direct your will so that the chances of a meet
ing are not of your making: avoid them so that the inevitable
remains obscure."-"There is not a will more general than my
will that could make me suspect that I substitute myself for it:
it is like a necessity attracting and repelling, but always at
tracting, a necessity whose attraction it would be given to me,
without proper proceedings and without even a wait, to
recognize."-"Attraction by which, keeping us in the mystery of
the illusion, we think we recognize them, name them, keep
them at a distance under the brilliance of the name, and thus,
embellishing it, facilitate their approach. "-"Always too close
for them to be near to us."-"And yet separated by the move
ment of their coming."-"They're not coming."

+
The words exchanged over the heavy marble table, going
from immobility to immobility. They would separate them111

selves by several steps, listening to the young murmur of the

days and years below. All around, there were men apparently
sleeping, lying on the very grQ'(Jnd, covers thrown over them
like one throws. earth onto an embankment, and these innu
merable little knolls, thoughts of the crumbled city, levelled
themseb;t:s to the point of beoming the bare floor of the room.

I
1

I remember, knowing only that it belongs to a memory,

this phrase "I don't know, but I have the feeling that I'm going

to have known."

Apparently, it has its power in the way verbal inflection

declines the present \.\Uder all the forms of its declension: " I
don't know" has, b y itself, a very sweet attraction; it is the
most simple speech; negation collects itself in it to silence
itself in making knowledge be silent, and as it can be a re
sponse to a determined question ("do you know if ... ?-1
don't know"), it does not pretend to already read the still am
biguous silen.ce, philosophical, mystical, of un-knowledge. I
don't know is calm and silent. It is a response that n.o longer is
really a part of dialogue: an interruption from which the
abrupt character of cessation is withdrawn-as if knowledge
and negation made one another more gentle to go as far as a
limit where their common disappearance would only be that
which escapes. "Not-1 know" shows the double power of at
tack that these two terms maintain when isolated from one
another the decision of knowing, the sharpness of the nega
tive, the edge at which we stop10 that from all sides impa
tiently puts an end to everything. "I know" is the sovereign
mark of knowing that, in its impersonality and its intem
porality, relies Qn a chance "I" and an already dissipated pre
sent: it is the authority, the affirmation not only of knowledge
as such, but of a knowledge that wants to know itself.As for
negation, its force is that of the forbidden, the summoning of
the Law which has always already taken back the lack in the
form of the prohibited. "I know-it is forbidden to." I don't

112

know. In this response that responds beyond the response,

there i s no refusal, unless the affidavit, the verification of a
relative state of empirical fact, "I don't know, I could, others
could, know"), is enough for the modesty of speech. I don't
know does not verify anything, effaces jtself, bQrne by an echo
that does not rep eat because what it would repeat holds it
back fl"om holding back. Only these two remarks are left for
us: how knowledge is sweet when I don't know; how negation
separates itself from the forbidden when I don't know lets it
lose itself in the murmuring distance of the separation.
"I don't know, but have the feeling." But, even in the fonn of
an addition, is not able to break the silence, only prolongs it
further. "I don't know" not being able to repeat itself or to close
itself, without running the risk of hardening itself, is indeed
the etld that does not end. The present that "I don't know" has
put gently in parentheses, gives place to a delay, the timid
mode of a future that scarcely prQmises itself, this "feeling"
not being

au

imperfect knowledge or knowledge from sen

sibility, but the way in which the absence of present dissimu

lates itself in knowledge itself in letting another still or aiM
ready absent present come marginally. "I have the feeling that
I am going to have known." The present, without renouncing
granting itself to the present, and a s if it held itself back in it
still, always leans more towards what in it, already past, indiM
cates itself in the future and gives itself in the immanent
approach of a new present (as it must in living temporality),
but of a present which, before being there, has already fallen,
since "having known", with a swiftness that takes one's breath
away, makes time rock in the depths of the past {a past with
out present). "Having known", the absolute completed of
knowledge. "Having known" is in general the proof that there
was a moment in which I was he who knew in the present.
But, here, "having known" has never coincided with a pres
ence, a self present holder of knowledge: beginning from the
immanence of a future th_at I do not touch ("I feel that I am
going") and without passing through any actuality, all has
collapsed in the irrevocable of the having known, and "having
known" is not a false appearance, a mockery, the wrinkle of
ignorance: having known is a redoubled knowledge, the form
113

of certitude. There will have been and there has been as an

absolute knowledge, which, without being, has always already
disappeared through the lack of a subject, either individual or
universal, capable of bearing this knowledge in the present.

t
That the fact of the concentration camps, the exter
mination of the Jews and the death camps where death con
tinued its work, are for history an absolute which interrupted
history, this one must say, without, however, being able to say
anything else. Discourse cannot be developed from this point.
Those who would need proofs will not get any, even in the
assent and the friendship of those who have the same thought,
there is almost no affirmation possible, because any affirma
tion is already shattered and friendship sustains itself with
difficulty in it. All has collapsed, all collapses, no present re
sists it.

The awareness at each moment of what is intolerable in

the world (tortures, oppression, unhappiness, hunger, the

camps) is not tolerable: it bends, sinks, and he who exposes
himself to it sinks with it. The awareness is not awareness in
general. All knowledge of what everywhere is intolerable will
at once lead knowledge astray. We live thus between straying
and a half-sleep. To know this is already enough to stray.

Awareness is dreadful, and yet dread does not depend

on awareness. Dread without awareness can indeed depend

on another form of awareness, that which isolates it, this ab
solute solitude that comes from awareness and traces a circle
around it, the loss of awareness that it entails and that does
not diminish it, that is, on the contrary, always more dreadful,
the immobility to which it reduces us because it can only be
suffered and never suffered enough in a passivity that cannot
even promise us the inertia of a dead thing, the muteness that
114

makes it silent even in words, all that makes it escape and

that makes everything escape through it; there is, starting
from there, a line of demarcation-on one side nobody, on the
other, all the others, those who understand, care, live, and
understand that also, that there is a line of demarcation,
without themselves ever being marked. Dread that conceals
and conceals itself. And yet, dread is in relation to all dread, it
is the dread of all.

At night, the dreams of death in which one does not

know who dies: all, all those who are threatened by death
and oneself, above the going rate.

Like a pact with straying, to admit a little lie, a little

imposture without the counterpart of what would be the

truth; and this allows us to stray only a little without the
guarantee of a state in which there is no straying.

That surpasses human force, and yet some man does it,

condemned by this not to surpass it.

Why, after death, must all become public, why must the
right to publish the least text of Nietzsche or of any writer

who would never in his life have accepted its appearing, find
an assent in each of us, and even despite us, as if the inde
structible affirmed itself in this way? Let us not destroy any
thing: is it respect, desire to know everything and to have
everything, desire to conserve everything in the great ar
chives of humanity, or indeed only the fear, illuminated by a
great name, of losing everything, when mortal loss is pro
nounced? What do we seek in these fragile texts? Something
that will not be found in any text, what is outside of text, the
word too many, in order that it not fail the completeness of
115

Complete Works or, on the contrary, so that it always fails it?

Or do we give in to the savage force, that which pushes every
thing outside, that leaves nothing at rest, that prevents any
thing from at last being silent for an instant?

Behind discourse the refusal to discourse speaks, as

behind philosophy the refusal to philosophize would speak:
+

speech not speaking, violent, concealing itself, saying nothing

and suddenly crying out. Each is responsible as soon as he
speaks, responsibility so heavy that he refuses it, but always
in vain, it weighs on him before any refusal, and even if he
sinks under its weight, he drags it down with him

responsible, in addition, for his collapse.

What is betrayed by writing is not what writing would

+
have to transcribe and that could not be transcribed, it is
writing itself which, betrayed, appeals to laughter, to tears, to
passive impassiveness, seeking to write more passively than
any passivity.

"I refuse this speech by which you speak to me, this

discourse that you ofe

f r me to attract me to it in calming me,
the time in which your successive words last, in which you
hold me back in the presence of an affirmation, is above all
this relation that you create between us just by the fact that
you address speech to me even in my silence that does not
respond."-"Who are you?"-"The refusal to take part in dis
course, to make a pact with a law of discourse."-"Do you
prefer tears, laughter, immobile madness?"-"! speak, but I
do not speak in your discourse: I do not let you, speaking,
speak, I force you to speak not speaking; there is no help for
you, no instant in which you rest from me, I who am there in
all your words before all your words."-"I have invented the
great logos of logic that protects me from your incursions and
116

allows me to speak and to know in speaking through the peace

of well developed words."-"But I am there in your logic also,
denouncing the oppression of a coherence that makes itself
the law and I am there with my violence that affirms itself
under the mask of your legal violence, that which submits
thought to the grip of comprehension."-"I have invented po
etic irregularity, the error of words that break, the interrup
tion of signs, the forbidden images, to speak you, and, speak
ing you, to silence you."-"I am silent, and in the hollowing
out of day and night, you hear me, you do nothing but hear
me, no longer hearing anything, then hearing everywhere the
rumor that has now passed into the world in which I speak
with every simple word, the cries of torture, the sighs of happy
people, the turbulence of time, the straying of space."-"I
know that I betray you."-"You don't have the power to betray
me, nor to be faithful to me. I do not know faith, I am not the
unspeakable demanding secrecy, the incommunicable that
muteness would make manifest; I am not even the violence
without words against which you could defend yourself with
violence that speaks."-"Nonetheless, affirming when I deny,
denying when I affirm, ravaging through an ever thoughtless
uprooting: I denounce you as the word never pronounced or

still superfluous that would like to except me from the order of

language to tempt me with another speech. You torment me,

it's true, even in leaving me in peace, but I can torment you,
too: justice, truth, truth, justice, these terms you reject with
your predicatable sneering follow you even to the other to
which you return them. You do me Good, with your crying of
injustice, and I would even say you are the Good that does not
let itself be taken for anything good."-"You can say this, I
accept everything, acknowledge myself in everything."-''You
accept so that I can begin to doubt again the friendship that
makes an exception of everything, since your previous refusal,
avowal of nothing, was closer to this unique speech that ap
peals to the Other."-"As you like, I am the Unique."-"No,
you will not tempt me with repose in unity; I invoke you be
yond this unity, without your knowing it, I beseech you before

any beseeching with my obstinate and desolate entreaty."

"This is good, I answer, even before you ask me, and I charge
117

you eternally with the responsibility ofmy levity."-"! will not

obey you, obeying you even in my desire to leave you far from
me, turned away from me, in order not to compromise you
with my wishes, my strength or the fatigue of my desire: I will
always remain indebted to you by the very fal;t that I acquit
myself."-"! accept that also. But, as now I am good and even
the good speech, I warn you gently with this precaution: you
have simply taken my former place, discourse without dis
course, agitated murmur of nights without speec;h, plaintive
rumor both benevolent and malevolent, which stays awake
and watches again and again, always listening, in order to
make any understanding and any response impossible."
"Yes, I am this murmur, as are you, yet we are always sepa
rated from one another, on each side of that which, murmur
ing, says nothing, oh degrading rumor."-"Marvellous."
"Saying nothing but: that takes its course."

"You have only to take in the unhappiness of a single

person, to whom you are closest, to take in Q.(l the unhappiness

in one."-"That does not appease me; and how would I dare
say that I take in a sole unhappiness where every unhappiness
would be taken in, when I cannot even take in my own?"
"Take the unhappy one in in your unhappiness."

The fragility of what already breaks would respond in

the neuter: passion more passive than all that would be pas
sive, yes that says yes before affirmation, as if the passage of
dying had always already passed there, before any consent. In
the neuter-the name without name-nothing responds, ex
cept the response that fails, that has always just missed re
sponding and missed the response, never patient enough to
"go beyond", without this "step/beyond" being accomplished.
The mirage of passivity is the spontaneity that is almost its
opposite: automatic writing, in spite of its difficulties and as
risky as it may be, only suspending the rules of appearances
(and not attacking-even vainly-the law inscribed at the
118

deepest level) thinks it leaves the moveJYlent of writing to its

letting go-but writing cannot let itself go, if thre is not, for
writing, any going-any becoming-to which writing would
leave itself, would abandon itself, as if giving its obedience
and as happens when one yields to someone's power. And
there is no dictatiQn. The dictation of sayjng has always faded
in a previous repetition, since saying can only say again. The
resaid of saying tells us something about a passivity
passively ambiguous-where very djsipn of saying has al
ready fallen. Transgression is not a simple letting gp: not that
it decides, and, there where it had no hold on anything, by
chance and sovereignly, would go beyond the power to do any
thing even to the impossible. Transgression transgresses by
passion, patience and passivity, transgressing always the
most passive of ourselves in the "dying by the lightness of
dying" that escapes our presence and by which we would es
cape ourselves without being able to hide ourselves. Passivity,
patience, passion, that have renounced the uneasiness of the
negative, its impatient shuffling, its infinite wanderiDg, and
thus-thus!-would take away from the neuter this retreat in
which its negative signaling still leaves it.

/f it were enough for him to be fragile, patient, passive, if

the fear (the fear provoked by nothing), the ancient fear that
reigns over the city pushing the figures in front of it, that
passes in him like the past of his fear, the fear he does not feel,
were enough to make him even more fragile, well beyond the
consciousness of fragility in which he always holds himself
back, but, even though the sentence, in interrupting itself, gives
him only the interr-uption of a sentence that does not end, even
so, fragile patience, in the horizon of the fear that beseiges it,
testifies only to a resort to fragility, even there where it makes
thought mad in making it fragile, thoughtless.

+
Fragility that is not that of Jife, fragility not of that
which breaks itself apart, but of the breaking apart, that I
119

----L

cannot reach, even in the collapse of the self that gives up and
gives its place up to the other.

Measuring the dimensions of the room that appeared

immense to him, he had covered it in sef}eral steps: a friend,
leaning on the table, his face darkened by sleep, seemed to
observe him silently. He resumed his movement, thiJ> time inca
pable of finishing it, ofbeginning the route, perhaps because of
his fatigue, and the fatigue came from his having to delimit the
space without taking into account his presence inside it-from
a point outside from which the face of his friend, face with eyes
closed, suddenly brightened with a smile of kindness.

cease
sleep,
dread

Dread, the subtetranean wodd where waking, sleep,

to be alternatives, where sleep does not put dread to
where, waking, one awakes from dread to dread: as if
had its day, had its night, its galaxies, its ends of the

world, its immobile disaster that lets everything remain.

When one falls-always from high up, no matter how

low one is-and a friendly hand suddenly grabs you at the
lowest point of the fall, one finally realizes that one is not
falling, but was only shrivelled up, immobilized by the feeling
of being there wrongly and moving all the less as one should
not be there.

"I am evil, the world attracts me i n its evil, and I ob

scure it with my own, and all the more so because evil pre
serves in me a self to suffer it."-"You could say the opposite as
well, since you are still able to say it."'-"I am even more un
happy about this.n-ren't you forgetting something?"

Unhappiness is absolute, which does not prevent its

being increased-and this sometimes by the very thing that
seems to lessen it.
120

Writing slowly to resist the pressure of what is not writ

+
ten, so slowly that, by a frightening reversal, bfpre one even
begins, it is beautiful and well written: like he who necessarily
becomes anonymous through publication.

+
Sleep puts dread to sleep and, still, in this state of
sleeping dread, one is completely in dread, under its watch
that simulates lucidity or makes this active for more dread.

It is not that the anonymous puts a name in a good

light, even a name outside of language, as the unprouncable

name of God would be, but it i s a sign for the absence of name,
for the coherence of which this sign remains the sign and
which forces the text, published or not, to signal to itself in
tensely through all that disorganizes it.

Nietzsche dies mad, but dying, for Nietzsche, does not

lmow madness, nor non-madness. ln as much as Nietzsche

dies in all time outside of time, even if madness overwhelms
him, starting from this line of demarcation that the thought of
the Eternal Return forces him to cross in an instant, in freeing
him from this instant as present, lifting him out of himself as
out of madness, by the lightness of dying that the thought of
the return trans-lates11 in leading it falsely-with as much
falsity as is necessary to abandon oneself to such a
movement-beyond the lightness and to the point at which
this lightness regains itself in thought, with all the weight,
the slowness, the painful sovereignty of a thought that tries in
vain to compensate for its eternal belatedness in regard to
dying: to die "mad" would be to die of this lateness, lagging
behind dying, which living people who die unaware of their
madness take as a sort of anticipated death, which they sanc
tion, visibly or invisibly, by its exclusion.
Nietzsche's madness: as if dying had dangerously eter
nalized him, either with an eternity of dying, with the ambi121

guity of eternity, with the danger of the transgression finally

accomplished-and then suddenly, having crossed the thresh
old, handed over to the outside, had led him back by the Qqt
side onto the threshold, in the exposedness to which the si
lence of his stupor reduces him. Madness then means: nobody
goes beyond the threshold, except by madness, and madness
is the outside that is only the threshold.

He had neuer regarded them as anything other than

figures that the ancient fear pushed towards him; whence the
attraction of bl:au,ty and youth that kept him frqm associating
with them, even if their approach, that of the threshold that is
neither close nor far, made tempting, yes, like a temptation, the
idea of a proximity promised or refused by space, according to
the game that is proper to it.

If the self gives way under the unhappiness of all, it

risks being only the self giving way and extended by this
unhappiness to the point of becoming the self of everyone,
even if it is unhappy. But unhappiness does not authorize the
self, the unhappy I, which leads one to think-only to think
that unhappiness has always undone the self, substituting for
it the other relation, relation with the other, and that it mean
while cuts if off in a punctual singularity in which it does not
have the right to be a self, even a singular self, not even a
suffering self: only capable of feeling to the point of being
separated from whatever suffering there is in passivity, what
ever common feeling of suffering, and summoned to sustain
the relation with the other who suffers by this unsuffered
passivity, unauthorized to suffer and as if exiled from
suffering.
The "pas" of the completely passive-the "step/not
beyond"?-is rather the folding back up, unfolding itself, of a
relation of strangeness that is neither suffered nor assumed.
Transgressive passivity, dying in which nothing is suffered,
nothing acted, which is unconcerned and takes on a name only
by neglecting the dying of others.
122


Not "I die", that does not concern me, but "dying that
does not concern me" puts me in play .iD all dying, by way of a
relation that does not arrive through me, in bringing me to
answer-without responsibility-in the most passive pas
sion, for this relation (relation with the qon-conceming} that I
neither suffer nor assume. Passivity of dying that does not
make me susceptible of dying, nor let me die in others. Dying
deliberately for the other, like giving oneself death, at differ
ent ethical levels and by acts over which nobody has the power
to pass judgement, indicates this moment in which passivity
wants to act in its very passivity: that to which practical gen
erosity leads, perhaps, in making real the unrealizable.

To answer for that which escapes responsibility.

Dying: like looking for a displaced subject, a "self-that

dies", as if dying were tired of the lightness proper to it, mark

of the unaccomplished trangression (accomplished by its un
accomplishment). Since we would die as if in order to liberate
dying, distractedly, heavily, sometimes with the gravity of a
responsibility-death heroic, generous, active-, or would die
heavy with the anticipated weight of dead things, in giving
ourselves up to the inertia of the great repose, dying of inert
death and not of passivity-the most passive passion-of
dying.

The fragility of dying-that of breaking-does not

leave us the right to be fragile, vulnerable, broken, but neither

to be strong, indemnable. capable of helping, even to the point
of losing the sacrifice.

..I die, I can. do nothing for you but be a burden to you.. a

painful responsibility, a word that no longer responds to you,
123

the inert thing that you could not love, by.t only forget euen in
your merrwry. "-"Dying, you do not die, you grant 111 this
dying as the harmdny 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."
"In the illusion that makes you live while I die."-"ln the illu
sion that makes you die while you die."

Writing: an arrow aiming at the void-the anachronis

tic of the future-past-and falling always too erly, in the too
full of a weighty past, of a future with nothing to come or even
worse, in the plenitude of a present that transforms every
thing into the written rich in resources and in life.

In harmony with the unhappiness of all, this unhappi-

ness that excludes any harmony.

As if awareness were left to us only for us to know what

we cannot bear to know.

"Why have written that?"-"! couldn't help it."-"Why

does this necessity of writing give place to nothing that does

not appear superfluous, vain, and always unnecessary?"
"The necessity was already unnecessary: in the coercion of 'I
couldn't help it', there is a feeling even more coercive that this
coercion does not have its justification in itself."

I do not know, but I know that I am going to have

known.

To die freely: iHusion (impossible to denounce). For even

if one renounces the illusion of believing oneself free in regard

to death, one ends up confusing, through constantly belated

words, what one calls gratuity, frivolity-its light flame of
wanton fire-, the inexorable lightness of dying, with the in
submissiveness of what any act of grasping misses. From
which comes the thought: dying freely, not according to our
freedom, but, through passivity, abandon (an extremely pas
sive attention), by way of the freedom of dying. And still dying
is not only within every power, the impossible in relation to
us, that which we cannot take on freely nor suffer under coer
cion: dying, in the absence of present, in the lack of traces that
it leaves, is too light to die, to constitute a dying. This
unconsituted-unconsitutuing that touches on the most pas
sive fragility, that undoes and destitutes lavishly, leaving us
without recourse, discovering us and giving us over to the
discovery of a passion not suffered and of a discourse without
words: as soon as we separate ourselves from it, trying to
separate it-the unreality of the illusion-it is then that ev
erything turns around: there where there was lightness, there
is heaviness; gratuity: responsibility; innocence: sharp put
ting into question.

t
Unhappiness: this word that befalls us without giving
any explanation and without letting us respond to it, fate
without fate. We can do nothing against unhappiness; thus it
speaks to us through its muteness. But, even if there is no
action capable of effacing it, no gaze to fix it, are we not al
lowed to feel that there would be a passivity more passive
than that by which we suffer it and from which it would be
given to us to withdraw from it this trait of natural fatality
of a word never pronounced but spoken forever-that it repre
sents to us? Perhaps thought is, in its most passive passion,
more unhappy than any unhappiness, being unhappy to still
be thought in face of the unhappiness that reaches it in oth
ers, passivity that leaves a certain distance to respond to it,
there where, pretending to escape any cause (social, histor
ical, or ethical) or at least always to surpass it, it affirms itself
in its dark sovereignty, in ruins. Yes, perhaps; only perhaps.
125


To him for whom the longing for unity is the ultimate
demand, life, which is living unity, even if only by default,
promises happiness and lets itself be lived as supremely
happy in its most uncertain moments. The unhappy con
sciousness, in its division, can indeed tolerate lf
i e that lacks
unity: it is because of life that it is lived as unhappy and that it
projects its id.al of unity, idaJ that represents the happy
possibility to it-gift, again, of its distress. Unhappiness does
not have consciousness to live the happy possibility, nor does
it live in the "simple" division-division, it is true, the most
pathetically rending because it rends itself-that eternally
suffers the reconciliation experienced as etmally deluded
longing. Unhappiness passes through the happy conscious
ness, as through the unhappy consciousness, door open only
onto unhappiness.
Freud, thinking of himself, would have said that he who
does not feel the need for unity (this need that seemed to him
to be tied to philosophy or religion), can accept from the most
favorable life only the favor of its mehmcholy course, with a
feeling rather of repulsion and fear before the great moments
of exaltation with which it wants to enchant us, as if this
exalting gift were a constraint that did not correspond to an
appeal, something undesired, a confused submersiQn of de
sire. But perhaps it is necessary to say more: we long for unity
necessarily through the highest reason, through the strongest
f r from its
desire, thus we must not miss it, nor already sufe
lack, as we rejoice in that which promises it; only neither
unity nor the unique is the ultimate demand, or would be so
only for he who could stop at the ultimate of demand, as well
as content himself with going back to a first beginning, to
what would be original in the origin. The other, in his attrac
tion without attraction, proposes nothing ultimate, nothing
that can finish or begin, even if one must have passed through
the necessity of the One to know how to respond-response
that does not know-to the equivocal appeal of the Other
equivocal, if in the other we cannot be sure that we do not
recognize only the still dialectical forms of alterity and never
the unknown of the other, outside of the one and of unity.
From this perhaps comes the fact that the morcellating de126

mand of writing, across and in the margins of the unity prom

ised by discourse, resonates only distantly with the happiness
or unhappiness of life, even in offering life the temptation of
another unhappiness, unhappiness without unhappiness, in
such a way that not even the consolation of a "profound" un
happiness would be left.
Finally, writing to respond to the unhappy demand, not in
harmony with the unhappiness of all, bqt jn the disco.rd of an
unhappy little unhappiness.

Unhappiness: perhaps we would suffer it if it struck us

alone, but always it reaches the other in us and, reaching us in

others, separates us even to this most passive passion in
which our lost identity no longer allows us to suffer it, but only
to identify ourselves with it, which is outside the identical, t o
carry us, without identity and without the possibility o f act
ing, towards the other who is always the unhappy one, as the
unhappy one is always the other: movement that does not end
but, like the "step/not beyond" of the completely passive t o
which we would respond i n dying, gives itself for its own
trangression: as if dying, outside of us, consecrated us to the
other even in losing us along the way and in holding on to us
in this loss.
Unhappiness does not support itself it is in as much as it
does not support itself, in the neutral inequality in which it
lacks any support as it misses the essence that would show
it and would make it be, that it demands to be borne, beyond
what we suffer, by a trangressive passivity that is never our
doing, and whatever we do or do not do, leaves us unprovided
for, absent, in the seriousness of a lightness felt as frivolity, in
the guilt of an innocence that accuses itself-sharpens itself,
puts into question-because it has never "lived" innocent
enough. (How could it be lived, if it were not here a matter of
the innocence of living, but of the innocence of dying?)

Does the feeling of an absolute lack of communication,

of not being able to share unhappiness with the unhappy one,
127

transport "me" into this unhappiness, or does it limit itself to

the unhappiness of the incommunicable? Still, "I" am sad in
others more than in myself, sad not to be able to lighten this
sadness and perhaps to call lack of communication what is
still only the inertia of a self that undoes itself and maintains
itself in its failure.

The supreme faith of believers: faith at the moment

when they will no longer have anything to believe and when
they will cease to be believers-faith in death, perhaps, which
is hidden from them by faith.

"Between you and me it is like between omething that is

more than you and something that is Less than me: him and
him.-Then you don't really relate yourself to me; the essential
has been lost, the unique character of our relationship.-ln
you, I've freed myself from myself, I no longer make you g lave
to the simple consciousness I have of you, nor limit you to
yourself in the consciousness you have of yourself.-But I want
to be limited and welcomed in the modest unity with which I'm
content.-Only one among others, interchangable with others,
face among the faces and not even according to the infinitude
of your desire.-Yes, that's it, inexchangable in as much as
interchangable, the unique someone who recognizes himself
only in the unique someone who you are.-Isn't it thus that we
meet one another without limiting one another?-How equivo
cal your answer is!"'

Does not the sufe

f ring body force us to live by way of a
body that would no longer be neuter1 disunified, but in the
nostalgia for and the thought of its unity, the "body proper"' all
the more as it is disapproprfated, and giving itself value as it
is worth nothing: forcing us to be attentive to ourselves in that
which does not deserve any attention? "From that also, I suf128

fer, and perhaps, through this suffering mode of life, I break

adrift, the rupture is without limit.-You make the most of
everything."

+
Oh void in me, into which, in a time more ancient than
all ancient times, I threw this self and which, during this time
without duration, falls into itself.

+
Think about others in such a way that it is no longer you
who comes back from this thought and that it is not in a
thought that you dispose yourself towards them.

"One's thinking about

not thinking about

me

makes me

feel this self; one's

me leaves me in this self that exceeds

me."-"At least disappear in this thought."

To live without the hope that life carries, nor with this
+
turning of hope against life (which one calls aggressiveness),
is this to live? is it to die? If it is true that it would be absurd to
speak of death in terms of life, we do not know if speech itself,
and, in speech, something that takes speech away from us and
makes us be quiet, is not more related to death and does not
lead us, speaking of life, to distance us from hopes, from fears,
and from living words, even to this limit that none of us passes
alive-except in speech.

+
Strange threats: "I don't threaten you, I leave you in the
neutrality of a life withoiJ.t threats, which doesn't euen leave
you a reason to live to defend yourself from the threatening
dread.-Then why this dread that surpasses any threat?
Because I threaten you in others, in all that is other, infinite
129

field from which the dread that irnmobilizes you keeps you
apart, reducing you to yourself alone, in the solitude of a dread
that encloses you because of others.-Dread of all in I who
disappear there.-lmmured in you by your anguished care for
others.-lt is because this care has not made use ofnw enough,
has not set to work this patience that would have made nw
pass beyond.-Don't think you can use others to free yourself
from yourself: you are condemned t q yourself in order for there
still to be someone to welcome others.-But I am nothing,
nothing in as much as me.-Nothing, this is what was needed:
support the insupportable nothing
."

+
Dread puts to sleep with a sleep in which it stays awake
to keep us entirely in dread: put to sleep for dread.

The tired desire: not only the wearing out of desire in

+
fatigue, not only this turning against itself by which it wears
out and wears itself out, but the disappearing of desire in its
attempt to maintain itself through the infinity of fatigue,
transmitting itself, as fatigue, to the infinity of its wearing
out.
Fatigue, fissure, as if, contrary to the movement of etymol
ogy, it were fissure, this lack that fails nothing, that would
find in fatigue its element of eternity, the illusion of an infini
ty in the absence of infinity.

There is a moment when generality is frightening: the

generality which, whether one likes it or not, one puts to

work-using its slightest words, always beyond singularity
and by which one risks generalizing one's own error: fatigue
discouraged, as if, without this contribution, the unhappy
level of the world could, by a mere nothing, find itself lowered.
"This is because you still attach too much importance to your
self. to your unhappy little share, to your mortal insuffii
c ency.
130

to your capacity to be, or not to be, for something, in the com

mon happiness, the comnwn IJ.fl.happiness.-But, by the mere
fact that I exist, at the limit of existence, surviving in survival,
I introduce into the circle in which a displaced subject dis
places itself something plai71:tive and impaired-servile
perhaps-that is superfluous.-You"re not yet at the limit, nor
impaired enough, still holding yourself up on your having and
your being, nor vulnerable enough, not reaching the point of
passivity ill- whi{;h alone the other would reach you without
your affecting the other, nor plaintive enough for your cry to
carry the plea of all to all.-! know, I still ex'ist too much, of a
too little that is too much.- You don't exist, you're dying.-/{I
were dying, perhaps dying would weigh less, even to the point
of interrupting itself, interruption of the dying of others.-Be
the lightness of dying, be nothing else for the other_, at the risk
of'living' in heaviness, seriousness, responsibility, sharp ques
tioning, that is, in an unhappy incapability of life for yourself"

He had lost, before having attained it, this share of im

passiveness that would have allowed him not to be unhappy
with himself, in order not to increase the general unhappiness:
fallen all at once, by an unexpected fall, fortunate and fragile,
below impassiveness, without ever being sure that one is at
ones most passive and perhaps because there could not be any
passivity present there-in the present, in whatever present
there is.

Impassiveness, passivity enclosed in the closure of a

self that does not even suffer itself as a self, but wants to free
itself from the other in itself, that refuses suffering, far from
being exiled from it.

_Silence is not the refusal of words: silent from all

words, from their reach, from their hearing, from that which,

131

in the least word, has not yet developed itself in speaking

ways.

"Death delivers from death.-Perhaps only from

dying.-Dying is this lightness within any liberty from which
nothing can liberate.-It is this, no doubt, that is frightening
in death, contrary to the analyses of antiquity: death does not
have within it that with which to allay death; it is thus as if it
survived itself, in the powerlessness of being that it disperses,
without this powerlessness assuming the task of incomple
tion-unaccomplishment-proper or improper to dying.-The
exteriority of being, whether it takes the name of death, of
dying, of the relation to the other, or perhaps of speech when it
has not folded itself up in speaking ways, does not allow any
relation (either of identity or of alterity) with itself.-With
exteriority, speech perhaps gives itself absolutely and as abso
lutely multiple, but in such a way that it cannot develop itself
in words: always already lost, without use and even such that
that which loses itself in it (the essence of loss that it would
measure) does not claim, by a reversal, that something-a
gift, an absolute gift: the gift of speech-is magnified or desig
nated in the loss itself -Then I have no right to say
.

anything.-None whatsoever."

If speech gives itself to the other, if it is this gift itself,

this gift in pure loss cannot give the hope that it will ever be
accepted by the other, received as a gift. Speech always exteri
or to the other in the exteriority of being (or of not being) of
which the other is the mark: the non-place. "However, you say
that with the assurance of abstract, servile, sovereign words.
ln pure loss, in pure loss.-That is still said with too much
certainty.-And that also."

Every day, doing what he did for the last time, and the
night reiterating it without end.
132

"We should respect in all books, in every speech, some

thing that still demands consideration, a sort of prayer to

speech.-1 respect it in the least speech, only in the least."

To order is not to speak: nor is to regulate. Language is

not an order. Speaking is an attempt (a temptation) to leave
this order, the order of language: even if it is by enclosing
itself in it. Speaking, this supplication to speak which speech
has always rejected, without consideration, or simply led as
tray, not accepted, not retained.

Friendship:
friends.

friendship

for

the

unknown

without

As if death, through him, distracted itself.

In this city: by chance; the two young names; immobile

facing an immobile friend; the room shrunken, immense: the

heavy marble table: the impeded speech: the ancient fear. The
Thing remembers

us.

Coming, coming, signs for the deserted city, signs of

themselves: names naming their name. Night after night. We

asked ourselves if, in the margin of the book, on the table, we
had read it.

If he writes alone, alone to write, it is because it is

better to be alone to lessen the imposture. The imposture: that

which imposes itself in the detoured wish of dying (of writing).
133

+
The rumor being only the way in which the city lets it be
known that it is deserted, always more deserted.

The ancient fear, the aging of the ancient fear. "Are you
afraid?"-"With a fear from another time." We were thus, un
der the guarantee of the young names, the innumerable occu
pants of fear in this deserted city: hiding fear, hiding ourselves
from fear.

You would have said in vain: I do not believe in fear;

this too ancient fear, without idolatry, without figure and with
out faith, the beyond of fear that does not affirm itself in any
beyond, would again push you into the narrow streets, eternal,
without end, towards the daily meeting, that which does not
propose itself to you as an end; whence the fact that, even
making your way there every day, you are never there. "Because
I reach it by flight, fleeing it endlessly."
"You respect fear.-Perhaps, but it does not respect me, it
has no regard." The most serious of idolatries: to have regard
for that which has no regard.

Who would believe that I am close to you?

If to live is to lose, we understand why it would be

almost laughable to lose life.

+
He could neither pronounce nor silence the two names,
as if these in their day to day banality had always run through
language to except themselves from it. Figures, pushed here
and there by the dry wind, this wind of rumor letting it be
known that the deserted city could not do without the illusion
of a tomb.
134

They inspire you.-Strange inspiration that I would

+
receive only in expiring.-Inspiration is indeed that: the
chance, the time of an expiration in which every word would
be breathed to you before being given to you.
Writing always more easily, more quickly than he writes.

One must not fi x the saying-between in the forbidden12,

+
"one
must not", where do you situate it, how do you say it
but
if not as the forbidden that has already turned into a negative
prescription, fulfilling the prohibition, making it a fulfillment,
the separation of the saying-between.

Taking three steps, stopping, falling, and, all of a sud-

den, becoming sure of himself in this fragile fall.

To survive, not to live, or, not living, to maintain

oneself, without life, in a state of pure supplement, movement

of substitution for life, but rather to arrest dying, arrest that
does not arrest, making it, on the contrary, last. "Speak on the
edgel3-line of instability-of speech." As if it attended the
exhaustion of dying, as if the night, hauing started too early, at
the earliest time of day, doubted it would euer become night.

It is almost certain that at certain moments we notice:

speaking again-this survival of speech, sur-speech-is a

way of letting ourselves know that for a long time we have no
longer spoken.

Praise from the near to the far.

+
Come, come, come [uiens, uiens, uenez]14, you whom the
injunction, the prayer, the wait could not suit.
135

"Be at peace with yourse)f.-There is no one in me to

whom I can speak famili'arly.-Be at peace.-Peace, this war

that is only appeased.-Be at peace, without peace without
war, ou.t;.side of any Piige to write, outside of any pact to sign,
outside of texts and of countries
The outside does not prom
ise any peace.-Be, without knowing it, at peace with your
. ....:_

self, in the beyond of peace that you would not know how to
reach.-That which you promise, I don't desire.-Accept
without desire the promise I make you."
Outside of any mercenary speech, silence without refusal
gives thanks.

There had been something like an event: the unforesee

able without complaint, keeping itself out of sight. Yes, that is

what it was about; what was it about? As if death, cQrnpleted,
had left everything intact, only free of everything, acquitted of
this dying for which the speech maintained within silence had
amicably persisted. Thus, the false appearances seemed to
have left him; and that, this freeing from the debt of secret and
regret, movement of immobility, far from truth and appear
ance, apart from play and openness, definite slowness, repose
without the promise of leisure, with the inescapable tran
quility: gift of serenity on the face henceforth entirely visible,
escaping the evasive.
Shadow of time, of old, welcome their {l{1ures. Respond no
longer to the one who would keep memory captive.

+
Both. in distress, the narrow march of their fragile fall,
common: death dying, side by side.

+
Coming towards us, as they came towards one another
through this plurality that unifzes them without showing uni
ty: their young return.
He thought, saving the we, like he believed he saved
thought in identifying it with the fragile fall, that their young
136

return would allow him, even in their no longer being together

(for a long time he had no lgnger heard anything, rwt even an
echo, that could h(}pe passed for an gpnrobation, a confirma
tion of the daily meeting), to fall in community. Fragile fall
common fall: words always skirting one another.
And he knew, thanks to the too ancient knowledge, effaced
by the ages, that the young names, naming twice, an infinity of
times, one in the past, the other in the future, that which is
found only on this side, that which is found only beyond,
named hope, deception. Hand in hand, from threshold to
threshold, like immortals, one of whom was dying, the other
saying: "would I be with whom I die?"

"Why do you no longer say anything?"-"Have I ever

said anything?"-"You let !;peak, without anything being said,
in the wqy of a thank you, the hope, the deception of every
utterance."
"Why do you no longer say anything?"-"lndeed, to be able
still to repeat this question in a low voice, lower each time: a
voice clear, neuter, impeded."-"I no longer have, even in the
form of this last question, any thought that concerns you."-"It
is good to renounce keeping us together in the discernment of a

"-"Why do you give back to me, under the illusion

tho14ght.
that it is good, what I no longer know how to give?"-"lt is
good."
He was so calm in dying that he seemed, before dying,
already dead; after and forever, still alive, in this calm of life
for which our hearts beat-thus having effaced the limit at the
moment in which it is it that effaces.
(/n the night that is coming, let those who have been united
and who efa
f ce one another not feel this efa
f cement as an inju
ry that they would inflict on one another.)

Free me from the too long speech.

137

NOTES TO THE TRANSLATION

1. I have translated "le 'il"' as "the he/it" throughout because "il"
is both the masculine personal third person pronoun and the imper
sonal third person pronoun. Since there is no neuter pronoun in
French, Blanchot uses "le 'il'."
2. The phrase thu

1;eme"

ered

is "le moi n'estpasW9imai& le

"Meme" means both "same" and "self." Blanchot questions

t e identity of the self as a model for identity as a whole. The self,

rather than being a model for i

, means only the sameness of
the self-same, and as such becomes what Blanchot calls "a canonic

delltit,y

abbreviation for a rule of identity."

3. What I have translated as "familiarity" throughout is "tutoie
ment" which means the use of the familiar form of address, through
the use of the pronouns "tu" and "toi." Generally, the use of the
familiar form indicates some kind of intimacy with or closeness to
the person so addressed, but in the case of the law, the familiar form
is used only to exclude any closeness

4. I have translated "la chance" as "luck" and "le hasard" as

"chance." "La chance" in French has the me.aning of both "luck" and
"chance" in English, which gets somewhat lost in the translation due
to the necessity of using "chance" in English for "le hasard," which
means "chance" in the sense of randomness.
5. Blanchot plays here on the verbs "tenir," "to hold" or "to hold
on" and "entretenir," "to maintain," "to entertain," "to converse with"
and their noun forms "tenue" and "entretien."
6. "Franchissement," from the verb "franchir" means "crossing."
"Franchise" means openness or candor.
7. "La perte est exigence, elle exige de Ia pensee qu'elle soit de
pensee.. ..
" "Depense" means "spent," but with the hyphen, it at
taches the pronoun "de" to the word "thought."
8. There is a multiple play on words in the phrase entre: entre
ne(u)tre. In the first place, "entre" is both the second person, familiar
form of the imperative of the verb "to enter" (which also occurs in the
first person plural in the word with which the book begins, "en
trons") and the adverb "between." "N'etre" is the negative of the verb
"to be" and an anagram of "entre"; with the insertion of the "u"
"n'etre" becomes "neutre."

9. I have left "jouissance" and "rejouissance" untranslated be- .

cause in translating them the sense of repetition would be lost.
"Rejouissance" as Blanchot uses it here indicates a repetition of

138

"jouissance," or sexual pleasure and expenditure, but in its usual

usage it means "rejoicing," a public, rather than private, pleasure.
10. What I have translated as "the edge at which we stop" is
Blanchot's word "!'arrete," which does not exist as a word, but is a
combination of two words. The first of these is "l'arret," which can
mean a place to stop, an arrest in the police sense, or a judicial
sentence, as in Blanchot's title L'Arret de mort. The word "arete," on
the other hand, indicates a sharp edge (it can also means a fish bone
on which one risks choking). Blanchot takes the same word later in
the text, where he qualifies it as "line of instability".
11. "Tra-duire," "to translate," means literally "to lead across."
12. "ll ne faut pas tiger l'entre-dire en interdit." "Entre-dire" and
"interdire" are semantically the same, since "inter" means "be
tween."
13. See note 10.
14. "Viens" and "venez" are, respectively, the singular and plu
ral forms of the imperative of the verb "to come." It sounds as if two
people

are

addressed, each separately, and then together.

139