File spoon-archives/blanchot.archive/blanchot_1999/blanchot.9912, message 2


Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 10:15:13 +0000
From: steve mitchelmore <stevem-AT-epic.co.uk>
Subject: Re: MB: New Book


Those without French will be interested in this on the Standford University
Press site  (www.sup.org)   It is published in February. 

"The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony 

Maurice Blanchot / Jacques Derrida Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg

This volume records a remarkable encounter in critical and philosophical
thinking: a meeting of two of the great pioneers in contemporary thought,
Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, who are also bound together by
friendship and a complex relation to their own pasts. More than a literary
text with critical commentary, it constitutes an event of central
significance for contemporary philosophical, literary, and political concerns.

The book consists of The Instant of My Death, a powerful short prose piece
by Blanchot, and an extended essay by Derrida that reads it in the context
of questions of literature and of bearing witness. Blanchot’s narrative
concerns a moment when a young man is brought before a firing squad during
World War II and then suddenly finds himself released from his near death.
The incident, written in the third person, is suggestively
autobiographical—from the title, several remarks in the text, and a letter
Blanchot wrote about a similar incident in his own life—but only insofar as
it raises questions for Blanchot about what such an experience might mean.
The accident of near death becomes, in the instant the man is released, the
accident of a life he no longer possesses. The text raises the question of
what it means to write about a (non)experience one cannot claim as one’s
own, and as such is a text of testimony or witness.

Derrida’s reading of Blanchot links the problem of testimony to the problem
of the secret and to the notion of the instant. It thereby provides the
elements of a more expansive reassessment of literature, testimony, and
truth. In addressing the complex relation between writing and history,
Derrida also implicitly reflects on questions concerning the relation
between European intellectuals and World War II."


   

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