Ending and Unending Agony by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

Author:Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
Language: deu, eng, fra
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2015-08-12T14:48:41+00:00

[y] Antonin Artaud, “[Histoire vécue d’Artaud-Mômo]” (1947), in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 26:168 [my translation].

[z] Artaud, “[Histoire vécue d’Artaud-Mômo],” in Œuvres complètes, 26:168 [my translation].

II

Ending and Unending Agony (22 September?)

Ending and Unending Agony

I can well say that I did not begin to live until I looked upon myself as a dead man.

—Rousseau, The Confessions, VI[1]

At the center, or very nearly so, of The Writing of the Disaster (1980), a relatively short text—a fragment, if you will—stands out by two distinctive features.

Printed in italics (according to a law of alternation that already for some time had presided over the composition of Blanchot’s “fragmentaries”),[2] the text bears a title in roman typeface—read aloud, let’s say, and with no particular intonation: “A Primal Scene”—which we come across again, several times, in the second part of the book (but whose first appearance is on page 72 [117]). In its typographical presentation, however, as in its allusive or quotational character, the title is bound to surprise: inscribed in parentheses and suspended by a question mark, it refers evidently—albeit distantly—to the phrase or analytical concept introduced, as is known, by Freud in 1914 in his essay on narcissism.[3] The title must therefore be read—if not heard—as follows: “(A Primal Scene?).”

The second distinctive feature is that the text, unlike all those—and without exception—distributed by the fragmentary, gives every indication that it is a narrative [récit], or at least the evocation, quite rare in Blanchot, of a childhood memory. Despite being narrated or recounted in the third person, its initial device [dispositif] is unambiguous (and no less so as is the device that, between the title and the narrative, and through the carefully calculated use of pronouns, overdetermines The Instant of My Death): without doubt, the text in question is openly autobiographical—and not simply detectable or arousing suspicion as such, as it happens in Blanchot’s fictions, in certain observations or certain dialogues inserted in the fragmentaries, in a good many testimonies, not to mention (why not?) in the whole of his literary-critical work, which in the end presents itself as the autobiography of an indefatigable reader.

Now, it so happens that this text—the same text, or very nearly so[aa]—had been published four years earlier in the fourth issue (February–March 1976) of a review—Première Livraison—edited by Mathieu Bénézet and myself.[4] Self-published and intended for a narrow readership, the review had as its characteristic feature a precise rule to follow: of every author we approached, whoever it was (the choice was ours), we asked for a text composed in whichever form they chose, provided it didn’t exceed one typewritten page in length. We had written to Maurice Blanchot. He responded—for it was indeed a response addressed to us in return (using the enunciative device to which I was alluding just now)—with the text that concerns us here.

Allow me to read it here in this “first” version:

A Primal Scene

You who live later, close to a heart that beats no more, suppose, suppose this: the child—is he seven years old, or eight perhaps?—standing, drawing the curtain and, through the pane, looking.

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