World After the End of the World, The by Kas Saghafi;

Author:Kas Saghafi; [Saghafi;, Kas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438478227
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2020-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Dead—Immortal

In order to further examine Derrida’s thinking of immortality and its complicated relation to mortality, I would like to turn to one of his texts, Demeure—Maurice Blanchot, in which he pursues a probing, intricate reading of what he names “immortality as death” (D 89/69, author’s emphasis). In the midst of a meticulous and painstakingly close analysis of Blanchot’s L’instant de ma mort, the “auto-biographical” account of the narrator’s close call with death, in Demeure, Derrida refers to a stark phrase, what he calls a “sentence without sentence [phrase sans phrase]”: “Dead—Immortal [Mort—immortel]” (86/67). Two words held together and separated by a tiret long, “a sole line [un seul trait]” of “union and separation, a disjunctive link [liaison disjoignante]” spanned by an abyss (86/67). In what follows I would like to comment on Derrida’s description of this phrase and suggest that it can be used as an example of how he treats the question of immortality. Even though it is embedded in a text devoted to a close reading of a narrative, one could argue that Derrida generalizes this notion, as he often does when it comes to something that appears to be absolutely singular (like one’s own language in Monolingualism of the Other, for example), to provide an account of “immortality as death” (my emphasis). It will become clear that Derrida does not ever believe in a clear opposition between immortality and mortality or finitude, and his reading of mortality and immortality does not conform to any traditional definition.

Blanchot’s text L’instant de ma mort ostensibly consists of an account provided by the narrator about a witness, who may be the narrator, involved in certain events leading to the experience of being almost executed. Even though the reader may wish to assume that the text is the account of the narrator-witness—and much of the structure of the text seems to lead one to believe this—it is important to note that, as Derrida writes, there is a “null and uncrossable” distance between the one who says “I” and the “I” of the young man of whom he speaks and who is himself (D 84/65). In other words, the reader must not forget that not only does a distance separate the narrator from the witness and from the signatory of the text but that, more significantly, the aim of Derrida’s text is to show that there is “an essential compossibility” between testimony and fiction” (49/42).22

I would like to focus my attention on a couple of passages in this notoriously elliptical narrative in which the young man, about whom the narrator writes, and the female members of his family are forced by the invading troops to leave their home, preparing to face a firing squad. As the young man pleads to have the members of his family, all female, be spared, he ends the sentence mentioning their long, slow procession suggesting that death had already taken place, that it had already happened. Death has already arrived because it is “inescapable” (D 79/62–63). It is an experience from which one is not “resuscitated … even if one survives it” (79/63).

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