I mourn therefore I am.
Jacques Derrida¹

Re: Hearse

What might ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’ think about literature? That it has a writer who can be known through his works and outside of them? That the writer means what he is saying, or that he at least means to say it? That the work itself is written in a language that is capable of referring to real or fictitious events? That perhaps there is a truth to the work that transcends it in some way, a message, a lesson, an insight? That the work is also in some way his to read, to enjoy, and to judge?

The philosophical interrogation of literature is a different kind of journey. It asks, ‘Do any of those everyday omnibus beliefs stand close scrutiny?’ and finds itself in a different mode of transport altogether. This journey is in a hearse, a funeral procession that circles around the question of literature and that finds itself in a perpetual state of mourning. In that funeral procession pass a succession of separations, each more exactingly honest in its grief than the last; each, like in all such processions, both lamenting and celebrating; each characterised by a mourning that perpetuates these separations in memoriam:

Under the eye of honesty pass in succession the author, the work, and the reader; in succession the art of writing, the thing written, and the truth of that thing or the Thing Itself; still in succession, the writer without a name, pure absence of himself, pure idleness, then the writer who is work, who is the act of a creation indifferent to what it is creating, then the writer who is the result of his work and is worth something because of this result and not because of the work, then the writer who is no longer affirmed by this result but denied by it, who saves the ephemeral work by saving its ideal, the truth of the work etc.²

By way of introduction, in our hearse there is taking place a constant rehearsal. In all senses of ‘rehearse’ it recites what has gone before (what has been written about that which is mourned), it lists, it runs through what is about to be said. This journey snakes around Orpheus’ path as he travels out of the Underworld. We must look back in order to become able to rehearse our lament. In doing so some elements of time, space, and circumstances are introduced to the act of literature and the workings of death. As an autopsy of Maurice Blanchot’s Literature and the Right to Death it will proceed in sections. It promises to work through its list: How can literature be written? What is an author? What is a reader? What is a work of literature? How is literature able to refer to things or to create them? What does it mean to make something out of language? What takes place within a work of literature? Why, when philosophy attempts to reflect on literature, is literature left undefined and philosophy shaken in the attempt?

Death and the Writing of Literature

Before we consider the idea of a writer and the idea of something that is written, we must consider the conditions of writing. What takes place in the space that surrounds the act of writing that makes writing possible? Blanchot provides a number of answers.

Blanchot’s discussion of the conditions of writing, the role of an author and any possible ‘purpose’ of a work is suffused with a deliberate, ironic and studied superficiality works as a somewhat waspish critique of existentialism. The title ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ sets presages the logic of the critique and in doing so circumscribes the entire essay. First of all, it says, let’s talk about literature and dispense with the vanity over the status of being a ‘writer’, the flaw in Sartre narrowly defining literature as having to be committed to a cause, and the self-aggrandisement that is implied in Camus’ discussion of the right to suicide. Essentially, Blanchot argues, literature inevitably exceeds the constraints that commitment to a cause might place upon it. It does so because there is a kind of death that is inherent to literature that permeates it as if it were ink that saturated and was barely contained by the sponge structure of the work. Further, this death is much more interesting and significant than the banality of the lone, intransitive death of an intellectual’s suicide:

Death as an event no longer has any importance… It is the moment when I die signifies to me as I die a banality which there is no way to take into consideration.³

One condition of literary production that Blanchot mentions includes the moment in time that it comes into being:

Every work is an occasional work; this simply means that each work has a beginning, that it begins at a certain moment in time and that that moment in time is part of the work⁴

This temporality is essential to literary production. The work could not emerge without it:

since without it the work would have been only an insurmountable problem, nothing more than the impossibility of writing it.⁵

One might create work due to the external impetus of a commissioning editor:

Valéry often reminded us that his best works were created for a chance commission and were not born of personal necessity.⁶

One might even be moved to write if one is committed to a ‘Cause’, but the commitment to the cause will be called into question by the greater commitment to literature:

He is only on his own side, that what interests him about the Cause is the operation he himself has carried out⁷

One might be the modern embodiment of the Romantic myth of the artist, with work springing from one’s own genius, but this will inevitably exceed the bounds placed upon it and work to intertwine with and undermine the rest of the world:

The work created by this solitary person and enclosed in solitude contains within itself a point of view which concerns everyone, implicitly pass judgement on other works, on the problem of the times, becoming the accomplice of whatever it neglects, the enemy of whatever it abandons, and its indifference mingles hypocritically with everyone’s passion.8

This recalls Blanchot’s reading of Kafka, but it also reminds one of Hamlet’s declaration:

I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.⁹

Hamlet might be seen as a recurring motif, a spectre, in Literature and the Right to Death in that it is a narrative that is made possible by the death of a King, a plot that is driven interpolated fictions, an intrigue that is sustained by the vacillation between forms of death - the wish for suicide and the demand for revenge, and a tragedy that is resolved in the dissolution of a State.

A further condition is the exercise of literary imagination in response to immediate circumstances. An enslaved writer may write about being free of slavery, yet

Insofar as he immediately gives himself the freedom he does not have, he is neglecting the actual conditions of his emancipation, he is neglecting to do the real thing that must be done so that the abstract idea of freedom can be realized. His negation is global. It not only negates his situation as a man who has been walled into prison but bypasses time that will open holes in these walls; it negates the negation of time, it negates the negation of limits. This is why this negation negates nothing, in the end, why the work in which it is realised is not a truly negative destructive act of transformation, but rather the realization of the inability to negate anything, the refusal to take part in the world; it transformed the freedom which would have to be embodied in things in the process of time into an ideal above time, empty and inaccessible.¹⁰

By leaping ahead into an imagined and literary emancipation, an empty and fictive freedom substitutes for any real future emancipation and at the same time masks the continuing reality of enslavement. At the same time that literature is subject to the conditions of its production, it is also the negation of those conditions.

Whilst literature works outwards to negate the conditions of its productions, its internal condition of production is precisely the absence of everything:

Unreality begins with the whole… it is seeing and naming them from the starting point of everything, from the starting point of the absence of everything, that is, from nothing.¹¹

The possibility of saying or writing something depends on the potential availability of everything and anything, and the creation of an empty space, that did not exist before, into which a new unreality can be streamed.

The Death of the Author

Following Blanchot, Barthes wrote ‘the author enters into his own death, writing begins’¹². Death lurks at the interface between the author and the work. A paradox governs the act of writing that serves ultimately to negate the author. This paradox is stated simply in two short sentences from Blanchot:

He has no talent until he has written, but he needs talent in order to write.¹³

He exists only as a function of the work; but then how can the work exist?¹⁴

One must write in order to be a writer, yet one is not a writer until one has written. The writer can only exist as a writer in relation to what he has written. He is a construct of his own writing that cannot exist outside of the text that he has written. His writing therefore negates any identity that the writer may have had outside of his status as a writer, all other possible identities are concealed by the act of writing. Yet in order to be his writing (i.e. his writing and also the writing of him), what is written must also be the negation of all prior writing:

In order to write, he must destroy language in its present form and create it in another form, denying books as he forms books out of what other books are not.¹⁵

The author, and writing, come into being through a double denial: Firstly the denial of the existence of the author outside the text, and secondly the denial of all other books in order to establish, through différance, an existence of the writing that is defined negatively by not being any other books.

Writing is constitutive of the writer. Any romance of intentionality is replaced with an alternative construction of the author as a function of a negative exteriority. Yet it is this writer and no other that is constituted in this way. The writing serves to deny all other writers as well as all other writing. The relation of the author to the writing has a specificity and a precision to it. It is ‘is precisely myself become other’¹⁶, ‘it is my consciousness without me’¹⁷.

It is impossible to locate or to imagine the writer outside of the writing; the writer is specified by the work but he is defined as specifically absent from it. His presence is conjured through a specification of an absence that is itself defined negatively:

This shifting on the part of the writer makes him into someone who is perpetually absent, an irresponsible character without a conscience, but this shifting also forms the extent of his presence, of his risks and responsibility… The trouble is that the writer is not only several people in one, but each stage of himself denies all the others.¹⁸

The writing writes the author. The apparent dispositions of a writer are disclosed as constructs of the operation of literature. The ‘self’ that is revealed by literature is not the self of the author outside of the text, but is instead a projection of the empty musings of literature itself:

Stoicism, scepticism, and the unhappy unconscious are all ways of thinking… but which literature only thinks out in him.¹⁹

The text constitutes the author even as the author writes it. The author becomes an absence that is defined by exteriority:

The writer who writes a work eliminates himself as he writes that work and at the same time affirms himself in it.²⁰

There is no interiority except that which is projected virtually by the work. Foucault, who was influenced by Blanchot, failed to find any interiority of the subject that was not constructed by the operations of power, knowledge and history²¹. This is why Foucault’s essay on Blanchot begins with a discussion of the exteriority of language and also the superficial interiorization of literature²².

Literature brings about the death of that which appears to create it. The author is destroyed, substituted, and negated in the movement of the idea of writing into the materiality of a text.

Death and the Reader

The threat of death to an author appears to present two choices. First, to fail in the becoming of an author by choosing not to write, which we might perhaps understand as an early termination of the writer; or second to surrender to the negation of writing and its negative subjectification. There is, however, a third way that is implied by the spacialising of writing that Blanchot undertakes in Literature and the Right to Death, and that is to imagine a reader on the other side of the text who is himself constructing it as he reads it:

Why not withdraw into an enclosed and secret intimacy without producing anything but an empty object and a dying echo? Another solution – the writer himself agrees to do away with himself: the only one who matters in the work is the person who reads it. The reader makes the work; as he reads it, he creates it; he is its real author.²³

Two further negations become apparent if one makes that move. The first is that what was previously an active denial of other works by the work in question becomes a passive negativity in which this work is understood merely as belonging system of books as perceived by readers, a net of works defined by différance:

It has become a work belonging to other people, a work which derives its value from other books, which is original if it does not resemble them, which is understood because it is a reflection of them.²⁴

Secondly, whereas before writing negating the operations of history in its ability to fictionally escape the chains of real slavery, its own meaning becomes subject to and conditioned by the flow of time and it’s subjective, contingent interpretation:

the results are never stable or definitive, but infinitely varied and meshed with a future which cannot be grasped… His careful rhetoric is soon absorbed into the workings of a vital contingency he cannot control or even observe… In writing he has put himself to the test as a nothingness at work, and after having written, he puts his work to the test as something in the act of disappearing.²⁵

The meaning of a work itself is cut loose; any notion of an ideal or transcendent truth that it might contain can be glimpsed only through the shifting interpretations that readers place upon it through history. Its condition would be defined by being mourned, its meaning perpetually caught between lamentation and celebration. The work would be a continually ‘in that act of disappearing’ since the possibility of it meaning anything (still less what it meant when it first came into being) at any given time in the future would be perpetually called into question.

The Work of Death

What is a work of literature? We have discussed the writer and reader situated on either side of the work, we can continue our exploration of the spacialisation and temporalisation that Blanchot sets out.

Is there anything above the work? For Blanchot there is an Hegelian ideal of the Thing Itself that transcends the work and which is its ultimate truth:

The Thing Itself… the art which is above the work, the ideal that the work seeks to represent… The goal is not what the writer makes but the truth of what he makes.²⁶

Truth happens in translation (to paraphrase Walter Benjamin). The translation at issue here is the movement from interior to exterior. Since there can be nothing on the inside prior to the work, it is a translation that comes from nothing. Since its apparent origin (the author) is constructed entirely by the work, the translation is faithful because there is no excess outside of the work that is not already entirely within it:

What was nothing when it was inside emerges into the monumental reality of the outside as something which is necessarily true, as a translation which is necessarily faithful, since the person it translates exists only through it and in it.²⁷

The work is work that takes place over time. It can’t have any existence outside of its own becoming – an imagined work is not a work until it is written. Temporalisation and spacialisation are at work once again, in the process of writing the work and in ‘its inscription in space’.

The work cannot be planned, but only carried out… it has value, truth, and reality only through the words which unfold it in time and inscribe it in space, he will begin to write, but starting from nothing and with nothing in mind – like nothingness working in nothingness, to borrow an expression of Hegel’s.²⁸

Because there can be no existence of the work outside of the work this operation must ‘start with nothing’ because nothing exists initially, and can have ‘nothing in mind’ because there can be no mind and no projected idea of the work outside what is written.

The becoming of a work is not necessarily the same as a work coming into reality as being real itself. Rather the becoming of the work is its coming into unreality. What is real about it is its materiality and its interpretation, in history, by reality. But the work itself is outside of reality, and despite its materiality its most significant aspect is that it is made out of language:

What is real in it is not the whole but the particular language of a particular work, which is itself immersed in history… What we are talking about, then, is a view of the world which realizes itself as unreal using language’s peculiar reality.²⁹

Unreality is ‘realized’ in the sense of being made real and also in the sense of being understood to be unreal.

The Death of ‘This Woman’ (or The Not-Dog it was That Died)

In 1996 Cornelia Parker exhibited two sets of works about negativity. One, “The Negative of Sounds” was the residue of vinyl that is left after gramophone records have been pressed. The other, “The Negatives of Words”, was shards of silver that were had been produced when etching lettering in silver³⁰. Rachel Whiteread has made her career out of displaying the sculptural negatives of everyday objects. Blanchot is concerned with what is etched out, and what negative residue remains, when literature attempts to speak of something. This is one of the principle operations of death in the work of literature:

For me to be able to say, “This woman,” I must somehow take her flesh-and-blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being.³¹

What can literature talk about? To speak of anything or anyone is to render a version of them out of language, and language is capable only of defining things negatively. ‘This woman’ is co-opted to the work of literature, but as an absence in two senses. Firstly ‘This woman’ is a representation of her ‘flesh and blood reality’, she is neither embodied or present in the work. Secondly, by being made of words, the meaning of ‘this woman’ is not present except in that it is different from all other possible words. Whilst ‘this woman’ is not any other possible thing either, she is especially not ‘this woman’. Blanchot gives the example of a ‘cat’ being more ‘not cat’ than it is ‘not dog’:

Negation cannot be created out of anything but the reality of what it is negating.³²

This absenting and annihilation of a presumed present reality was explored by Robert Browning in Porphyria’s Lover³³ where the narrator suddenly decides to strangle his lover with her own hair. The closing line, ‘And yet God has not said a word!’, both reinforces the notion that this death is merely a literary death and plays the same game of negation and denial in relation to the existence of God.

Blanchot shows elsewhere that this form of death and negation applies to narrative voice in both fiction and testimony. In ‘The Instant of My Death’ he refers to himself in the third person and attempts to describe or imagine how he himself might have felt in the face of a German firing squad:

I know – do I know it – that the one at whom the Germans were already aiming, awaiting but the final order, experienced then a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of beatitude (nothing happy, however) – sovereign elation? The encounter of death with death?³⁴

The ‘do I know it’ here functions to draw attention to the operation of negativity and the impossibility of authentically presenting either another person, a coherent or singular self, or oneself from a previous time. The distancing from the ‘I’ of the narrator and the ‘one at whom the Germans were already aiming’ enacts a fictive annihilation at the precise moment in the testimony when the life is most in danger and when it is spared.

Orpheus, before he descended into the underworld, could play so beautifully that trees would gather round to hear him and rocks would soften and relax a little. The negation and abolition of a real thing by the work of literature is also an act of concealment (concealing its absence) in this concealment is a possibility that it is sustained in its negative state:

When (literature) names something, whatever it designates is abolished; but whatever is abolished is also sustained.³⁵

There is no simple opposition between presence and absence in Blanchot’s theory of literature. Following Heidegger, he allows literature conceal the absence of a presence within the absence that is the condition of language. Language is the life that endures death and maintains itself in it³⁶. Death is the condition of language. The nothingness of language intimates, in its own negativity, a possibility of being. Since man knows, uniquely, that he will die (he is ‘death in the process of becoming’), death comes to define ‘his only hope of being man’:

This is why we can say that there is being because there is nothingness: death is man’s possibility, his chance, it is through death that the future of a finished world is still there for us; death is man’s greatest hope, his only hope of being man.³⁷

The death of ‘this woman’ is not a straightforward negation of presence with absence but is a concealment of the absence of presence through negation:

In speech what dies is what gives life to speech; speech is the life of that death.³⁸

This is the mechanism by which literature is capable of ‘re-presenting’ anything. Literature offers hope because it enacts a mastery of death and the possibility of an idealised representation within the operation of negation.

Speech, Writing, Literature

As our procession circles closer to the centre, we are able to ask what literate is made out of. ‘Literature is bound to language’³⁹. The act of speech is a double negation. Both the thing that is being talked about and the ‘I’ that speaks is explicitly and implicitly rendered in language. Since they are rendered in language they are negated:

When I speak, I deny the existence of what I am saying, but I also deny the existence of the person who is saying it.⁴⁰

Negation and the lack of a self-present relation between signifier and signified is the condition of language. However, it is the condition of man ‘not to be able to approach anything or experience anything except through the meaning he had to create’⁴¹. Language is always already the interface for the creation of meaning, and so man is in a perpetual state of creating meaning through negation and interacting through a veil of death and the concealment of death:

Is it that words have lost all relation to what they designate? But this absence of relation is not a defect, and if it is a defect, this defect is the only thing that gives language its full value.⁴²

In Blanchot, there is no simple disavowal of writing in favour of speech; instead he is more concerned with the difference between everyday language and literary language. This is not to privilege any formal ‘literariness’, but is instead to argue that literature is aware of the negativity of language even as it uses it, whilst everyday language is compelled to ‘play along’ with a notion of presence that is not really there:

That is the primary difference between common language and literary language. The first accepts that once the non-existence of the cat has passed into the world, the cat itself comes to life again fully and certainly in the form of its idea (its being) and its meaning.⁴³

The condition of literary language is its awareness of language’s own separation from reality and the possibility of either referentiality or presentation:

Language perceives that its meaning derives not from what exists but from its own retreat from existence⁴⁴

But literature understands that it is constituted entirely in language, so whilst language retreats from existence literature retreats with it, retaining its power to narrate its separation, kept alive by being capable of this (and only this) narration, and speaking only of its inability to speak with simple, straightforward meaning:

Literature has certainly triumphed over the meaning of words, but what it has found in words considered apart from their meaning is meaning that has become thing: and thus it is meaning detached from its conditions, separated from its moments, wandering like an empty power, a power no one can do anything with, a power without power, the simple inability to cease to be, but which, because of that, appears to be the proper determination of indeterminate and meaningless existence.⁴⁵

Yet Heidegger tells us that ‘Language is the house of being. In its home man dwells’⁴⁶. Even as language retreats from existence, it remains the only means by which man is able to have any correspondence with reality.

Literature, by its very activity, denies the substance of what it represents. This is its law and its truth.⁴⁷

Literature plays a special role in relation to man, being and language by making it possible for man to comprehend and articulate the separation from existence that is otherwise concealed in everyday language. In acknowledging the presence of absence in language, man is also able to recognise the spectre of death in existence. This awareness of death is what Heidegger says makes it possible for man to venture in the world⁴⁸

.

Death on the Slopes

As we have said. Literature is made of language. But literature is aware that it is made of language and is able to treat language as if it were its own reality. For Blanchot, this provides two slopes on which the writer of literature can operate:

The first slope is meaningful prose. Its goal is to express things in a language that designates things according to what they mean… What is art’s complaint about everyday speech? It says it lacks meaning: art feels it is madness to think that in each word some thing is completely present through the absence that determines it, and so art sets off in quest of a language that can recapture this absence itself and represent the endless movement of comprehension.⁴⁹

The second slope is for writers who ‘are interested in the reality of language, because they are not interested in the world, but in what things and beings would be if there were no world.’⁵⁰

These slopes are slippery. There are no fixed positions:

An art which purports to follow one slope is already on the other.⁵¹

This is because literature is aware of language’s retreat from existence so it can’t stay on the first slope without finding itself in a state of negation and abstraction that places it on the second slope. Literature can’t stay on the second slope because that would mean denying the world and, in a similar point to that made about the solitary writer, such an implicit shunning of the world would be an implied critique of it and would therefore situate the writer back on the first slope:

It is negation, because it drives the inhuman, indeterminate side of things back into nothingness; it defines them, makes them finite, and this is the sense in which literature is really the work of death in the world. But at the same time, after having denied things in their existence, it preserves them in their being; it causes things to have a meaning, and the negation which is death at work is also the advent of meaning, the activity of comprehension.⁵²

One slope kills; the other slope mourns. But not necessarily in that order.

Ghostscript

We have encircled and interrogated literature. We have examined the writer that we thought came before it. We have looked at the reader that we thought came after it. We have looked above, below and inside literature. We found in every case that death was there before us. Have we been examining an apparition? Might the power of literature derive not merely from its power over death, but its specifically spectral qualities?

Psychoanalysis has taught that the dead—a dead parent, for example—can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts.⁵³

Literature works like a ghost. The most one can say about it is that it is ‘not nothing’. It is can materialise in this world yet not of this world. It can materialise at a certain time but it comes from outside of time. It appears to bring a message. Like literature, it is a thing and it is not a thing. It is not presence and not absence. The spectral qualities of literature serve to deconstruct the dimensions of time, space, interiority, exteriority, consciousness and materiality that Blanchot has explored and found to be governed by death, and which philosophy to some extend depends upon. Despite it’s nothingness and because of its non-nothingness, literature retains a power that is analogous to haunting:

It is as though in the very heart of literature and language, beyond the visible movements that transform them, a point of instability were reserved, a power to work substantial metamorphoses, a power capable of changing everything about it without changing anything.⁵⁴

Like all ghosts, literature resists reflection. If philosophy attempts reflection on literature it is philosophy that is left troubled and uncertain whilst literature remains impossible to pin down:

If reflection, imposing as it is, approaches literature, literature becomes a caustic force, capable of destroying the very capacity in itself and in reflection to be imposing. If reflection withdraws, then literature once again becomes something important, essential, more important than the philosophy, the religion, or the life of the world which it embraces.⁵⁵

Like a ghost, Literature arrives without arriving:

Es spukt… “it ghosts,” “it apparitions.” An identity that, without doing anything, invisibly occupies places belonging finally neither to us nor to it.⁵⁶

Derrida notes that there is, historically, reluctance on the part of philosophy to admit to the existence of ghosts. In Archive Fever he discusses how Freud seeks to distance himself from himself within his own story concerning ghosts⁵⁷. He says, ‘I know of a doctor’, and the ‘doctor’ in question is soon revealed to be Freud. If instead he said ‘I saw a ghost’ his discussion of the encounter would be undermined – it would immediately be robbed of its right to appear to be a scientific discourse concerning truth. Writing about an apparently fictional doctor lends the story credibility without undermining the ‘scientific’ discourse that surrounds it. Collapsing the distance between Freud and the ‘doctor’ would kill Freud’s reputation. Yet such reputations are themselves a form and harbinger of death, as it is for ‘Robbespierrer’s virtue’ and ‘Saint-Juste’s restlessness’.⁵⁸

Es spukt. It spooks. Literature spooks philosophy. Why should the question of death be so central to the philosophical interrogation of literature? Because philosophy is spooked by literature.

References

¹ Quoted by Gillian Rose in Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation, Cambridge University Press, 1996, P. 11

² Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 311

³ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 320

⁴ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 305

⁵ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 305

⁶ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 304

⁷ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 309

⁸ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 310

⁹ William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii, 234-235

¹⁰ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 315 - 316

¹¹ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 316

¹² Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ in Image Music Text, Fontana Press, 1977, P. 143

¹³ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 303

¹⁴ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 303

¹⁵ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 314

¹⁶ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 314

¹⁷ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 328

¹⁸ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 310 311

¹⁹ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 317

²⁰ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 340

²¹ See Deleuze Foucault

²² Michel Foucault, ‘Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside’ in Foucault:Blanchot, Zone Books, 1990, P. 12

²³ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 306

²⁴ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 306

²⁵ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 307

²⁶ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 308

²⁷ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 305

²⁸ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 304

²⁹ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 339

³⁰ http://www.artwrite.cofa.unsw.edu.au/0328/features/elliott_corneliaparker/elliott_corneliaparker,%20p2.html

³¹ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 322

³² Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 326

³³ Robert Browning, ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ in The Poems Volume 1, Penguin Books, 1981, P.381

³⁴ Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, Stanford University Press, 1994, P. 5

³⁵ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 329

³⁶ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 336

³⁷ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 337

³⁸ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 327

³⁹ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 322

⁴⁰ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 324

⁴¹ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 323

⁴² Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 322

⁴³ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 325

⁴⁴ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 324

⁴⁵ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 331

⁴⁶ Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’ in Basic Writings, Harper, P. 217

⁴⁷ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 310

⁴⁸ “Being lets beings loose into the daring venture. This release, flinging them loose, is the real daring… Being is the venture, pure and simple.” Martin Heidegger, ‘What are Poets For?’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, P. 101

⁴⁹ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 333

⁵⁰ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 333

⁵¹ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 332

⁵² Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 338

⁵³ Jacques Derrida, quoted in “Jacques Derrida,” by Mitchell Stephens, New York Times Magazine (January 23, 1994)

⁵⁴ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 343

⁵⁵ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 302

⁵⁶ Jacques Derrida, ‘What is Ideology’ in Specters of Marx, the state of the debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, Routledge, 1994

⁵⁷ Jaques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1995, P. 88 - 89

⁵⁸ Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995, P. 319

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