The Instant of My Death, and: Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (review)

Blanchot, Maurice, The Instant of My Death; and Derrida, Jacques, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. Pp. 115.

This book presents Blanchot’s “Instant of My Death,” a tiny prose text of 1994 so spare that nearly any paraphrase overwhelms it, followed by Derrida’s Demeure, a hundred-page lecture on the Blanchot text. In Blanchot’s story–or memoir, or fantasy–the narrator recalls a young man nearly shot in the last days of World War II. A roving band of soldiers pillages his region of the French countryside, burning farms and killing the farmers’ sons. The lieutenant orders his men to execute the young man, then moves away, distracted by the noise of an explosion. It turns out that the soldiers are actually Russians from the traitorous General Vlassov’s army, and one of them, who explains this, dismisses the young man. Instead of losing his life, he loses only a manuscript, which the soldiers remove from his house. The narrator reflects on the strange feelings of elation and guilt that forever alter this man’s now posthumous life, “as if the death outside of him could only henceforth collide with the death in him” (9). In a kind of postlude, the protagonist–clearly a literary figure now, more and more resembling Blanchot–meets with Malraux and Paulhan concerning the lost manuscript.