The Instant of My Death, and

Demeure: Fiction and Testimony

Bibliographic Data

ID5339773
AuthorsRei Terada (0009-0007-3271-4162, corresponding author)
Year2001
Volume30
Issue3
Pages132-136
Publication date2001-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSubStance (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0049-2426 • E-ISSN: 1527-2095
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/sub.2001.0034
OpenAlexW1640876992
LanguageEN
Citations received9

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

Art · Fantasy · Feeling · Literature · Memoir · Paraphrase · Psychoanalysis · Shot (pellet) · Tragedy (event) · French Literature and Critical Theory · History · Philosophy · Psychology

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