The Refusal of Death

“…it is over and still it goes on, and is there any tense for that?”—Molloy.

I haven’t yet understood something very basic, something I think a lot of people have long since understood: how it is that the end doesn’t end, how the end can be involuted. For example, in Beckett’s trilogy especially, though also in Blanchot’s L’Arret de mort. It must be something very basic to narrative—to all narrative. I can conceptualize it philosophically better than narratively/literarily. Although you’d think the one understanding would illuminate the other.

For Blanchot, the impossibility of death is closely related to Heidegger’s ideas in Being and Time, to the distinction between death as ontological possibility and death as material actuality: these two deaths never converge. Ray Brassier,* Nihil Unbound: “But to say that death ‘is’ precisely insofar as it is never actual is to say that though Dasein is already dying, it can never actually die, since death is its transcendental and hence unactualizable condition of (im)possibility.”

The impossibility of death, though, doesn’t mean immortality. Beckett’s unnamable can’t stop failing to stop going on, but that “survivance parlante” (as Blanchot calls the unnamable) isn’t the same as an immortal soul. Herschel Farbmann: “In its restlessness, the dead body—the corpse-image—is, in Blanchot’s analysis, the image of the absence of the subject of that death and not, in any way, an image of the subject of the experience of death.”

In Volodine, the impossibility of death is sometimes along these Blanchotian-Heideggerian lines. In Ecrivains, the chapters of which so often end on words of ending, such as rendomir, se pender, etc, the writer Bogdan Tarrassiev is obsessed with a very Beckettian problem: how to come to the end of writing. But the impossibility of death also happens (or fails to happen) on a world scale in post-exoticism, to all of human life on Earth. In the death throes of humanity, or even after its death throes, a survivance parlante goes on narrating post-exotically, goes on talking. (Is it Des enfers fabuleux that ends at the seaside, where it’s revealed that the narrator has been speaking this book to the only creatures that still live, to crabs and other tidal life?)

But sometimes Volodine seems to embrace a bolder, more contrarian but also more naïve impossibility of death—a kind of furious utopianism. Closer to Nikolai Fyodorov’s “common task”** than to Dasein’s task. So, for example, Volodine in this interview: “Personnellement, je ne supporte pas l’idée de la mort, que cette mort applique à mes proches ou à moi-même… Et c’est avec le poids de ce refus, cette répugnance, que depuis toujours je transforme littérairement la fin de mes personnages en un moment de réalité ou de rêve où leur vie se prolonge. Je puise dans l’imaginaire pour annuler et ridiculiser la mort…” He’s not flat-out crazy: “Reste que l’insulter la mort n’apporte qu’une satisfaction passagère. Le néant existe, il est horrible… il est la réalité, et, on se rend compte que la parole, en face de la réalité, ne peut rien.”

I meant for this to be about la flambulance and post-exoticism’s attack on the real. Next time

*It's weird for me to quote Brassier as if he were Heidegger's approving explicator. His point is something else: attempting to assert finitude, Heidegger's philosophy finds itself saddled with "something like an actual infinity" because it can't think a time before or after Dasein's temporalizing. (Enter Dasein, temporalizing...).

 **mankind’s task of perfecting himself so that he stops dying and so that he can also resurrect all the previous dead. What I know about Fyodorov comes from Jonathan Flately's tracking of his influence on Platonov’s Techenvgur, in Affective Mapping. And Stites's Revolutionary Dreams.