Life emerges from non-life, but at the cost of an unexperiencable death (a trauma, writes Caruth). Life cannot assume that death, not even by dying (writes Brassier). At the same time, the unassimilable death is not forever receding future—it’s here, it’s inside (a dead and scarred-over ‘vesicle,’ writes Freud; the remnant of monocellular life that sacrificed itself in the furnace of unassimilable experience, overwhelming stimuli.) The anterior is lost: there is no emergence and no beginning, only a continuing. This is the logic that animates (or re-animates) the fictions of Beckett and Blanchot. Molloy doesn’t know how came to the room; nor does Malone; and as for the unnamable, not only does he begin (or continue) by asking where now, who now, when now, but the anterior is lost to him, too: “Can it be that one day, off it goes on, that one day I simply stayed in, instead of going out, in the old way, out to spend the day and night as far away as possible, it wasn’t very far. Perhaps that is how it began.” In Blanchot’s Death Sentence, the lost anterior is the text of the story that is present in the world of the story—but present as absent, as destroyed or lost, commanded to be burnt or locked away: “I must not forget that I once managed to put these things into writing. … Inactive, in a state of lethargy, I wrote this story. But once it was written I reread it and destroyed the manuscript.”