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Dying without Death: Temporality,

Writing, and Survival in Maurice
Blanchot's The Instant of My Death and
Don DeLillo's Falling Man
a a
Stefan Polatinsky & Karen Scherzinger
a
University of Johannesburg
Published online: 15 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: Stefan Polatinsky & Karen Scherzinger (2013) Dying without Death: Temporality,
Writing, and Survival in Maurice Blanchot's The Instant of My Death and Don DeLillo's Falling Man ,
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 54:2, 124-134, DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2010.549857

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 Critique, 54:124–134, 2013
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0011-1619 print/1939-9138 online
DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2010.549857

S TEFAN P OLATINSKY AND K AREN S CHERZINGER

University of Johannesburg

Dying without Death: Temporality, Writing, and Survival in

Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death and
Don DeLillo’s Falling Man
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What is at stake when we write about near-death? This essay engages with the temporal
repercussions—a radical “time out of joint”—that the event of near-death opens up. It explores
how Maurice Blanchot (in The Instant of My Death) and Don DeLillo (in Falling Man) attempt
to write the instance of remaining through the creative use and transgressive play of language
and grapple with the radical uncertainty of surviving death.
Keywords: survival, near-death narratives, DeLillo, Blanchot, temporality

The Instant of My Death by Maurice Blanchot (2000) explores the extraordinary tale of a
young man “prevented from dying by death itself” (3). This young man is captured during World
War II and lined up to be executed. He awaits his death “as if everything had already been done”
(5) and experiences something “unanalysable” (9) and indescribable. However, the order to fire
is interrupted by noise from a nearby battle, and the young man is released. The text flounders
in attempting to articulate this “experience,” this “encounter of death with death,” which invokes
a feeling of “extraordinary lightness” (5). After this episode, “at the moment when the shooting
was no longer but to come” (7), this feeling of lightness persists but cannot be translated: “freed
from life? the infinite opening up? Neither happiness, nor unhappiness. Nor the absence of fear
and perhaps already the step beyond” (7–9). What remains of his existence may possibly be
transformed by this unanalysable feeling, “as if the death outside of him could only henceforth
collide with the death in him” (9), and the instant of his death is “henceforth always in abeyance”
(11). He finds himself “bound to death by a surreptitious friendship” (5).
The Instant of My Death is a rich and demanding text that challenges writing and repre-
sentation by placing language at its limits, or displacing language at the outer edges of what is
seemingly possible. In ways that are strikingly similar to The Instant of My Death, Don DeLillo
describes a perilously close encounter with death and, like Blanchot, reflects on the limits of
representation that are suggested by survival. Keith Neudecker emerges from the World Trade
Center on September 11, 2001, having experienced at shockingly close quarters the impact of
American Airlines Flight 11 that careered into the North Tower, as a “blast wave passed through

124
 Dying without Death 125

the structure that sent [him] out of his chair and into a wall” (DeLillo 239). He is also a witness
to the final life-moments of his close friend, Rumsey. Like the young man in Blanchot’s story,
Keith’s post-death life—his remaining—is an existence perched on the brink of the indescribable
and unanalyzable. Uncannily, DeLillo uses the very same terms as Blanchot to describe Keith’s
survival: like the tai chi group he observes as he makes his way through the rubble, he too is
henceforth “in a state of abeyance” (The Instant of My Death 11; DeLillo 4). Moving uptown, he
“sees things, somehow, differently [: : : t]here was something critically missing from the things
around him” (DeLillo 5). It is precisely this “state of abeyance,” this seeing of things differently,
decreed by the instant of death and survival, that the remainder of Falling Man explores. Keith
tries “to tell himself that he was alive but the idea was too obscure to take hold” (6); it is the
impossibility of holding on to the obscure idea of survival that Keith, his estranged wife Lianne
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(“When he appeared at the door it was not possible” [87]), and their son Justin must negotiate.
The question that dogs Keith’s post-attack existence is the same one that haunts Blanchot’s recit:
I was going to die: why am I not dead? How can I live beyond the instant of my death? Or, in
the words that Keith uses to describe his vision of a figure falling past his office window, about
to meet his death: “[w]hy am I here instead of there” (244)?
In his essay about the condition and consequences of remaining, Demeure, Jacques Derrida
highlights the ways in which Blanchot’s story blurs the distinctions that pertain between the
apparently mutually exclusive categories of fiction and testimony. Fiction confesses to its non-truth;
testimony, on the other hand, swears to its truth. Deconstructive possibilities abound, however:
testimony is defined, at least in part, by the possibility of falsehood; fiction, in its fabrications,
always already gestures toward the possibility of truth. For Derrida, this deconstructive turn
finds its foothold in the temporal. He argues that Blanchot’s short text concerns itself with an
autobiographical or biographical tremulousness of a young man who claims to bear witness to,
and recount, not only his life but also his death. Significantly, The Instant of My Death is a
narrative and/or testimony (though it “calls these distinctions into question or causes them all
to tremble” [Derrida, Demeure 26]) that signs itself in accordance with “every possible tense: I
am dead, or I will be dead in an instant, or an instant ago I was going to be dead” (45). The
instant of this young man’s death is hidden in the interstices of these tenses, “rests on the very
thing no ontology could essentialize” and receives its “determination from something other than
itself” (28). It attests perhaps to the singularity of a secret that cannot be revealed through the
conventions of chronological time.
The notion of a secret testimony, however, is troubled by contradiction because to testify,
to bear witness, is to abhor a secret and require that the witness “render[s] public” (Derrida,
Demeure 31) that to which he or she testifies. Derrida therefore puts forward the prospect of
“attesting to there being some secret without revealing the heart of the secret” to the possibility of
“testifying to the absence of attestation” (31). This secret instant of death in life takes one beyond
categories in that it cannot be constructed into a form, a realizable, expressible relation: as he
writes elsewhere, it “interminably disqualifies any effort one can make to determine it” (Derrida
and Ferraris 57–58). It is not something that can be detected, demystified, or unveiled, for such
a possibility would imply that the secret is linked to representation and is a reserve of potential
knowing. Ultimately, the secret remains “inviolable even when one thinks one has revealed it”
(Derrida, On the Name 26).1
The irresolvable paradox of testifying to a secret is just one way in which the difficulties
of representing survival and the instant of death are suggested in Blanchot’s story. This double
bind is also suggestively expressed by Blanchot, in The Writing of Disaster, as an “unexperienced
 126 Critique

experience” (67), which speaks of something that takes place without having taken place, a
“strange event” that is “abyssal, elliptical, paradoxical, and [: : : ] undecidable” (Derrida, Demeure
53). The young man was supposed to die and yet the very order to die comes to prevent him
from dying. Being “prevented from dying by death itself” (The Instant of My Death 3), “to die
forsaken by death” (The Writing of the Disaster 136) elicits enigmatic consequences for writing
which is placed and tested at the limits of what Blanchot describes (in The Step Not Beyond)
as “un-knowledge” (112)—not a lack of knowledge or even knowledge of the lack but rather
that which escapes or exceeds knowledge and ignorance alike. Moreover, this “unexperienced
experience” testifies to the possibility that “what will happen will have opened another time.
Absolute anachrony of a time out of joint” (Derrida, Demeure 61)—or, as Lianne Neudecker
describes it in Falling Man, a “deep fold in the grain of things, the way things pass through the
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mind, the way time swings in the mind, which is the only place it meaningfully exists” (DeLillo
105), “a deep pause” (134). This “time out of joint” is a time that does not close in upon itself. It
is a time, in the words of John Caputo, “structurally ex-posed to an out-side that prevents closure”
(123), a time that is an effect of différance. In the space of a few moments of the narrative, “a
man still young” is rendered “already less young” (The Instant of My Death 3–5), yet according to
actual, temporal chronology barely a few seconds have elapsed. This, according to Derrida, comes
to testify to two times: that of objectivity and that of virtual or fictional simulacrum, which remain
incommensurable. There is a disturbance in the measure of time that opens up “an anachrony of
all instants” (Derrida, Demeure 81). This anachrony signals “an outside of time in time” (The
Step Not Beyond 1), a detour or turning away of time that contests and breaches the continuity
of linear time. The rapid aging of this old young man seems to suggest an entire lifetime in an
instant, an instance of eternity, a change of age.
DeLillo apprehends a similarly anachronous moment for his survivor when he describes Keith
and Lianne watching, on television, a replay of the moment of impact as the plane hits the North
Tower of the WTC:

They would all be dead, passengers and crew, and thousands in the tower dead, and
she felt it in her body, a deep pause, and thought there he is, unbelievably, in one of
those towers, and now his hand on hers, in pale light, as though to console her for
his dying. [: : : ] “The second plane, by the time the second plane appears,” he said,
“we’re all a little older and wiser.” (134–35)

In this passage, conventions of time and, inseparably, the distinctions between life and death are put
into question. Time is halted—there is “a deep pause”—and future death is inevitable in the present
(“they would all be dead”). Keith—one of the “all”—is a survivor but barely distinguishable from
the dead, a mere approximation, an almost imperceptible “as though” separating him from having
died. In the brief, unrepresentable moment at which the second plane appears, the possibility that
the first collision was an accident is dismissed and time, once paused, is now accelerated, making
us “all a little older and wiser”—or, as Blanchot has put it, “already less young” (The Instant of
My Death 5).
The structure of DeLillo’s novel enacts these subversions of existential logic. Falling Man
opens with its ending: the moments of Keith’s emergence from the tower, just before it collapses
with Rumsey inside. The final chapter of the novel describes the moments that lead up to the
instant of his near-death, the temporal point at which death and survival are equally poised. In his
description of the impact itself—the instant of Keith’s (non)death—we find DeLillo wrestling at the
 Dying without Death 127

most fundamental level of syntax in an attempt to capture something—nothing? an unexperienced

experience?—that remains doggedly elusive:

A bottle fell off the counter in the galley, on the other side of the aisle, and he watched
it roll this way and that, a water bottle, empty, making an arc one way and rolling
back the other, and he watched it spin more quickly and then skitter across the floor
an instant before the aircraft stuck the tower, heat, then fuel, then fire, and a blast
wave passed through the structure that sent Keith Neudecker out of his chair and into
a wall. (239)

The repeated conjunctions (“and”) and demonstrative adverbs of time (“then”) in this long, winding
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sentence seem to be leading toward—or at least seeking out—a fixed point. However, the instant
of impact defaults to the “instant before.” Representation of the moment of impact can, at best,
only be approximated by the contiguous; and, intriguingly, by means of a syntactical slip. In the
phrase, “before the aircraft struck the tower, heat, then fuel, [: : : ]” the comma splice between
“tower” and “heat” serves to gesture, almost desperately, toward an instant that lies irretrievably
outside of time and words.
In the remainder of this apparently ineffable moment, all temporal and existential certainties
are thrown into disarray. There is a “shift in the basic arrangement of parts and elements” (DeLillo
240): Keith finds himself “losing things as they happened. He felt things come and go” (240);
“[h]e felt the dead nearby” (241). Objects move “in slow motion” (239); there are “long stalled
moments” (244); he has “no sense of pace or rate” (245); there is, he later acknowledges, “a ‘dazed
reality”’ (91). This repeated drawing out of time in the final pages of the novel forms a contrastive
backdrop to a completely different temporal order, in which it is the fleeting, unrepresentable
instant of impact and death that are paradoxically foregrounded.
DeLillo’s preoccupation with the multiple intersections of time, the irretrievable and unrepre-
sentable instant, life, death, and survival is most clearly in evidence when Keith glimpses, through
an office window, a man falling to his death: “He could not stop seeing it, twenty feet away, an
instant of something sideways, going past the window, white shirt, hand up, falling before he saw
it” (DeLillo 242, emphasis added). The unutterable brevity of the instant is contrasted with the
endless perception of memory (“he could not stop seeing it”) and, indeed, also as an apprehension
that precedes perception: it is/was “falling before he saw it.” As was the case with the description
of the plane hitting the tower, the instant can only be represented in terms of an imagining of its
past (the decision to fall, the first tracing of a falling) and its future (where we know the man
must land, as well as in Keith’s memory and a haunting revision).
Later, when Keith is making his way down the stairwell,

[s]omeone took his arm and led him forward for a few steps and then he walked on his
own, in his sleep, and for an instant he saw it again, going past the window, and this
time he thought it was Rumsey. He confused it with Rumsey, the man falling sideways,
arm out and up, like pointed up, like why am I here instead of there. (DeLillo 244,
emphasis added)

The question, “why am I here instead of there,” a question asked by a dying man in the instant
before his death but which remains in the mind of the survivor ensures, in Blanchot’s words, that
he is “bound to death by a surreptitious friendship” (The Instant of My Death 5).
 128 Critique

These temporal distortions index and provoke an equally bewildering existential crisis that
pivots on the life–death axis. Like Keith Neudecker, the young man of Blanchot’s text is a “wit-
ness” to “death that came at him” (Derrida, Demeure 66), and, for Derrida, it is this “inexorability
of what was coming at him” (67) that unleashes a trembling where “everything only may be”
(69). From the very moment that condemns the young man to death (without an ensuing death),
there will be for him, Derrida argues, “a death without death and thus a life without life” (89).
Life has indeed freed itself from or relieved itself of life. The young man lives yet he is no longer
living—at least as he once did—and his existence comes to embody the logical and textual matrix
of “X without X” (to live without living, to die without death, the instant of death without death).
He is “alive and dead, living-dead” (97). For Derrida, the “without” in this model X without X
signifies a “spectral necessity” (92) that overflows the opposition between real and unreal, actual
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and virtual, factual and fictional. The death of which the narrative speaks has taken place even
if it did not take place in what is commonly referred to as “reality.” This possibility of death
without death or life without life defies conventional logic and inscribes a certain non-knowledge
(or “un-knowledge” as Blanchot suggests) that is not ignorance or indifference but rather what
Joseph G. Kronick describes as a structural submission to the heterogeneity of not-knowing and
a referral to the other.2 What was coming or supposed to come—in this instance, death—never
actually arrives, and it is this nonarrival of death that belongs to another time that cannot be
absorbed within a linear-temporal narrative. It belongs to the enigma of a “lightness” that calls
the present beyond (au-delà) itself and that cannot be captured in the grossness of the order of
the present or the actual.
The lightness that defines the young man’s survival defines Keith Neudecker, too, who, as
we have seen, is bathed in a “pale light” as he observes the television footage that records his
death. (It must be noted that the camera’s mechanical recording of airplanes crossing a sky and
colliding into a building is no triumph of the visual over the verbal. It notably fails to capture the
reality of the event for Keith; indeed, the recording seems to obscure, rather than reveal, to draw
more attention to unrepresentability than representability.) For Keith, the new way of being that
this lightness suggests instills a heightened awareness of the suspension of time and being:

It was Keith as well who was going slow, easing inward. He used to want to fly
out of self-awareness, day and night, a body in raw motion. Now he finds himself
drifting into spells of reflection, thinking not in clear units, hard and linked, but only
absorbing what comes, drawing things out of time and memory and into some dim
space that bears his collected experience. Or he stands and looks. He stands at the
window and sees what’s happening in the street. Something is always happening, even
on the quietest days and deep into night, if you stand for a while and look. (DeLillo
66)

Tenses, usually reliable markers of time, teeter here indecisively. The dominant past tense of the
narrative (he “was going slow”) fleetingly shifts into the present (“Now he finds himself”); but the
lack of “clear units, hard and linked” indicates that the present is far from stable and representable:
rather, it is troubled by indices of the past (time and memory) and can be comprehended only by
“dim space.” Similarly, the phrase “something is always happening” hints at a disjuncture between
(or coexistence of) the temporally circumscribed instant and the ongoing and indefinite present.
This temporal-existential tension is also at play when Keith, making his way to Florence’s
apartment, sees a woman on horseback, which causes him to muse that it
 Dying without Death 129

was something that belonged to another landscape, something inserted, a conjuring

that resembled for the briefest second some half-seen image only half believed in the
seeing, when the witness wonders what has happened to the meaning of things, to
tree, street, stone, simple words lost in the falling ash. (DeLillo 103)

Keith’s encounter here with a suspension between the seen and the intuited is identical to Lianne’s
sighting of the Falling Man performance artist who, it might be argued, comes as close as it is
at all possible to perform the condition of X without X and causes Lianne to wonder “what has
happened to the meaning of things.” The Falling Man—David Janiak—in his suspension from
various New York public structures, captures the instant of death but survives (at least for most
of the novel), and it is precisely the contrast between the instant, the implied, anticipated future
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of death and the actual outcome of survival that makes him such a disturbing, striking metaphor
in the novel.
The Falling Man is, like the young man of Blanchot’s text, anonymous (at least until the last
pages of the novel) and therefore iconic, an inhabitant of the temporal and spatial slash between
death/survival. However, unlike Blanchot’s young man, the Falling Man’s gesture is fiercely public.
This public aspect of his performance—a performance that testifies to the death of the real falling
man but renders it fictional because it is a performance and because he does not die in these early
enactments—confronts the New Yorkers who see him with a crisis of the apparently untenable
contingencies of testimony and truth in performance:

There were people shouting up at him, outraged at the spectacle, the puppetry of
human desperation, a body’s last fleet breath and what it held. It held the gaze of the
world, she thought. There was the awful openness of it, something we’d not seen, the
single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all. And
now, she thought, this little theatre piece, disturbing enough to stop traffic and send
her back into the terminal. (DeLillo 33)

The witnesses—or are they the audience?—are outraged precisely because the distinctions between
fiction (his performance) and reality (the death of the man he represents) are unclear. Derrida’s
sense of the aporetic behavior of fictional testimony seems especially apposite here. Because
the Falling Man is performing the fall of the men and women who jumped from the towers,
the observers must know he will not die: it is mere “puppetry,” a “little theatre piece.” But the
representation exposes a vivid and painful truth—a “collective dread”—that is neither mere nor
“little” but rather a moment of epistemic shift, biblical in its implications, as is made clear in
the allusions to Jesus of Nazareth’s transubstantiation in the phrase, “body come down amongst
us all.” In her second sighting of the Falling Man, Lianne “wishe[s] she could believe this was
some kind of antic street theatre, an absurdist drama that provokes onlookers to share a comic
understanding of what is irrational in the great scheme of being or in the next small footstep. [But
t]his was too near and deep, too personal” (163). The Falling Man is suspended literally from the
building, but figuratively, also, between representation and truth, and between X and X. He recalls
something that surely every witness to the attacks of 9/11 has seen: the falling man, whether in
photographs, in television footage, or in reality; and yet he also represents, awfully, indescribably,
“something we’d not seen,” that is, the sheer unrepresentability of X without X. Not surprisingly,
then, he holds the “gaze of the world.” (DeLillo’s novel, of course, performs in much the same
 130 Critique

way as its central trope: Keith’s story is caught in the netherworld between reality—9/11 as a
historical event—and fiction.)
For Blanchot, survival signals the dark side of life, the far side of beyond without being, of
life without death. It is a passage or interval of what has always already come to pass. This interval
between the no longer and the not yet signals a lapse of time (le laps du temps), a time lag, or
the interim of an endless wait (le délai), which Hélène Cixous describes as the entredeux, the in-
between, between a life which is ending and a life which is beginning. The entredeux is nothing,
no-thing, “a moment in life where you are not entirely living, where you are almost dead. Where
you are not dead. Where you are not yet in the process of reliving” (Cixous 9). The intensity of
survival is an aspect of life death (la vie la mort)3 that contributes to a sense of defamiliarization
and strangeness. It is everything that “makes the course of life be interrupted” (9). We do not
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know how to “live” it. But, as Cixous reminds us, “we must” (9). Survival is always a “step over
the edge” (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster 48) that rules out every conclusion and does
not mark the end of the fall. Indeed, it is not the end, but rather a “never-ending ending,” as
Levinas suggests (132). It is as if survival signifies an eternal detour—a “deep fold in the grain of
things”—that cannot be unified by the present. Fittingly, then, when Lianne observes the Falling
Man for a second time, she finds herself “stretched so tight across the moment that she could
not think her own thoughts” (DeLillo 165): the quotidian mutual placements of present time and
self-identity wildly distorted.
Derrida extends his response to the interconnected distortions of time, testimony, and fiction in
Blanchot’s story to argue that the event of “dying without death” cannot be traced back to a fullness
of presence, to a present that was not ruptured by différance. The event of near-death “can only
be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger” (Derrida, Of Grammatology 5), and any attempt
to describe it would need to take into account the movement from an instance in which death may
have occurred to an endless interval of surviving. This endless interval bears witness, impossibly,
to that which escapes (historical) representation, to the “vertiginous extremity of that which is
itself without limits” (Hill, Blanchot 3). For Keith in Falling Man, this “vertiginous extremity”
takes the form of an inescapable and all-encompassing state of heightened defamiliarity:

He began to think into the day, into the minute. It was being here, alone in time,
that made this happen, being away from routine stimulus, all the streaming forms of
office discourse. Things seemed still, they seemed clearer to the eye, oddly in ways
he didn’t understand. He began to see what he was doing. He noticed things, all the
small lost strokes of a day or a minute. [: : : ] Nothing seemed familiar, being here, in
a family again, and he felt strange to himself, or always had, but it was different now
because he was watching. (65)

The tension in this passage between that which seems and that which is observed, between seeing
and understanding, between heightened clarity and strangeness, is just one instance amongst
many in Falling Man in which DeLillo pushes at the boundaries of representation, a testing
of limitations and possibilities that a text about death and survival necessarily decrees. Keith’s
disembodied self-watchfulness here and his sense of being “strange to himself” alerts us to the
otherworldly existence in which his survival has placed him—and the challenge to representation
that survival provokes. Not-dying, as we have seen, does not simply mean to continue to live,
but to live as one would, having died: as a “hovering presence” (59). Blanchot, in The Writing
of the Disaster, argues that life itself as survival (la sur-vie) alludes to an unbridgeable interval,
 Dying without Death 131

which, once crossed, demands rather pressingly an other life, the life of the other—“the burn of
life which cannot burn out” (105). Living on (or perhaps “on living,” survivre) as if the event of
near-death, of dying, has no terminus, seems to suggest a reprieve or an afterlife, life after death,
“more life or more than life” (Derrida, “Living On” 77). It is a survival and a revenance, a living
on and a returning from the dead that suggests an interruption of life through dying, a “startling
starting over” (114) that marks an extension of life in the form of a reprieve. Both Keith and
Blanchot’s young man adopt a spectral existence and remain in life as ghosts. The ghost is the
one who “dies only to survive” (Blanchot, The Work of Fire 81), the one who embodies the “as
if” of the living dead, the one who is a witness to the secret of how an aspect of death opens
onto the challenges and complexities of survival. Indeed, survival is the “torment of language, the
incessant search for its infinity” (Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation 385) so that life as living on
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or living over suggests both a continuation of life as well as a strange life after death—the “most
intense life possible” (Derrida, Learning to Live 52).
Survival presupposes something, perhaps a life that has escaped from itself, that has already
come upon us and that cannot be present. What never yet takes place happens nonetheless. The
event of near-death, which comes to evict us from ourselves, launches us into a space-time whose
coordinates are different from those to which we have always been accustomed (Cixous 9). This
existential repositioning in turn affects the attempt to represent the instance of near-death and its
fallout, which impacts language by bringing on what Blanchot calls “a base of absence, semblances
of sentences, remainders of language, imitations of thought, simulations of being” (The Step Not
Beyond 52). Such a description is an especially fitting one for the attention paid to language
in Falling Man. In the wake of 9/11, in which death and near-death have been brought into
terrifying proximity, everyone seems to operate from and toward a base of absence. The Falling
Man, for example, when interviewed, has “no comment to make to the media on any subject”
(DeLillo 222), and he persistently turns down invitations to speak, highlighting the impossibility of
articulating the “simulations of [non]being” toward which his performance gestures. Justin wryly
tests the communicative potential of a depleted language when he elects to speak exclusively in
monosyllables; Lianne’s Alzheimer’s writing group meet with the express purpose of harnessing
language to memory, only to find that it offers no protection against the “world receding” (93);
and, with nearly every character in the novel being accorded an alternative name, identity is
loosened from its customary anchors. Furthermore, DeLillo’s characteristic style—withholding,
reticent—is especially suited to his purpose in this novel. It is gestural, recalcitrant even, seeking
alternative forms of expression in sentences freed of elaboration, tropes, adjectives, complexity
(lines of dialogue rarely exceed one or two), or even subjectivity (“Raise before the flop. Hit early
and hard” [226]).
The reconfiguration of existential coordinates that near-death inaugurates, and the represen-
tational challenges that such a reconfiguration provokes, finds oblique expression in DeLillo’s
allusions to the still life paintings by Giorgio Morandi. To begin with, Lianne and Martin both
find a reassuring representational certainty in the painting hanging in Nina’s apartment: “She saw
the tower” (DeLillo 49). However, as the novel progresses, and as time passes, Lianne’s close
encounter with the temporal, existential, and representational difficulties put into play by Keith’s
survival makes her impatient with such serendipitous coincidences, and she cannot disagree with
her mother’s remark that “[t]hese shapes are not translatable to modern towers, twin towers. It’s
work that rejects that kind of extension or projection. It takes you inward, down and in. That’s what
I see there, half buried, something deeper than things or shapes of things” (111). Near-death—or,
in Nina’s case, death to come—challenges the translatability of experience into language. The
 132 Critique

paintings—“natura morta”—neither represent nor not-represent; but allude to something deeper,

unfathomable, inarticulate yet discernable in semblances and approximations.
In addition to the ambiguous status of the Morandi paintings, the liminal condition of being
forever an interval and the representational crisis such a condition inspires are also explored in
the passages of the novel that describe Keith in the casino. As Keith’s spectrality becomes more
and more pronounced towards the end of the novel (he is “sequestered,” there is a “dimension
of literal distance between himself and others” [DeLillo 212]), he “drifts away,” “[d]isappearing
in the consequence” to what Lianne pithily describes as a “séance in hell” (216). The casino to
which Keith retreats toward the end of the novel is presented by DeLillo as a kind of netherworld,
a purgatory way-station between life and death, “a kind of delirium” (226):
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The money mattered but not so much. The game mattered, the touch of felt beneath
the hands, the way the dealer burnt one card, dealt the next. He wasn’t playing for
the money. He was playing for the chips. The value of each chip had only a hazy
meaning. It was the disk itself that mattered, the color itself. There was the laughing
man at the end of the room. There was the fact that they would all be dead one day.
He wanted to rake in the chips and stack them. The game mattered, the stacking chips,
the eye count, the play and dance of hand and eye. He was identical with these things.
(228)

Keith’s knowledge that “they would all be dead” one day is, of course, a certainty compromised
by the fact of his survival. This assertion of death’s inevitability that only survival can comprehend
seems to throw into relief the arbitrary and conventional association of sign and referent: the chip
as sign has lost its referentiality and can only be valued as currency without a standard. What
is more, it has no meaning as sign: this is only hazy, at best. In keeping with this shattering
of referential bonds, Keith’s assertion of identity is unconvincing: what he is “identical with” is
the disembodied “hand and eye” at “play.” Singularity is lost: the only coherence possible seems
predicated on shattered forms. All that matters is chance: the game, which is transient, freed from
rules, conventions, futures and pasts. It matters only inasmuch as it doesn’t mean, or matter.
The Instant of My Death and Falling Man offer the reader the experience of language
unworking itself, so that both texts affirm the “essential dispersion and insubordination” of writing,
the position of writing as “irreducible dissidence” (Hill, Blanchot 188). Moreover, they highlight
just what is at stake in representing near-death through writing; what it means to think about and
represent the event of near-death that may be essentially unknowable and unrepresentable. From
the very instant that one must invent a language and form to attest to this instance, the writer,
as Blanchot suggests, becomes exiled from writing; in attempting to imagine the aporetic and
enigmatic haunting of the event, the writer is forced to make concessions where a certain “un-
practice” (The Writing of the Disaster 26) comes into being. The endeavor to craft a form where
no forms hold sway brings to the surface something like absent meaning, which is not the absence
of a potential or latent meaning, but the “passive pressure which is not yet what we call thought”
(41). In this gesture, knowledge is drawn to the outer edges of the system and into a space of
aimless poetic drifting so that knowledge changes imperceptibly and takes one more step towards
the silent murmuring of the abyss of truth. Hartman usefully suggests that this type of writing
“participates in a complex movement of erosion that constitutes the soul and life of words,” it
makes “things appear insofar as they have disappeared, drawing light from that extinction, from
the element of obscurity itself” (47). Hartman’s proposition resonates with Blanchot’s suggestion
 Dying without Death 133

that writing or literature is “going toward itself, toward its essence, which is disappearance (la
disparition)” (The Book to Come 195).
To write near-death is “to be in relation, through words in their absence, with what one
cannot remember” (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster 121). It is to transform the instant into
the horizontality of an imaginary space so that one passes into an endless interval of dying. Instead
of explicating writing through recourse to narrativity, this movement of/in writing mobilizes itself
in order to bear witness, impossibly, to that which escapes (historical) representation, to the
“vertiginous extremity of that which is itself without limits” (Hill, Blanchot 3). Ultimately, writing
the event in which one survives near-death attests to writing that is in excess of life and that life
cannot contain (Hart 10). Even in thinking about what might make this writing possible, we
can only resort to more metaphors and esoteric aphorisms where something comes to pass in a
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movement that exports and deports. In short, writing near-death is an act sustained by radical
excess that is irrecuperable by any totalizing discourse or dialectic. It requires an endlessness or
limitlessness without purpose, unity, and circumscription and, in this way, it “lies before us as a
challenge, an extreme exigency that bears witness to the irreducible futurity of that which is still
to come” (Hill, “Introduction” 19).
Blanchot’s and DeLillo’s texts both demonstrate how survival transgresses the boundary of
the self’s jurisdiction; it introduces an event or encounter with aspects of experience that are
not reducible to the self. It is properly an “entirely other experience” (Blanchot, The Infinite
Conversation 44) of a time out of synchrony and deprived of the dimension of passing beyond.
One is “delivered over to another time” (44), to an experience at the limits that “escapes all employ
and all end” whereby something (as no-thing) “escapes our very capacity to undergo it, but whose
trial we cannot escape” (207). The event of near-death cannot directly be written about because it
is the opening of an infinite movement that attests to the outer edges or limits of consciousness and
language whereby its “eventness” remains heterogeneous to the very language it sets in motion. It
turns away from language even as language approaches it; it “takes consciousness and language
to the limits of their possibility” (Clark 85). If near-death and survival resist direct representation,
however, they do not foreclose quite as rigidly upon the approximative and gestural. The Instant
of My Death and Falling Man are written in the mood and moment of falling, not in the fixed
aftermath of fallen. Falling is, in these texts, the condition of suspension and in-between, entredeux;
it is to occupy a time out of joint. In their creative engagement with falling as a narrative strategy,
with writing in and of a state of abeyance that responds to the temporal and representational
consequences of survival, both attest (perhaps) to the (secret) potential of fictional testimony.

Notes
1 For Derrida, the secret makes one tremble in that it unsettles everything so as “to imprint upon the body an
irrepressible shaking” (The Gift of Death 53). The secret is what ties an irrefutable past (the shock of the event has
affected us) with a future that cannot be anticipated, with a future that can only be apprehended as unforeseeable and
unpredictable. We tremble because we do not know from which direction the shock of the secret has come, which we
can neither see nor foresee: “I tremble at what exceeds my seeing and my knowing (mon voir et mon savoir) although it
concerns the innermost parts of me, right down to my soul, down to the bone, as we say” (54).
2 John Caputo puts this rather differently when he points out how non-knowing (non-savoir) does not imply that one

relinquishes the endeavor to know or that one promotes an obscurantism that takes delight in non-knowledge. Instead, non-
knowledge is what protects the future and keeps it open by keeping its secret. It breaks open the parameters of the possible
by refusing knowledge that forecloses the possible scope of the future via a prescient programming or predelineation of
the future’s foreseeable range.
 134 Critique

3 The notion of life death (la vie la mort) is taken from Gaston’s reading of Derrida in Derrida and Disinterest. It

suggests that which exceeds the inversions of either life as death or death as life by creating a gap of altering difference
and a structure of alteration without opposition so that life continues elsewhere.

Works Cited
Blanchot, Maurice. The Book to Come. Trans. C. Mandell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.
. The Infinite Conversation. Transl. S. Hanson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.
. The Instant of My Death. Trans. E. Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
. The Step Not Beyond. Trans. L. Nelson. Albany: State U of New York P, 1992.
. The Work of Fire. Trans. C. Mandell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. A. Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995.
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Caputo, John D. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997.
Cixous, Hélène. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. Trans. E. Prenowitz. London: Routledge, 1997.
Clark, Timothy. Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derrida’s Notion and Practice of Literature. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1992.
DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. London: Picador, 2007.
Derrida, Jacques. Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Trans. E. Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
. The Gift of Death. Trans. D. Wills. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.
. Learning to Live Finally. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Hoboken: Melville, 2007.
. “Living On: Border Lines.” Deconstruction and Criticism. Ed. Harold Bloom. Trans. J. Hulbert. London:
Routledge, 1979. 75–176.
. Of Grammatology. Trans. G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
. On the Name. Trans. T. Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
Derrida, Jacques, and Maurizio Ferraris. A Taste for the Secret. Trans. Giacomo Donis and David Webb. Cambridge:
Polity, 2001.
Gaston, Sean. Derrida and Disinterest. London: Continuum, 2005.
Hart, Kevin. The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.
Hartman, Geoffrey. “Maurice Blanchot: The Spirit of Language after the Holocaust.” The Power of Contestation: Perspec-
tives on Maurice Blanchot. Eds. Kevin Hart and Geoffrey Hartman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004. 46–65.
Hill, Leslie. Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary. London: Routledge, 1997.
. “Introduction.” Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing. Ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill. London: Routledge, 1996.
1–20.
Kronick, Joseph G. Derrida and the Future of Literature. Albany: State U of New York P, 1999.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Proper Names. Trans. M. B. Smith. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996.

About the Authors

Stefan Polatinsky is a Research Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
He has a keen research interest in the dialogue between philosophy and literature.
Karen Scherzinger is Chair of the Department of English at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She has
published on the work of Henry James, on fiction about James, and on a range of contemporary novelists.