ABSTRACT
The above citation is taken from Maurice Blanchot’s essay ‘Literature and the
Right to Death’ (1947), printed in his collection La part du feu (1949) (The Work of
Fire).1 The paragraph concludes: ‘And it is not death either, because it manifests
existence without being, existence which remains below existence, like an inex-
orable affirmation, without beginning or end – death as the impossibility of
dying’ (B: WF, p. 328). This sets up the possibility of the ghostlike living on, or
survivre, which supervenes on actual lives:
at the end of everything is fame; beyond, there is oblivion; farther beyond,
anonymous survival as part of a dead culture; even farther beyond, perse-
verance in the eternity of the elements. Where is the end? Where is that
death which is the hope of language? But language is the life that endures death
and maintains itself in it.
