Christopher Langlois - Temporal Exile in The Time of Fiction - Reading Derrida Reading Blanchot's The Instant of My Death (2015)

Temporal Exile in the Time of Fiction: Reading Derrida Reading Blanchot's "The Instant of
My Death"
Author(s): CHRISTOPHER LANGLOIS
Source: Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Vol. 48, No. 4, a special proceedings
issue: A MATTER OF LIFEDEATH III (December 2015), pp. 17-32
Published by: University of Manitoba
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/44030404
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This essay asks whether or not Martin Hägglund's reassessment of the Derridean project of deconstruction as a
project defending diachronic temporality is amenable to thinking the peculiar temporalities of literature and fic-
tion that Derrida, in "Demeure: Fiction and Testimony," detects in Maurice Blanchot's The Instant of My Death.
Temporal Exile in the Time

of Fiction: Reading Derrida Reading
Blanchot's The Instant of My Death
CHRISTOPHER LANGLOIS
ential publication Radical Atheism is to rescue the Derridean deconstructive

One relation entialrelation
of theto jpublication
ustice and altertoitytasksfromjustice
being that Radicalperverted
conceptually and Martin alter Hägglund Atheism ity from is sets being to rescue out conceptually to accomplish the Derridean perverted in his deconstructive highly by ethical influ-
by ethical
metaphysicians like Robert Bernasconi, Drucilla Cornell, and Simon Critchley.
Hägglund is particularly hostile toward attempts in the secondary literature of decon-
struction to align Derridas writing with the transcendental ethics of Emmanuel
Lévinas. What such attempts fail to appreciate is that nowhere does Derrida 's think-
ing pursue the "ideal justice" embedded in what Hägglund severely criticizes as a
Levinasian pre-temporal economy of alterity, ethics as metaphysical "first philoso-
phy," that naively (and perhaps dangerously) privileges good over evil, the other over
the same, speech over writing, peace over violence, and life over death. The Derridean
relation with alterity, ethics, justice, and life, Hägglund rightly claims, is distributed
Mosaic 48/4 0027- 1 276-07/0 1 70 1 6$02.00©Mosaic
18 Mosaic 48/4 (December 2015)
much more aporetically (autoimmunitarily) than readers like Critchley, Cornell, and
Bernasconi are willing to concede. In Hägglund's reading of Derrida, justice always
already betrays injustice, the alterity of the other is always already violated by the iden-
tity of the same, life is always already implicated in death, and peace always already pre-
supposes violence. The sole culprit behind these relations of autoimmunity in the
Derridean project of deconstruction is for Hägglund "the 'ultratranscendentaT condi-
tion" of temporality "from which nothing can be exempt" (10). Deconstruction is
nothing, in other words, if not a sustained critique of temporality, and we fundamen-
tally misunderstand the movement and space of differance if we do not appreciate it as
the instantiation of the ontological violence that temporality constitutively commits.
"Thus, a rigorous deconstructive thinking," Hägglund explains, "maintains that we are
always already inscribed in a temporal economy of violence,' where we are both
excluding and being excluded" (82).
Because Derrida was not always consistent in emphasizing the degree to which
deconstruction is first and foremost a project of temporality (or so Hägglund wants
us to believe), it is hardly surprising that Derrida's thinking has so easily been co-
opted by such (albeit closeted) metaphysical and ethical thinkers like those men-
tioned above, or, more recently, by theological apologists of deconstruction like Hent
de Vries, Richard Kearney, and John Caputo, who continue to work at the vanguard
of the "theological turn" in contemporary critical theory. What each of these camps
exclude, or at the very least suspend, is the incessantness of the logic of autoimmunity
that infects each and every concept and image of philosophical ways of thinking that
rely on a metaphysical logic of temporal presence (which is to say, temporal tran-
scendence) for value and verification. What is so radically atheist about deconstruc-
tion, in short, is that it precludes both the possibility (from ontological and
epistemological perspectives) and the desire (from ethical and political perspectives)
for the fulfillment of promises of metaphysical or theological transcendence in the
temporal space of finitude that living, thinking, and desiring humanity solely inhab-
its. As it relates to the theological front of Hägglund s reassessment of what Derrida s
thinking entails, the autoimmunitary logic of deconstruction means that "messianic
hope is for Derrida a hope for temporal survival, faith is always faith in the finite, and
the desire for God is a desire for the mortal, like every other desire " (120, emph. mine).
Making good on deconstruction's investment in the logic of the autoimmune
reversibility of what we desire and of what it is possible to desire demands doubling
down on its commitments to temporal finitude and the survivalist dimension of
desire. According to the ontological schema laid down in Hägglund's interpretation of
deconstruction, finally, desiring escape from temporal finitude by positing extra-
Christopher Langlois ļ 19
I
temporalspcesofpresnce(liketh ranscedntbeingofGd,theaistorical egit-

imacyofsverignty,orthemtaphysical mperativeofjustice)tha wouldbe
im unefromtheanihlatingtouchoftemporalnegativ yisa ilogcalforphilo-
sophicalthink gasit s uicdalfordesirngsubjectiv y.
Howevr efrshingHäglund'sreas mentoftheDrideanprojectasreistan
tobth e thical ndtheolgical"turns"i contemporaycrit altheory,itnevrthe-
les harbousariskofcnflatingviolenc and eathintoasingletmporalmechanism
ofclosuredivngthelogicofdeconstrucion,the"arche-violenc"ofdiférance.
Violenc andtemporalityareHäglund'smater opesinthis chemaofthe"thicop-
litcalsignficaneofdeconstrucion,"whic Häglundreads incompatiblewith e
Levinas ndreamofretuniglifetoast eofpurenovilenc andevison ga
transcedntalimageofevrlastingpeac.Andyet,byfailngtoadequatelydistnguish
betw nthe mporaleconmyofviolenc tha motivaesDridasencouterwith
Lévinas,ontheon hand,ando theotherthefarmorepardoxicaltemporaleconmy,
asBlnchotunderstandsit, hat riculatesdath stheimposibltyofdying,tha
demandste ifyngtowhatIcanotgivetsimony,tha compelswitnesingwhatIcan-
notwines,andtha guarntesa uferingsuchta Icanotsuferit,Häglundiad-
vertnlyeidsDeridasother,no-temporaldeconstrucive nvestmenti hesizure
ofinsta sexildfrom urmournigofthepast ndouranticpation fthefutre.If
whatHäglundistryingtod isacountfortheconditon fposibltyofdecon-
strucion,whic heblievs ucesfulytohave complishedbydiagnosigDeridas
indebtdnes to hediachronic fintudeof inte mporality,his ndebtdnes,tha is
tosay,to heirevocable ndultimaelyunsblatbleontlogicalpresnceofthe
Heglian egative nfi ty, henwhatHäglundmustrikencoutering-andit spre-
ciselythistha edosnotd -arethoseimagesandexpriencsliterdthroughout
Derida'sworktha resit hetmporalintervntios fdiférance.Häglundisunam-
biguos nthedgre towhic temporalfintude-synoymous,inHäglundsview,
withdiférance-isan bsolute,uncoditonalprincpleofal tha flsundertheont-
logicalumbrelaoflivngi tme:"Theaspect hatismostcruialfor adiclatheism
[. ]conerstheontlogicalst usofspacing.Deridarepatedlyarguestha dif-
férance(as nameforthespacingoftime)not nlyapliestolangu eorexprienc
oranyotherdlimtedrgion fbeing.Rather,it san bsoluteygenralconditon
whic meanstha ther canotevni princpleb anythingtha isexmptfromtem-
poralfintude"(2-3,emph.Häglund's).
In209theNwCent ialReviwpublishedaspecial suedvoted ntirelyto
Häglund'srevitalztion fthecrit aldiscoursetha surondsDerideandecon-
strucion.AdrianJohnsto'scontributont hisvolumeisparticularyiluminat g
of some (though not all, as we will soon see) of the blind spots in Hagglunďs appro-
priation of Derrida and of the ultratranscendental logic of temporality that Hägglund
reads as constitutive of the philosophical project of deconstruction. Johnston accuses
Hägglund of employing a "false dilemma affecting the very core of his radically athe-
ist theory of desire":
The mutually exclusive, either/or opposition he thrusts forward between life and death -
the former is equated with living on as the time of mortal survival, whereas the latter is
associated with eternity as possible only through the cadaverizing cancellation of life -
serves as the basis for his claim that desire always fantasizes about having more (mortal)
time, rather than, as with an immortal, no time (and, hence, no life, given the equation of
being alive with being-in-time, since "there cannot even in principle be anything that is
exempt from temporal finitude"). Departing from Hägglund's related characterization of
temporal life as "infinite finitude," a third possibility in excess of the bivalent distinction
between mortal life and immortal death is thinkable: the "finite infiniteness" of "undeath"
à la the horror fiction category of the undead as neither alive nor dead in the standard
senses of these terms. That which is undead neither heeds the linear, chronological time of
survival nor languishes in the frozen immobility of timeless death, these being the only two
options allowed for by Hägglund. (152)
Johnston is right to hone in on the binarism separating life from death that over-
determines Hägglund's articulation of the radical atheism ultimately synonymous
with deconstruction itself. Johnston launches his critique from an exclusively psycho-
analytic vantage point overseeing the logic of desire that props up Hägglund's con-
ceptual architecture. This is a smart and effective manoeuvre to make, particularly as
Hägglund is indeed quite explicit that radical atheism is predicated on life's desire for
continuous survival in the infinite finitude (the mortality) of temporality. The under-
lying presupposition of radical atheism is that death is synonymous with eternity and
immortality - "the cadaverizing cancellation of life," as Johnston so eloquently puts
it - and conversely that life is synonymous with surviving finitude and rejecting
desires for presence and transcendence. Hägglund leaves very little room for manoeu-
vring ontologically between these life and death poles of temporal existence. Through
the very Žižekian figure of the "undead," Johnston inserts a psychoanalytic wedge in
the space of temporal presence that Hägglund, on the contrary, assigns to the category
of temporal impossibility. The temporal space of non-linear, synchronic presence is
for Johnston the space of the undead and of the unconscious (the unconscious is that
which is undead in desire), and if it can be demonstrated that such a space is perfectly
compatible with the logic of deconstruction, then perhaps it is also the case that
Christopher Langlois 2 1
Hägglund's reduction of deconstruction exclusively to a project affirming the "infinite

finitude" of temporal life is too restrictive of what happens to existence outside the
temporal limits of desiring consciousness. Psychoanalytic theory works well as a con-
ceptual antidote to Hägglund s reading of deconstruction insofar as it posits the non-
diachronic temporal space of the unconscious as a territory of existence where the
desire for survival in finitude does not necessarily trump desires for alternative modes
of (non-finite) temporal existence. As effective as Johnston is at presenting the psy-
choanalytic theory of unconscious desire as a supplement to the radically atheist the-
ory of desire put forward in Hägglund's work, there is yet another vantage point worth
looking at from which Hägglund's life/death binarism begins to erode, a vantage point
that Derrida articulated throughout his several encounters with the literary-critical
writing of Blanchot.
This essay revisits Derrida s penetrating work on Blanchot s The Instant of My
Death , "Demeure: Fiction and Testimony," in order to emphasize the significance of
fiction to deconstructive thinking. The suspicion is that the non-diachronic horizon
of literature that Blanchot s writing represents can be used to critically supplement
Hägglund's theory of the radically atheist project of deconstruction. The problem
with Hägglund s reading of Derrida, in other words, is that it misses the opportunity
of weighing the implications of Derrida's encounter with the experience of literature
and fiction, and more generally of Derrida's encounter with the experience of litera-
ture and the experience of the narrative voice that Blanchot's writing and thinking
facilitate. This experience, Derrida tells us, is a passionate experience that exiles us
from temporal finitude. The instant of the death of Blanchot s protagonist, the death
experienced as the fictional here and now of the death always already to come, an
instant suspended forever in abeyance, Derrida remarks, "testifies to nothing less than
the instant of interruption in which fiction and testimony find their common
resource [...]. Such an instant does not follow in the temporal sequence of instants;
this instant is another eternity, the stance or station of another present" (73). The
question that we must put to Hägglund is whether or not there is room in the decon-
structive conception of temporality to allow for Blanchot's narrative voice to dwell in
this atemporal, infinitely mortifying space of deaths abeyance.
In ground
ground"Demeure: of The
of Blanchot's Blanchot's
InstantFiction and The
of My Death , andTestimony,"
although itInstant
"takes upofjust
My aDerrida
few Death discloses and although the autobiographical it "takes just back- a few
pages and appeared less than a year ago," Derrida notes, he nevertheless insists that it
stands in Blanchot's oeuvre as nothing less than an "enormous text" (43). Derrida
confides in his audience that he received a letter "from Blanchot last summer, just a
year ago, almost to the day, as if today were the anniversary of the day on which I
received this letter [...]. Blanchot wrote me thus, on July 20, first making note of the
anniversary date: July 20. Fifty years ago, I knew the happiness of nearly being shot to
death" (52). Blanchot first published The Instant of My Death in 1994, sending Derrida
back to 1944 through the admission in his letter. Such an admission throws into con-
fusion the generic classification of this short récit. Originally published as a work of
narrative and fiction, Blanchot reveals in his letter to Derrida that The Instant of My
Death simultaneously reflects an autobiographical event that befell Blanchot at the end
of World War II. The generic undecidability that consequently surrounds the reception
of this text means that the events and experiences that it narrates cannot so easily be
relegated to episodes purely and simply of fiction. What happens in the narrative is fic-
tional, The Instant of My Death having been published as a fictional text, but it is also
autobiographical. Determining where fiction ends and autobiography begins, or where
autobiography begins and fiction ends, is a problematic that Derrida details at length
as he proceeds virtually line by line reading Blanchot. Derrida's focus in "Demeure" is
on deciphering the peculiar temporality of a fictional event - death experienced as the
impossibility of dying - that nevertheless is deeply rooted in autobiographical and his-
torical reality. Derrida withholds judgment on determining whether or not fiction pre-
cedes reality or reality precedes fiction. This is not an inconsequential decision, and
points directly in the direction of Derrida's deconstructive sympathies for modes of
experience - perhaps immune to finitude, "out of joint," outside of time - about which
the philosophical discourses of ontology and epistemology are silent.
The plot of Blanchots "enormous" little text is straightforward enough. It opens
with a narrative voice recollecting, in the first person - "I remember a young man" -
a harrowing incident that befell the text's unnamed protagonist at his home in the
French countryside during World War II: "In a large house (the Chateau, it was
called), someone knocked at the door rather timidly. I know that the young man came
to open the door to guests who were presumably asking for help. This time, a howl:
'Everyone outside.' A Nazi lieutenant, in shamefully normal French, made the oldest
people exit first, and then two young women" (3). Once outside, the Nazi lieutenant,
who turns out to be an officer with the Russian Vlassov army, our narrator reveals
later, ordered the young man to stand against a wall and ready himself for execution.
After calmly requesting that the soldiers not subject his family to the grisly spectacle
of his execution by firing squad, the young man passively accepts his fate "as if every-
thing had already been done" (5). It is at this point that the narrative presents this
young man encountering immortality precisely at the threshold of death, where dying
has become an impossibility for this young man as if it had already been done.
Christopher Langlois 23
Accepting his execution as a foregone conclusion exiles this "y°ung man" into a tem-
poral outside where death no longer functions as an event that ends finitude and life
in equal measure.
As this young man suddenly encounters death as the impossibility of dying, the
text's narrator struggles to descend with him into the intimacy of this experience that
dissolves the subjective presence of the one who is there to experience it:
I know - do I know it - that the one at whom the Germans were already aiming, awaiting
but the final order, experienced then a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of beatitude
(nothing happy, however) - sovereign elation? The encounter of death with death?
In his place, I will not try to analyze. He was perhaps suddenly invincible. Dead -
immortal. Perhaps ecstasy. Rather the feeling of compassion for suffering humanity, the
happiness of not being immortal or eternal. Henceforth, he was bound to death by a sur-
reptitious friendship. (5)
The order of the firing squad robs Blanchoťs protagonist of the deferred promise of
death, ordering that his death pass from temporal imminence to temporal presence as
if it had already been done. The passivity of this protagonist - the narrator, Blanchot -
is central to acquiescing to the firing squad s command that his death, and thus his
life, be temporally exiled from the diachronicity of death's deferred arrival. Surviving
in the time of finitude is no longer a possibility for this protagonist, precisely because
it is the protagonists life in finitude that the soldiers suspend the instant they are
given the order to fire. Blanchoťs protagonist forfeits, through an extreme act of pas-
sivity, his human right and his human desire to survive in time. Neither living as a
subject desiring temporal survival, nor absolutely mortified in the afterlife of an eter-
nal present, Blanchoťs protagonist experiences for the first time a compassion for
finite humanity thanks to having been exiled from the finite temporality that circum-
scribes the species. From this non-finite place - dead - immortal? - it is neither pos-
sible nor desirable to analyze, as the narrator confesses. To the extent that this young
man survives his own death, in other words, he does so as a being exiled from time
and exiled from witness and testimony. He survives the future anterior event of his
execution in the mode of a fictional - though no less real - existence, one that can
only be communicated as if it is suddenly immune from finitude. This is a place from
which testimony in the first person is impossible and where no witnesses reside who
can attest to its occurrence, thereby necessitating Blanchoťs recourse to narrating this
event in the language and logic of literature and fiction.
As Blanchot explains in The Infinite Conversation , literature and fiction acquire their
extraordinary ontological status in those rare and often violent spaces of existence where
"something happens" to individuals such that "they can only recapture [their experi-
ence] by relinquishing their power to say 'I.' And what happens has always already
happened: they can only indirectly account for it as a sort of self- forgetting, the for-
getting that introduces them into the present without memory that is the present of
narrating speech" (384-85). Perhaps dead, perhaps immortal, Blanchoťs protagonist
has all of a sudden commenced inhabiting this present of narrating speech that strips
him of his subjectivity and desire. "What speaks" from the present of narrating
speech, from the instant of my death , is the voice of compassion for suffering, desiring
humanity that experiences economies of violence (ontologically if not physically) at
each and every instant of its life in finitude. The protagonist's temporal exile - its exile
to the space of fiction and its relinquishment of the power to say "I" - is responsible
for its acquisition of the compassionate perspective on living in finitude. No individ-
ual can claim this compassionate perspective so long as they remain in possession of
the subjectivity that their survival in time guarantees. It is because no individual can
inhabit the place of the narrative voice that it is necessary to call it the voice of fiction -
it does not exist in the time of survival. Paraphrasing Wallace Stevens, the narrative
voice of Blanchoťs The Instant of My Death speaks the language of a fiction that we
know to be a fiction, but that we do not discard as illusion or fantasy.
With of this the autobiographical

of this text, as well as thetext, as wellmarkers
historical as the dimension historical
that it invokes hangingit quite
in situating markers so that heavily it invokes over in Derrida's situating reception it quite
precisely in the historico-political context of the Nazi occupation of France, there is
much that remains to be said about "what is at stake" in this short autobiographical
fiction. The autobiographical reality that overshadows the fiction is decidedly more
complicated and inaccessible than what Blanchot, as autobiographical subject writing
fifty years after the fact, is able to admit in a letter to Derrida. After a short series of
"perhaps" - "perhaps suddenly invincible"; "perhaps ecstasy" - the narrative never-
theless risks deciding on what it was that conferred onto "this young man" a "feeling
of extraordinary lightness." What the young man experienced, what dislodged him,
however momentarily, from the temporal matrix of the living and from the con-
sciousness of his biographical subjectivity, was nothing less than "the feeling of com-
passion for suffering humanity." What turns out to be Blanchoťs most personal work
of narrative fiction is also the text that speaks for the generic humanity from which
Blanchot, in historical fact and through the depersonalizing voice of fiction, is subse-
quently violently exiled. The Instant of My Death is the testimony of the one who has
passed from the temporal space of existence to the de-temporalized nowhere of fic-
tion (death as the impossibility of dying), in short, from finitude to immortality, and
yet in this passage reclaims a passion and a passivity solely by being "bound to death
by a surreptitious friendship" (5). Blanchoťs compassion for suffering humanity, his
step not beyond the instant of his death, "bears witness," writes Derrida, "to a univer-
salizable singularity" (94), a "permanent differance," "undying as differance " (95, emph.
Derrida's). Whereas Hägglund dismisses the ethicalization of the Derridean project
on the grounds that its ethicalization naively detemporalizes deconstructive thinking,
what I want to suggest here is that perhaps it is Blanchot s stumbling upon a compas-
sion for suffering humanity that can return to the space of literature an ethical imper-
ative that doubles as the ethical imperative of deconstructive thinking, an imperative
that emanates precisely from the outside of time.
This concept of the "outside of time," however, is a delicate one, particularly as
Blanchot rather adamantly insists that there is no "outside of time" that is not imma-
nent to time itself. This "outside of time" articulates more clearly if it is identified with
the present that no time can represent. This is the present that Blanchot s protagonist,
his narrator, indeed Blanchot himself, is forced to inhabit by order of the firing squad.
What does this scene of execution have to say about temporality as Blanchot and
Derrida have come to understand it in the space of literature? In The Step Not Beyond
Blanchot asks that in our reflections on temporality we "let there be a past, let there
be a future, with nothing that would allow the passage from one to the other, such that
the line of demarcation would unmark them the more, the more it remained invisi-
ble: hope of a past, completed of a future. All that would remain of time, then, would
be this line to cross, always already crossed, although not crossable, and, in relation to
(me,' unsuitable. Perhaps what we would call the 'present' is only the impossibility of
situating this line" (12). Impossibility for whom? This is in fact the question that
demands to be asked as we consider whether or not in writing, in having crossed the
threshold of death still living, what we "call the 'present'" becomes not so much an
impossibility but rather what Derrida, in keeping pace with Blanchot, calls an "unex-
perienced experience" (47). Certainly this is not an experience that "I" can have, an
experience that admits of a "me" present for its enjoyment and reflection. However,
does this also mean that experiencing - narrating - a present outside of the temporal
poles of living and dying is an absolute impossibility? Does this also mean that if
exiled into the temporal abyss of this uncrossable line of presence and death, some
fragment or trace of existence does not persist? A fragment or trace of existence that
demands the resources of literature and fiction for its retrieval?
In the fragment from which we have just quoted, Blanchot is trying to work out
the conceptual parameters of the post-Nietzschean Law of Eternal Return, and thus
the fragment continues: "The law of the return supposing that 'everything' would
26 I Mosaic 48/4 ( December 201 5 )
¡
comeagin,semsto aketimeascompletd:thecirleoutofcirulation fal cir-

cles;but,inasmuchasitbreakstheringin tsmid le,itpro se atimenotuncom-
pletd,atime,onthecontray,finte, xceptinthepresntpoint hat lonew think
wehold,andtha,lacking,introducesrupt reintoinf ity,makingusliveasinast e
ofper tualdeath"(Step12,emph.mine).Theoutsideoftime,the"presntpoint"
tha makes"u liveasinast eofper tualdeath,"istherforenotaspceina yway
alienatedfromtime.The"outsideoftime"is m ane t otimeitself,andindcates
tha insdetimether isanu crosablethresholdtha persit in tsuncrosabilty
onlyto hedgre tha we ndure,tha we"survi e"time,tobrowfromHäg lund's
terminolgy,as phenomenolgicalycoherntexprienc.This anexprienc tha
aptlycharcterizsday-todayexistenc.Itisanexprienc tha charcterizsexis-
tence when death continues to inhabit an inaccessible future. Once we enter into a
state of perpetual death, however, time is no longer coherently experienced according

to the impossibility of "situating this line" (of the present) phenomenologically.
The instant that Blanchoťs autobiographical protagonist is suddenly rendered
"dead-immortal" by order of the firing squad, however, something unpredictable
happens yet again. A return to finitude: "At that instant, an abrupt return to the
world, the considerable noise of a nearby battle exploded. Comrades from the maquis
wanted to bring help to one they knew to be in danger. The lieutenant moved away
to assess the situation. The Germans stayed in order, prepared to remain thus in an
immobility that arrested time" (Derrida 5). Derrida reads the (unexperienced) expe-
rience of "arrested time" as fundamental to Blanchot s blurring of the lines between
testimony and fiction. The narrative voice that speaks in The Instant of My Death
originates in this "immobility" of "arrested time," and much of the narrative action
that occurs in this text is concerned with what, if anything, of the experience of this
immobility is subject to witness and testimony by the narrating consciousness that
survives death's neutralization by death itself. Derrida recognizes that before "the
return to the world," "death had already taken place. It had arrived from the moment
the young man began to wait for 'the final order,' the 'Fire' of the lieutenant. He had
thus left the world, dying before dying, not for another world, but for a non-world
beyond life, not for a transcendent beyond or the beyond that religions and meta-
physics tell us about, but for a here-below without world, a beyond here-below, a
without-world from which he who is already dead already returns, like a ghost, the
moment gunfire suddenly explodes in the vicinity" (70-71). Derrida's interpretation
of this scene is significant for understanding non-diachronic experiences compatible
with deconstructive thinking insofar as it simultaneously upholds Hägglund's thesis
of Derrida's rejection of there being any reason to desire or hope for "a transcendent
Christopher Langlois ! 2 7
i
beyond,"butalsocmplicates harchite urof inte mporalityonwhic Häglund

relisnpaitngdeconstrucivethink gas myopicaf rmation fliequathesurvial
ofdiachronicf tudeatveryinsta oflivngi tme.
ThatDeridase "theyoungman"ofthenar tivexldfromtheworldwith-
outexprienc gtheanihlatonprmisedby eathsugets ha nexistnceprd-
icatedonfi te mporalitysonlypredicat cordinglyintmesofurvialnd ot
whent desirfo survialhsbenr de motbysuchradiclyextraneoushi-
toricalndphenom logica rcumstances aceptingoe'sfateinb gput
beforthefirngsquad.Blnchoťsprotagnist,acordingly,doesntexprienchap-
pinesorgatiudeovrhislfehavingbensavedbythedistracion fanerby
explosin;rathe, isalvtiondei ,Blanchoťsprotagnistlvesinorde tonar te
the"ormentofinjustce" hatriseaftrhe"larnedtha reyoungmen,so f
farmes-trulystrangestoalcombat,whose nlyfaultwastheiryouth- adben
slaughterd"(6-7).Blanchoťsprotagnisturviesonlybecausoftherspect hesol-
dierspaidto hepro ietor ftheCateu.Ashecomsto heralizton hat is
retun otheworldwasoington higels xcept ha "intha yer194,theNazi
lieutna hdfortheCateu respctor nsideraton hat efarmsdi not
arouse[.],nodubtwha tenbganfortheyoungmanwsthe ormentofinjus-
tice.Nomrecstay; hef lingtha ewasonlyivngbecaus,evni theysof
theRusian,heblongedtoanblecas"(7).Thertun olifesnotcelbrated,in
otherwods,a nfirmaton fhumanity's rengthinfaceo thedangerstowhic
wearsubjectdbyvirtueof urfagilefnitudean mortaliy.Thedsirefo survial
hadbencompletyinoculated hinsta hat"heyoungman"becami mersd
ina on-fi texpriencoftemporalitywherindy gintmewasrend an
imposibltyb deathiself.Hisexcutionwasjuticegvnhisparticpaoni the
Resitance.Thiswa fteand gift obedsire andceptd.
Inthescirumstances,urvi ngtemporalexi andretunigto hetimofthe
livngcanotbexpriencdasnfirmaton fbelongi tohumanity,butisrathe
abdgeofinjustceandshametha isurvialshencforthpedicat onthepriv-
ilegofinhabting heCâteau.Therislfebyond, utsidefnite mporality,buti
isonlyacesiblasit lvedas fictonalexistncetha cnotbe ntolgicalysup-
portedbythe"Iofanutobigraphicl,historcalysituaedsubjectivy.Being
retundto heworldistan mount obeingxiledfromthecstay-"nomre
ecstay"(Derida7)-tha justamo ent,a etrniyagohdaforde Blanchoťs
protagnist"hef lingofcmpasionfrsuferinghumanity, he apinesofnt
beingm ortalndetrnal,"ndof"hencforthbeingboundto eathbyasurepti-
tiousfriendship"(5).Returnigto heworldstop hisfelingad isolvethis
friendship, but not without leaving a trace of what this feeling and this friendship
promised - a "compassion for suffering humanity" Suddenly fiction becomes autobi-
ography, and the work of literature consists in representing the traces of a feeling and
the residues of a friendship that are simply not accessible to the genres of witness and
testimony in the diachronic finitude where Blanchoťs narrator, returned to the world
through an act of injustice, begins once again to reside. Communicating the traces of
a compassion for suffering humanity becomes the exclusive prerogative of literature
and fiction.
According to Derrida's interpretation of the life/death of Blanchoťs narrative

voice, it is the resources of fiction that are needed when life is exiled from the time of
the living. What happens in exile from finitude? Only fiction can approximate what
happens where life ceases to be lived as the diachronic survival in time. Fiction haunts
the testimony of such unexperienced experiences as the only genre of representation
that remains. When exile to the outside of time is over, if it ever ceases, all that remains
is a trace of what was never phenomenologically experienced in the first place pre-
cisely because in order for exile to have occurred in the first place, the time of experi-
ence, Hägglund's time of survival, would had to have been violently immobilized by
the imminent realization of death - death as the impossibility of dying in time.
Blanchoťs narrator concludes with the acknowledgment that amidst his return to the
time of life,
there remained, however, at the moment when the shooting was no longer but to come, the
feeling of lightness that I would not know how to translate: freed from life? the infinite
opening up? Neither happiness, nor unhappiness. Nor the absence of fear and perhaps
already the step not beyond [Ni Vabsence de crainte et peut-être déjà le pas au-delà]. I know,
I imagine that this unanalyzable feeling changed what there remained for him of existence.
As if the death outside of him could only henceforth collide with the death in him. "I am
alive. No, you are dead." (8-9)
The experience of having died and of subsequently reliving this death in the time that
remains of existence is surely an experience of having survived something that wit-
nessed testimony cannot access - the infinite opening up? However, to say that such an
event did not fundamentally disorient the structure of temporality is to accept the
philosophical philistinism that says fictions of existence - fictions of existence lived
outside of time - are not only the least real of realities, but in fact have no business
laying ontological claim on what happens in the reality of temporal survival. If fiction
is nothing but a lie, if fiction is just illusion and fantasy, then perhaps the experiences
we have in temporal finitude have the last word on the narrative cohesion of a life
punctuated at last by death. Only if there is no possibility of temporal displacement

can we say that fiction is just a luxury of the imagination and not an essential generic
language for communicating events and memories that consciousness and remem-
brance cannot access. But surely this would be saying too much in saying so little
about fiction, about "the passionate place of literary writing" and of "literary fiction,"
which "haunts so-called truthful, responsible, serious, real testimony as its proper sen-
sibility" (72). Fiction is not just the lie that haunts the truth; rather, it is the language
of temporal exile and of living, already dead , in the impossible spaces of historical and
phenomenological liminality.
There perhaps isinsurmountable obstacle

an insurmountable to challenging
important strategichisobstacle
comprehensive
moment analysis of in Hägglund his s Radical comprehensive Atheism that analysis poses of a
to challenging
deconstructive temporality. Hägglund concedes that "one question that is bound to
arise, then, is whether there are aspects of Derrida s work that do not adhere to the
radically atheist logic I develop [...]. My response is that even if one is able to find
passages in Derrida that cannot be salvaged by the logic of radical atheism, it is far
from enough to refute the reading I propose here" (12). The purpose of this essay was
not in any way to contradict or "theologize" the central findings of Hägglund's astute
recontextualization of deconstruction as a radically atheist project. Rather, the pur-
pose of this essay was to juxtapose Derrida's oblique commitments to literature and
fiction with Hägglund's insistence that radical temporal finitude (radical atheism) is
all that there is of existence and desire. Hägglund:
Différance articulates the negative infinity of time. No moment is given in itself but is
superseded by another moment in its very event and can never be consummated in a pos-
itive infinity. The negative infinity of time is an infinite finitude, since it entails that finitude
cannot ever be eliminated or overcome. The infinite finitude of différance is at work before,
within, and beyond anything one may circumscribe as being. Différance is thus without
being but not because it is something ineffable that transcends time and space. On the con-
trary, différance is nothing in itself because it designates the spacing of time that makes it
impossible for anything to be in itself. (3, emph. Hägglund's)
The ethical consequences of this understanding of différance are that reference cannot
be made to a conception of alterity or justice, nonviolence or peace, which precedes
the temporal spacing of finitude that confronts any and all such conceptions with
their opposites. Justice cannot be conceptualized independently of the possibility of
violence; peace cannot be imagined without accepting the possibility of war; prom-
ises cannot be made without accepting the possibility of being broken; gifts cannot be
offered without acknowledging the possibility that they may be refused; etc. What
Hägglund concludes from all of this is that living in the temporal space of presence is
purely and simply an impossibility given that all modalities of existence are subject to
partition between past and future over the abyssal fault line of the non-existent pres-
ent. Because time does not stop, because time has never stopped and will never stop
marching forward out of the past, over the present, and into the future, there cannot
therefore be an experience, image, or concept exempt from the radical atheist condi-
tion of non-presence. Using Derrida's invocation of "testimony" and "fiction" in his
reading of Blanchots The Instant of My Death , this essay hypothesized that the
diachronic temporality universalized by Hägglund does not necessarily apply to par-
ticular limit-experiences - death as the impossibility of dying, suffering that the "I"
cannot suffer - such as we glimpse in the space of literature and fiction demarcated
by Blanchot. Derrida acknowledges the possibility in his reading of Blanchot that
there where the death of Blanchoťs protagonist becomes an event no longer of the
future is precisely where temporal finitude ceases to over-determine the horizons of
existence. Put otherwise, Hägglund's reading of deconstruction is applicable to expe-
riences accessible to testimony, but not necessarily those experiences outside of time
that demand literature and fiction for their singular expression.
As Derrida's reading of Blanchot suggests, literature and fiction oblige us to con-
sider the possibility that although an "unexperienced experience" such as the arrival of
death in the space of temporal presence is absolutely inaccessible to the discourse of
testimony and witness - "if there is a place or instance in which there is no witness for
the witness or where no one is witness for the witness, it would be death" (46) - the
same does not automatically apply to the singular perspective on the presence of death
staked out in literature and fiction, and particularly the literature and fiction of
Blanchot: "Nothing seems more absurd to common sense, in effect, than an unexperi-
enced experience. But whoever does not try to think and read the part of fiction and
thus of literature that is ushered in by such a phrase in even the most authentic testi-
mony will not have begun to read or hear Blanchot" (47). According to common sense,
moreover, in order for there to be an "unexperienced experience," there would first
have to be the possibility of a hiatus from temporality. This, Hägglund insists, is pre-
cisely what deconstruction does not permit, thereby making his understanding of
deconstruction surprisingly palatable to common sense. Johnston's intuition that
"Hägglund's reasoning is too reasonable," that "his logic is too logical," sets us yet again
on a productive path of possibly opening up deconstructive thinking to the conceptu-
ally anathema discoveries of unexperienced experiences in literature and fiction (151).
What goes on in the depths of literature and fiction, and likewise what goes on in the
unconscious depths of consciousness, cannot be reduced to the strict logical require-

ments that Hägglund imposes over desire and temporality. Michael Naas echoes
Johnston's critique of Hägglund when he writes that "the question, again, concerns
what kind of critique deconstruction is, whether its aim is to refute or reject claims by
demonstrating their inconsistency or what undermines them, in other words, whether
its aim is to make ontological or epistemological claims about the way things really are
as opposed to the way they appear, or whether it needs also to give some account of
such appearance precisely as fiction, simulacrum, or phantasm" (55). We only partially
understand the motives of deconstruction if we limit its critical procedures to making
prescriptive claims about the always already structure of being, knowledge, and truth.
Deconstructive thinking, however, is also concerned, as Naas argues, with the discourse
that makes metaphysical absolutes so rhetorically persuasive and philosophically
resistant to being done away with once and for all by deconstructive critique.
Accordingly, while Hägglund might be correct in arguing that the temporal structure
of diachronic finitude that we have no choice but to inhabit always already excludes
presence, he cannot so easily dismiss that there are (unexperienced) experiences, feel-
ings, and traces of living in a present exiled from finitude. These experiences, feelings,
and traces might be fictions, simulacra, or phantasms, to borrow from Naas, but they
are not by that account any less real than the reality of time that Hägglund describes.
Time does not necessarily proceed in the same diachronic movement for all times
and in all spaces. It fragments and loops, is interrupted, pauses, accelerates, and hides.
Blanchoťs particular ventures into the space of fiction and literature force temporality
into postures of immobility and darkness, into acting as the foundation for the "unex-
perienced experiences" with which his protagonists are faced and about which his nar-
rators are made to report. Such is the insight Derrida is developing in reading Blanchot.
Precisely at the instant of the death of Blanchot s protagonist, Derrida tells us, there
erupted into the reality of this protagonist "an unbelievable scenario" in which "he had,
in some sense, left the real" (80). This "unbelievable scenario" consisted in
a disturbance in the measure of time and a paradoxy of these instants, which are so many
heterogeneous times. Neither synchrony nor diachrony, an anachrony of instants.
Demourance as anachrony. There is not a single time, and since there is not a single time,
since one instant has no common measure with any other because of death, by reason of
death interposed, in the interruption by reason of death, so to speak, because of the cause
of the death there can be no chronology or chronometry. One cannot, even when one has
recovered a sense of the real, measure time. And thus the question returns, how many
times: how much time? how much time? how much time? (81)
Derrida is certainly not saying that in the instant of death (of death as the impossibil-
ity of dying) there is restored to temporality the presence of the present. On the con-
trary, there is nothing being positively instantiated in the temporality interrupted by
the firing squad. What is achieved, rather, is an unpredictable and immeasurable dis-
combobulation of the present that ordinarily recedes into the past as it is ordinarily
overtaken by the imminent anachrony of the future. Derrida's wonder over what has
happened to time at the instant of this death does not segue into a solution or answer
to the question, repeated ad infinitumy "How much time?" Derrida determines, on the
contrary, that the interruption of time that time itself is responsible for permitting has
the chance of throwing us into the outside of time where the unexperienced experi-
ences of our temporal exile call on literature and fiction for representation and mem-
ory. Deconstructive thinking is responsible for life lived outside of time, for dying in
the eternal present that time no longer digests and where no subjective presence sur-
vives. This is the time of literature and fiction, the time of The Instant of My Death.
WORKS CITED
Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.
Print.
Derrida, Jacques. "Demeure: Fiction and Testimony." The Instant of My Death. T

Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. 13-103. Print.
Hägglund, Martin. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford: Sta
Johnston, Adrian. "Life Terminable and Interminable: The Undead and the Afte
Friendly Disagreement with Martin Hägglund." New Centennial Review 9.1
MUSE. 20 Dec. 2014.
Naas, Michael. "An Atheism that ( Dieu merci!) Still Leaves Something to be Desired." New Centennial
Review 9.1 (2009): 45-68. Project MUSE. 20 Dec. 2014.
CHRISTOPHER LANGLOIS completed his PhD in Theory and Criticism at the University of
Western Ontario and now holds a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship through the Department of
English at McGill University. Some of his previous work has appeared or is forthcoming in such
journals as College Literature , Twentieth-Century Literature, Mosaic, and The Faulkner Journal.

Christopher Langlois - Temporal Exile in The Time of Fiction - Reading Derrida Reading Blanchot's The Instant of My Death (2015)

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Temporal Exile in the Time of Fiction: Reading Derrida Reading Blanchot's "The Instant of

Temporal Exile in the Time

ential publication Radical Atheism is to rescue the Derridean deconstructive

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