44

In his writing, Maurice Blanchot bears witness to “the encounter of death with death.” Reading Jacques Derrida, we understand that Blanchot’s death—the death to which he bears witness as he writes: “Often I died”—throws into crisis the reliance on the “I” of both the psychological and the eidetic reduction. Blanchot’s death—or Blanchot’s writing of death—operates here an epoché outside the transcendental framework and suspends even the very subject of suspension: the living and lived presence of the “I” is itself suspended—“often I died.” For Maurice Blanchot and, in a different way, for Donald Winnicott, the subjective appropriation of such immemorial death is neither possible nor desirable. Nonetheless, far from denying death, Blanchot, reading Robert Antelme, retains that the determination to survive does not relate to the power of saying “I” but to an impersonal attachment to life—neither a sense of death nor a sense of life but, perhaps, a sense of the encounter of life and death.