In the opening paragraph of “The Last One to Speak,” Blanchot writes:
Plato: for of death, no one has knowledge, and Paul Celan: No one witnesses for the witness. Nevertheless, we always choose a companion: not for ourselves, but for something inside us, away from us, that asks us to be absent from ourselves to cross the line we can never reach. The companion, lost in advance, is henceforth the loss in our place.
Why does Blanchot bring together Plato and Celan, the themes of dying, witnessing and the notion of the companion?
One might suppose one knows about dying, about its causes, it course and its outcome, it is, after all, something that happens to others around us, but this is to mistake death as a solely physical process with death as a stepping over, and for Plato, a transcendence into the real. Of death, no one has knowledge; but death, as Socrates tells us in the Phaedo, grants knowledge to the immortal soul that was previously incarnated in the body. To strive to know it is necessary to strive to live close to death, as Socrates demands, to attempt to maintain a necessary distance from a body always prone to error. One knows nothing of death, but death is thus just the condition of possibility of knowledge; one sees, but it is the blindspot of the seeing eye that permits sight. Death, in this sense, is double, it allows knowledge, but of death we know nothing, permitting us to attain what is only possible for human beings only by withdrawing from us as something over which one could have power.
How then is death bound up with testimony for Blanchot? One is said to give or provide testimony, it is something of which the one who testifies is capable, that is, which falls within their powers to recall and to put on record what befell them. To use the figure of the companion, as Blanchot does, who is chosen for me is to point to another giving, to a passivity wherein the “il [he/ it]” is brought forward as someone who is “inside us, away from us,” as someone who comes forward in each of us in order to receive. Why does he invoke a companion as it were “within” us, or more precisely, who is away, that is, outside whilst remaining inside each of us? To “die” or, in the sense under discussion, to “witness” is to be traversed, but here it is a notion of death or witnessing that is at stake, that demands a new reflection on receptivity, on passivity.
The companion invoked so briefly in these passages from “The Last One to Speak” should be understood as one who witnesses “in” me when my capacity to witness is impossible. Memory usually allows us to bear witness, to recall something undergone, something taken on or assumed, but in the experience of the sort that Blanchot evokes, I do not bear witness in the first person. Upstream of its capacity to act in the world, the “I” has undergone something unbearable that cannot be recalled in an unequivocal manner. The notion of the companion sets the one who witnesses in place of the “I” at a distance from the “I” who emerges after the experience.
Celan’s phrase, “no one bears witness for the witnesses [Niemand/ zeugt für den/ Zeugen],” that Blanchot cites alongside the quotation from Plato* points to the difficulty of unearthing and testifying to certain experiences that are endured in another sense. The “other” witnessing in question is precisely what is claimed to have occurred in the camps. The paradox of the notion of witnessing in Blanchot bears exacting ethical stakes, for it bears upon the possibility of receiving the testimony of the survivors. The survivor has borne witness as the companion (understood as the locus of an experience of witnessing before the “I” has assembled itself), or, better, the companion survives in place of the “I,” enduring the unendurable. How does the survivor attest? And how can others receive the testimony of an event that barely offers itself to memorization?
In one sense, Celan’s phrase can be interpreted in terms of the impossibility of witnessing for the witnesses – for others, perhaps, who die around me, for the helpless ones whom the survivors resolve to remember. But it can also be interpreted in another sense, referring to the vigilance of a self that endures as “no one” [ne personne], as a traumatized spacing in which the companion as it were steps forward to experience something in my place. The latter can also be said to constitute an impossible witnessing, where impossibility is to be understood in terms of the impossibility of enduring an event in the first person. This is the interpretation of this line that Blanchot seems to offer, pointing to the experience of witnessing that is also an experience of dying: to a traumatized spacing that “survives” the disappearance of the “I”, living on as the companion.
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