Let Us Sleep

A few notes on one of the chapters of Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure (new version).

Anne is found one day, stretched out on a bench in the garden, already lapsing towards unconsciousness. She is ill; she’s dying, which she at first experiences as a kind of sweetness. She sleeps; the night holds no terrors.

The silence flowed, and the solitude full of friendship, the night full of hope …

Illness seems to be a kind of rest, the sweetness of sleep; Anne will return to the world. In these early stages, illness seems beneficient; she feels its friendship. But then her real illness begins.

… around her, many things were changing, and a desolate climate surrounded her, as if gloomy spirits sought to draw her toward inhuman feelings. Slowly, by a pitiless protocol, they took from her the tenderness and friendship of the world.

Anne rests in a room barely reached by the sun. Her mother sits beside her in an armchair. Hours pass in silence. When Anne attempts to speak to her mother, asking if she had been swimming, her mother tells her to be quiet. Anne must not talk; she’ll tire herself.

Obviously, there were no confidences to be shared with a person about to die, no possible relationship between her and those who are enjoying themselves, those who are alive.

She has been removed from the world, and from those relations with others that pass by way of the world.

Yet, surrounded by hardness, watched by her friends who tested her with an air of innocence, saying, ‘We can’t come tomorrow, excuse us,’ and who then, after she had answered in true friendship, ‘That’s not important, don’t take any trouble’, thought, ‘How insensitive she is becoming; she no longer cares about anything'[….] Soon they would be saying, ‘She’s no longer herself, it would be better if she died’, and then: ‘What a deliverance for her if she died!’

Her composure is unwelcome; she realises she must show a face of suffering, and present her visitors with ‘closed eyes’ and ‘pinched lips’. Only in this way will she assume take on the role for her friends, for her mother, of a dying patient. To speak to those around her in friendship only makes her appear insensitive; if she is to retain their support, then it must not appear that she’s other than herself. She is dying; she must play the role of the dying all the way up to dying. Only in that way will death seem not simply a deliverance.

Then this means she still wants to live – or at least not to be thought to deserve death as a blessed relief. It seems she wants the solitude of her new isolation, her separation from the world, feeling her way into its absence, and responding to its demands.

But then, Anne really begins to suffer – first of all, to open her eyes, and then to receive the gentlest words. And then another phase:

But now, she hardly suffered any more at all; her body attained the ideal of egotism which is the ideal of every body: it was hardest at the moment of becoming weakest, a body which no longer cried out beneath the blows, borrowed nothing from the world, made itself, at the price of its beauty, the equivalent of a statue.

Anne is borne to a new state. An egotism – but this word used in a stange sense. The body has separated itself from the world; it has become something like a statue – and isn’t what defines such a work of art the putting out of use of its own substance? Anne’s body becomes hard, obdurate. This is an egotism that seems to close her from the world. But it protects her, too, this egotism without ego.

Yet more trials await her:

This hardness weighted terribly on Anne; she felt the absence of all feeling in her as an immense void, and anguish clutched her. Then, in the form of this primordial passion, having now only a silent and dreary soul, a heart empty and dead, she offered her absence of friendship as the truest and purest friendship …

Pause for a moment in this long sentence. Anne is tormented not by any particular feeling, but by feeling’s absence. She experiences this absence as anguish – but is this not a feeling? Rather, the acute experience of the absence of feeling – of ‘a heart empty and dead’. Then Anne’s newfound hardness, her body’s separation from the world has a price.

It seems, also, that her withdrawal is also a severing of of her former friendships. She is alone with her hardness. But now a new promise: the absence of friendship can now become friendship – the ‘truest and purest friendship’. Strange transformation. What is this chance that opens to Anne in the midst of her anguish? What has she been able to offer as friendship despite the severing of her relations to her friends? A friendship, now, that seems to be unilateral – that does not ask to be returned, or at least not by another person. Is this not a way of indicating the welcome she gives her falling outside of the world, outside those relations whose network once gave her support?

To what demand is she responding in friendship?

… she resigned herself, in this dark region where no one touched her, to responding to the ordinary affection of those around her by this supreme doubt concerning her being, by the desperate consciousness of being nothing any longer, by her anguish; she made the sacrifice, full of strangeness, of her certainty that she existed, in order to give a sense to this nothingness of love which she had become.

Anne is not there, where others take her to be; she cannot be there, experiencing only a desperate doubt, in response to which she gives up her certainty that she exists. Or rather, she continues to accept that she has been placed in parentheses those relations that once joined her to the world, and to her friends.

Now there is a new kind of friendship – a kind of love, whose price is the sacrifice of all certainty. She has been separated from the world and from her former life, thrown back on herself. This is her ‘egotism’. But there is no ego for her to fall back upon, or at least what there once might have been she has willingly sacrificed. Her new friendship, the nothingness of love, requires nothing else.

And thus, deep within her, already sealed, already dead, the most profound passion came to be. To those who cried over her, cold and oblivious she returned hundredfold what they had given her, devoting to them the anticipation of her death, her death, the pure feeling, never purer, of her existence in the tortured anticipation of her nonexistence.

A gift – out of this new kind of friendship, this new love. She is dying; she gives to them a kind of anticipation – the awareness that she is to die. But why is this a gift? In what sense is it generous to give the awareness of your impending death to others?

We have already seen her friends criticised for not understanding her graciousness for what it was: the gesture of a woman who is still alive, who is not yet terminally ill. But things have changed; Anne is suffering. And in this suffering, it seems the awareness that others know she is going to die assists her.

She drew from herself not the weak emotions, sadness, regret, which were the lot of those around her, meaningless accidents with no chance of making any change in them, but the sole passion capable of threatening her very being, that which cannot be alienated and which would continue to burn when all the lights were put out.

Then her new friendship, her love, is not to be thought as a kind of regret – that she had not told those around her of her love for them, or her sorrow at leaving them behind. This love, this friendship is pure – it seems to have lifted itself above what, for her, are merely the contingencies of life, that network of relations she at once time lived within.

Let them have her life. Let them have the one she was, and to project the image of the living upon the dead. She is dying, and she welcomes this dying. Who is she now? Who has she become, for whom emotions and sadness are meaningless?

She would give those around her a kind of passion, one that, it seems, belongs to her – it cannot be alienated – or, perhaps, to which she herself belongs.

For the first time, she raised the words ‘give herself’ to their true meaning: she gave Anne, she gave much more than the life of Anne, she gave the ultimate gift, the death of Anne; she separated herself from her terribly strong feeling of being Anne, from the terribly anguished feeling of being Anne threatened with dying, and changed it into the yet more anguished feeling of being no longer Anne, but her mother, her mother threatened by death, the entire world on the point of annihilation.

Love, friendship, and now giving herself, in their purity, in their ‘true meaning’. She gives her own death to the others. But what does this mean? Has she shed her death, understood as the possibility of coming to an end? Has she struggled into a new kind of life – a strange dying without terminus?

Yet she has only been freed from anguish for yet more anguish. In a sense, she has left herself behind – Anne-who-will-die is now the possession of those gathered around her deathbed.

Never, within this body, this ideal of marble, monster of egoism, which had made of its unconsciousness in a last pledge of friendship, never had there been more tenderness, and never within this poor being reduced to less than death, plundered of her most intimate treasure, her death, forced to die not personally but by the intermediary of all the others, had there been more being, more perfection of being.

By passing from suffering to anguish, from the vulnerability of her body to its toughened triumph, Anne (but is she any longer Anne? What does this name designate?) has lost hold of her death. She has given it to others; she can only die by way of them. Or rather, the idea of death as a limit, as finitude, belongs only to the living.

Then the one who is sying is no longer bothered about ‘Anne’, who was at home in the world that she used to be. She has turned from the one she was in order to deliver herself into the nothingness of love, into her new, solitary friendship. Only in the eyes of those around is death a limit. She, now, knows something else.

But here, the narrator speaks of plunder, as though her death had been stolen from her. The one who was called Anne has also lost the death – her own death – with which she was most intimate. It has been taken from her – but she doesn’t seem to mind, unlike Rilke’s Malte, who wants to die the death his grandfather died.

In one sense, she has given up her death – she dies only ‘by the intermediary of all the others’; this is her generosity, her graciousness. But the one who is dying has relinquished her hold on Anne of the world; Anne, as she was, lives in the memories of those around her. Anne is lost – but the one who lies dying in her place experiences this as a liberation. Let others keep the intimacy of Anne’s death; let them mourn the one she was.

And so she had succeeded: her body was truly the strongest, the happiest; this existence, so impoverished and restrained that it could not even receive its opposite, nonexistence, was just what she was seeking. It was just that which permitted her to be equal, up to the very end, to all the others, in excellent form to disappear, full of strength for the last struggle.

Triumph. She experiences plenitude – an excess of being, being’s perfection. She has succeeded in driving away all lack – all nonexistence. Yet she has done so only by paring aware her existence – by becoming ‘impoverished’ and ‘restrained.’  Paring away the-one-who-was-Anne.

It is implied (‘she had succeeded’) that this is something she brought about through an act of will. Was death plundered from her, or did she give her dying to others? Is her happiness the result of her own great effort, or is it a way of reconciling herself to what has already occurred?

She has let go of herself. And now something marvellous happens.

During the moments which followed, a strange fortress rose up around Anne.

There follows a deliriously beautiful passage where Anne becomes aware of herself not as a human being, but ‘merely a being’, among mayflies in a fantastical landscape, a place of where ‘obscure origins floundered. Amorphous monsters in ‘mysterious agony’.

There was no way to express what they were, these shapes, beings, baneful entities – for us, can something which is not the day appear in the midst of the day, something which in an atmosphere of light and clarity would represent the shudder of terror which is the source of the day.

Wherever she is, she has approached the condition of the light and the meaning of the world. At the heart of the day, a strange kind of night. Instead of well-defined forms, strange metamorphoses; creatures who substitute shapelessness for shapelessness.

She has been granted a revelation; she has reached the protean metamorphoses that are the condition of meaning.

What was the result of this revelation? One would have said that everything was destroyed, but that everything was beginning again as well. Time, coming forth from its lakes, rolled her in an immense past …

A past, though, that was never present. A past into which everything had already disappeared, and which is always just on the verge of returning. This is a way of speaking of a disjunction in time – time without itself, displaced from the present. But note that if she is to remember what occurs, then something of her must survive this disjunction of time – something like a self must remain across her metamorphoses.

Suddenly – and never was anything so abrupt – the failures of chance came to an end, and that which could in no way be expected received its success from a mysterious hand. Incredible moment, in which she reappeared in her own form, but accursed instant as well, for this unique combination, perceived in a flash, dissolved in a flash and the unshakable laws which no shipwreck had been able to submerge were broken, giving in to a limitless caprice. An event so serious that no one near her perceived it and, although the atmosphere was heavy and wierdly transformed, no one felt the strangeness.

Suddenly, all at once, the fortress is breached; Anne has returned to the world. Anne is present, once again, to the others, but only for a moment. She appears in her own form: she is again herself. This incredible. But it is also accursed, because it lasts only for a moment. The laws of the world, into which she seemed to deliver herself – back into the day, back into meaning, back into relation with her friends – are again broken. But the ones around her do not see this.

The doctor bent over her and thought she was dying according to the laws of death, not perceiving that she had already reached that instant when death, destroying everything, might also destroy the possibility of annihilation. Alone, she saw the moment of the miracle coming, and she received no help.

Here is the strangeness: death is not approaching in the form of nonexistence, but as the impossibility of ceasing to exist. There is to be no break, no gap in being. Those around her mourn; Anne, they think, is going to disappear. But the one who is dying knows Anne to have already dispersed.

Now there is dying, and without cessation. And isn’t it dying that summons from her friendship and love? Hadn’t dying purified the relations she kept with the world by supplanting them with another relation, one to which she has willingly sacrificed herself?

But what is the miracle she experiences? Will death, once again, offer the chance of annihilation? Or is the miracle something like the infinite attenuation of death; death without limit? Strange miracle! But what could she have known when she was Anne of this peculiar threshold? How could she have anticipated this becoming-infinite of the finite; this infinite experience of mortality?

She is alone. And now she finds the others around her a desperate burden. Hasn’t she given them her death, and a hundredfold? Hasn’t she given them Anne?

Oh stupidity of those who are torn by grief! Beside her, as she was much less than dying, as she was dead, no one thought to multiply their absurd gestures, to liberate themselves from all convention and place themselves in the condition of primal creation. No one said in the silence: ‘Let us hurry and before she is cold let us thrust her into the unknown. Let us create a darkness around her so that the law may abandon itself disloyally to the impossible. And ourselves, let us go away, lose all hope: hope itself must be forgotten.’

She needs help. But what help can be given by those who refuse to relinquish hope – hope that Anne might still live, that death might be arrested? This is still to conform to the laws of the world; it is to preserve her within the laws of the world. Only a proximity to primal creation – perhaps a reference to the mysterious land into which she was delivered – can help her now.

Now Anne opened her eyes. There was in fact no more hope. This moment of supreme distraction, this trap into which those who have nearly vanquished death fall, ultimate return of Eurydice, in looking one last time toward the visible, Anne had just fallen into it as well. She opened her eyes without the least curiosity, with the lassitude of someone who knows perfectly well in advance what will be offered to her sight.

No more hope – Anne, as Anne, will not live. She opens her eyes to the world. She has fallen into the trap – the attempt to look at the world, Eurydice, for a last time.

Yes, there is her mother, her friend Louise, there is Thomas. My God, that was just what it was. All those she loved were there. Her death must absolutely have the character of a solemn farewell, each one must receive his squeeze of the hand, his smile.

She looks. And now she seems to deliver herself back to the laws of the world, the sense that she must disappear.

Like every dying person, she went away observing the rituals, pardoning her enemies, loving her friends, without admitting the secret which no one admits: that all this was already insignificant.

She dies like anyone else. But has the other in her – the one who opens herself in friendship and the nothingness of love – survived. Who opens herself – and to what? Perhaps to the future that will be lived as death, a constant streaming, an unlimited becoming. In these last moments, she discovers what she has always wanted to say to Thomas. But she dies without saying it, for what does it matter? What does anything matter?

I wonder what she might have said of her friendship, her love for the infinitude of dying.

And now, the end:

Let us sleep.