‘I Think Therefore I am Not’

The Wake

Set the controls for the heart of Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure (new version). A few rough and laborious notes to accompany a reading of the penultimate chapter of his novel. These follow on from a previous post.

Thomas finds Anne perfect in death, her eyes closed, her mouth unsmiling. No trace of life; she does not appear to sleep. She only resembles the one she was; death has unleashed a strange mimetic power. In one sense, the corpse is not Anne; it does not resemble the one she was in life. But in another, it has allowed Anne to resemble something that is not-Anne; it is as though death becomes real through her, and as it does so, her body seems to become larger, occupying more space in the room. The corpse absorbs the gaze of everyone around it.

Soon Thomas is left alone with the body. Night has come; he is surrounded by stars.

The totality of things wrapped about me and I prepared myself for the agony with the exalted consciousness that I was unable to die.

Where death is, you are not. And where you are, death cannot be. To Thomas it has been revealed that he cannot die; he seems to have partaken of Anne’s nothingness to have been touched by her corpse such that he himself dies. A death, of course, that has been enacted many times in the earlier chapters of the novel.

But, at that instant, what she alone had perceived up until then appeared manifest to everyone: I revealed to them, in me, the strangeness of their condition and the shame of an endless existence.

Who is this ‘everyone’? Thomas, after all, is alone. To whom can he reveal anything? He seems to imagine a whole crowd around him. Thomas is imaging the others for whom his strange immortality is manifest.

Of course I could die, but death shone perfidiously for me as the death of death, so that, becoming the eternal man taking the place of the moribund, this man without crime, without any reason for dying who is every man who dies, I would die, a dead person so alien to death that I would spend my supreme moment in a time when it was already impossible to die and yet I would live all the hours of my life in the hour in which I could no longer live them.

The death of death, but not its cancellation; the unlimiting of the limit; death become dying, an interminable dying. Thomas takes the place of the always guiltless dying – who die through no fault of their own, and must endure the impossibility of ever bringing death to an end. This experience will henceforward bear his life, even if he cannot be said to undergo it in the first person.

Thomas is dead – but that ‘is’ indicates a self-relation that has slipped out of phase with itself. A relation now, we learn at the threshold of the soliloquy, that Thomas stands in for each of us. Then Thomas is not only a character in a novel – he is not Mr Valdemar or the hunter Gracchus, but is each of us, all of us, substitute who undergoes what we cannot endure by ourselves.

What is Blanchot’s novel? A philosophical tract? A work of sung philosophy like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? Or a fiction in which philosophy, like Thomas, is made to struggle with its obscure double?

Death is not a Metaphor

Who more than I was deprived of the last moment full of hope, so totally deprived of the last consolation which memory offers to those who despair, to those who have forgotten happiness and toss themselves from the pinnacle of life in order to recall its joys? And yet I was really a dead person, I was even the only possible dead person, I was the only man who did not give the impression he had died by chance.

Thomas lacks that last moment of hope experience by the dying – not that they would survive death, but that rather they would escape, by death, the endlessness of dying. No consolation of the end. And Thomas endures this as though he was fated thus – it was not by chance that he dies. Thomas was meant for death; he was destined for it. His existence depends upon the death to which he is subjected.

All my strength, the sense I had, in taking the hemlock, of being not Socrates dying but Socrates increasing himself through Plato, this certainty of being unable to disappear which belongs only to beings afflicted with a terminal illness, this serenity before the scaffold which bestows upon the condemned their true pardon, made of every instant of my life the instant in which I was going to leave life.

Socrates is permitted the punctuality of death; so too for the criminal before the scaffold. For the terminally ill, it is the endlessness of dying that is suffered. Illness without terminus: Thomas will be unable to disappear. And yet it is this which makes every instant one when life might leave him behind.

All my being seemed to mingle with death. As naturally as men believe they are alive, accepting as an inevitable impulse their breathing, the circulation of their blood, so I ceased living. I drew my death from my very existence, and not from the absence of existence.

Death is not absence, for Thomas, but presence; it is his existence. Dying, it would seem is without end, and it is from this endlessness Thomas seems to draw sustenance. He is not alive – but his dead is not such that it is the opposite of living. Then is he alive in another sense? Is he living – surviving – amidst a dying that bears him forward without ever coming to an end?

I presented a dead person who did not confine himself to the appearance of a diminished being, and this dead person, filled with passions but insensitive, calling for his thought upon an absence of thought and yet carefully separating out whatever there might be in it of the void, of negation in life, in order not to make of his death a metaphor, an even weaker image of normal death, brought to its highest point the paradox and the impossibility of death.

Death is not to be a metaphor – it is not to be conceptualised, or removed from the experience that will be from now on occupy the heart of Thomas’s life. Dying in life: Thomas will certainly attempt to think about death, to reflect on his experience, but this thought cannot reduce the strangeness of death as the impossibility of dying. Does he think, then, in the way that he dies – without absence, without limit? Is he borne by thinking as he is borne by dying?

What then distinguished me from the living? Just this, that neither night, nor loss of consciousness, nor indifference called me from life. And what distinguished me from the dead, unless it was a personal act in which at every instant, going beyond appearances which are generally sufficient, I had to find the sense and the definitive explanation of my death?

The living are those for whom death is simply negative, a loss of consciousness. But Thomas is no longer simply alive. Thomas differs from the dead because he experiences his death, because he would explore its sense. And doesn’t dying, for him, coincide in an important sense, with this search for an explanation?

If this is the case, then the search for a definitive explanation is a mockery; it is a remnant of what still attaches Thomas too strongly to the world. But still, he seeks to reach ‘beyond appearances’ – beyond their sufficiency. Does this mean his search will run aground there where sense and explanation will always be insufficient?

People do not want to believe it, but my death was the same thing as death. Before men who know only how to die, who live up until the end, living people touched by the end of their lives as if by a slight accident, I had only death as an anthropometric index. This is in fact what made my destiny inexplicable.

What Thomas calls death may seem to have little to do with death as absence, as the limit of life. And yet it comes to him that his experience of dying is nothing extraordinary; it is just that he has lost a sense of ‘knowing how to die’, of accepting death as an external event that will end his life as if by an accident.

What gives him his destiny, and makes it inexplicable, is that dying is something he continually endures, without being able to grasp it or think it, unless his thought, too, demands a relinquished grasp, a hand that can seize nothing.

‘The Corpse of Humanity’

Under the name Thomas, in this chosen state in which I might be named and described, I had the appearance of any living person, but since I was real only under the name of death, I let the baneful spirit of the shadows show through, blood mixed with my blood, and the mirror of each of my days reflected the confused images of death and life. And so my fate stupefied the crowd.

The crowd, whom Thomas seems to have gathered around him in his imagination, are bewildered by his strangeness. He is dead, but death does not finish him off. Peculiar fate, that lends Thomas only the appearance of normality. The crowd discern the confused ‘images of death and life’ of which he is a mirror.’ Thomas is real – or is he unreal? Precarious life, lived in dying.

This Thomas forced me to appear, while I was living, not even the eternal dead person I was and on which no one could fix their glance, but an ordinary dead person, a body without life, an insensitive sensitivity, thought without thought. At the highest point of contradiction, I was this illegitimate dead person. Represented in my feelings as a double for whom each feeling was as absurd as for a dead person, at the pinnacle of passion I attained the pinnacle of estrangement, and I seemed to have been removed from the human condition because I had truly accomplished it.

Up until now in this chapter, Thomas has spoken only of himself. But now we learn Thomas is divided (as the etymology of his name suggests). There is another locus of experience ‘within’ him (inverted commas because of the strangeness of this topology – for isn’t it the outside that inhabits him?).

Thomas lives and he is dead. He is capable of feeling just like any other person in the world, but there is also in him an absence of feeling, a kind of estrangement. Thomas is not quite human – but isn’t this because he is all too human, because he undergoes what others, unbeknownst to themselves, are also undergoing?

Since, in each human act, I was the dead person that at once renders it possible and impossible and, if I walked, if I thought, I was the one whose complete absence alone makes the step or the thought possible, before the beasts, beings who do not bear within them their dead double, I lost my last reason for existing. There was no tragic distance between us.

Extraordinary claim, which makes this novel perhaps something more than a novel: Thomas – someone like the dead Thomas ‘in’ Thomas – is present in all human actions.

At once, we are each of us able to be able, to transform the world and ourselves; we are confident of our powers, but at the same time we are also unable to accomplish anything at all. At once, we can act, we can think and death, for us, is something that will befall us from without as the end of our life, but at the same time, death never arrives, the end never comes – or rather, it is as though dying is with us already, that it accompanies us in all things.

Thomas dies for us in each of us; he is endlessly sacrificed. Thomas is only the one who is sacrificed in our place by taking our place, substituting himself for us as we reach the brink of dying. But Thomas is also the one who addresses himself in a soliloquy, who can speak of the role he performs for each of us. But who speaks when Thomas speaks?

We live our death, and through him – isn’t this, Thomas asks himself, what separates human existence from that of animals? Isn’t death for them exactly that external event which comes after everything? But for the human being, death comes loose from itself; it wanders. Death is set adrift into dying, and dying into living, where one reverses over into the other: this is the peculiar fate of human existence.

A man without trace of animal nature, I ceased to be able to express myself with my voice which no longer sang, no longer even spoke as the voice of a talking bird speaks. I thought, outside of all image and all thought, in an act which consisted of being unthinkable.

The ‘other’ Thomas, enduring dying, is separate from the order of animals, and his is also a name for what, within each of us, likewise separates us from the animal order. The ‘other’ Thomas is dying in all of us. And the ‘other’ Thomas thinks in the same way; he endures death as non-knowledge, as the unthinkable. There is still thought, but it is now entirely passive; it has no part in human action.

Every moment, I was this purely human man, supreme individual and unique example, with whom, in dying, each person makes an exchange, and who dies alone in place of all. With me, the species died each time, completely. Whereas, if these composite beings called men had been left to die on their own, they would have been seen to survive miserably in pieces divided up among different things, reconstituted in a mixture of insect, tree and earth, I disappeared without a trace and fulfilled my role as the one, the unique dead person to perfection. I was thus the sole corpse of humanity. In contradiction of those who say that humanity does not die, I proved in every way that only humanity is capable of dying.

Thomas is each of us, assuming our place as each of us dies. There is nothing something special about our relation to death, that it is a kind of intimacy, something kept apart from the world like a secret. But Thomas is the one who really dies for all of us. He is the ‘no one’ to whom death comes, the impersonal locus that endures dying as a becoming without term.

I appeared in every one of those poor moribunds, ugly as they were, at the instant full of beauty in which, renouncing all their links with the other species, they become, by renouncing not only the world, but the jackal, the ivy, they become uniquely men. These scenes glow within me like magnificent spectacles. I approached them and their anxiety grew. These miserable creatures who were becoming men felt the same terror at feeling themselves men as Isaac on the altar at becoming a lamb. None of them recognised my presence and yet there was in the depths of them, like a fatal ideal, a void which exerted a temptation over them, which they felt as a person of such complete and imposing reality that they had to prefer that person to any other, even at the cost of their existence.

Thomas recalls again the extraordinary step into human existence that occurs, one presumes, not just at a particular point in history, but all the time, ceaselessly. Death’s approach brings anxiety – who would want to exchange their capacity to act for passivity, their chance to think for the fascination of non-thought?

Then the gates of agony opened and they flung themselves into their error. They shrunk, forced themselves to be reduced to nothing to correspond to this model of nothingness which they took for the model of life. They loved only life and they struggled against it. They perished from a taste for life so strong that life seemed to them that death whose approach they anticipated, which they thought they were fleeing as they hurled themselves forward to meet it and which they recognised only at the very last moment when, as the voice was saying to them, ‘It is too late’, I was already taking their place.

Only in agony is their dying revealed to human beings; only then are they flung into error, into a wandering without term. Death is coming; it is feared but it is also anticipated. Wasn’t it death that they trying to escape all along? But it was dying they were really fleeing; it was the experience of the interminable, the incessant which commences when Thomas takes their place.

Does Thomas save them from this experience (one they cannot endure in the first person), or do they become Thomas when the gates of agony open? Is the horror of agony precisely that Thomas, the companion, comes forward in each of us to endure what we cannot endure alone?

What happened then? When the guard who had stepped away returned, he saw someone who resembled no one, a faceless stranger, the very opposite of a being. And the most loving friend, the best son saw their senses altered before this alien shape and cast a look of horror on that which they loved the most, a cold, unrecognisable look as if death had taken not their friend but their feelings, and now they were the ones, they, the living, who were changing so profoundly that it might have been called a death.

Death is arriving: Thomas. And just as Anne seemed to remove herself, in dying, from the person he and the others knew, so does Thomas in the dying, in the corpse turn aside all familiar relations. Thomas is the corpse become alien, become other. And just as Thomas was affected by the corpse of Anne, so will others be affected by him, the ‘other’ Thomas who substitutes himself for each of us in our agony and in our dying.

Even their relations among themselves were altered. If they touched one another it was with a shudder, feeling that they were experiencing contact with a stranger. Each, with reference to the other, in complete solitude, complete intimacy, each became for the other the only dead person, the only survivor.

Now each sees Thomas in the other. Thomas, the ‘other’ Thomas is everywhere. Dying is loose in the world. Ordinary relations are impossible. A distance interposes itself between human beings that is not of the world.

And when he who wept and he who was wept over came to blend together, became one, then there came an outburst of despair, this strangest moment of the mourning, when, in the mortuary chamber, friends and relations add to themselves the one who has left their number, feel themselves of the same substance, as respectable as he, and even consider themselves the authentic dead person, the only one worthy to impose upon their common grief.

Each, too, becomes a stranger; mourner and mourned become one. Each feels as though they supplanted the place of the dying; each is the one closest to death. But then, a reversal; things go back to normal; the laws are restored.

And everything, then, seems simple to them. They again bestow on the dead person his familiar nature, after having brushed past him as if he were a scandalous reality. They say: ‘I never understood my poor husband (my poor father) better.’ They imagine they understand him, not only such as he was when living, but dead, having the same knowledge of him that a vigorous tree has of a cut branch, by the sap which still flows.

Then, gradually, the living assimilate those who have disappeared completely. Pondering the dead in pondering oneself becomes the formula of appeasement. They are seen entering triumphally into existence. The cemeteries are emptied. The sepulchral absence again become visible. The strange contradictions vanish. And it is in a harmonious world that everyone goes on living, immortal to the end. The certainty of dying, the certainty of not dying, there is all that is left, for the crowd, of the reality of death.

A further twist. Having understood that they, too, are dying – that they are as close to death as the dying one – they integrate the dying one into their life. The dead are assimilated by the living; so do the enter into existence. The dead gain new life in this assimilation. But what do they lose?

And now the experience of mortality is forgotten; there is only immortality, only the endless, spreading certainty of the day. Yes, there will be death, but there will always be the day; someone will go on living even if I do not.

Yet Thomas, by the corpse of Anne, does not forget. He has not assimilated her; his entire soliloquy is prompted by what reached him by way of her death and that he will not relinquish to the crowd.

But those who contemplated me felt that death could also associate with existence and form the decisive word: death exists. They have developed the habit of saying about existence everything they could say of death for me and, rather than murmur, ‘I am, I am not,’ mix the terms together in a single happy combination, and say ‘I am, while I am not’, and likewise, ‘I am not, while I am’, without there being the slightest attempt to force contradictory words together, rubbing them one against the other like stones.

But those who contemplate him, says the ‘other’ Thomas, realise that death is in some sense part of life. Dying is always there. For the contemplators, this thought is not disturbing.

I am what I am not; I am not who I am: formulations familiar enough; being can reverse into nothingness and vice versa; the very life of the dialectic depends upon this kind of exchange. Death and life are integrated into a whole.

As voices were called down upon my existence, affirming in succession, with equal passion: ‘He exists for always, he does not exist for always’, that existence took on a fatal character in their eyes. It seemed that I was walking comfortably over the abysses and that, complete in myself, not half-phantom half-man, I penetrated my perfect nothingness.

But Thomas would endure the contradiction; the ‘other’ Thomas belongs to a dying that cannot be assumed or put to work. He falls outside the dialectic, the comfortable exchange of life and death, which assumes, as its general equivalent, a notion of measure of which Thomas is the living (dying) refutation.

The Void

A sort of internal ventriloquist, wherever I cried out, that is where I was not, and also just where I was, being in every way the equivalent of silence. My word, as if composed of excessively high vibrations, first devoured silence, then the word. I spoke, I was by that act immediately placed in the centre of the intrigue.

I threw myself into the pure fire which consumed me at the same time it made me visible. I became transparent before my own sight. Look at men: the pure void summons their eye to call itself blind and a perpetual alibi exchanged between the night outside and the night within permits them to retain the illusion of day throughout their lives. For me, it was this very illusion which by an inexplicable act seemed to have issued from myself.

The void – to which Thomas has already linked himself – summons sight. But sight, gazing at the void, sees nothing; it is blind. Sight – linked, of course, to theory, to knowledge as the third term that makes them possible – becomes impossible.

A kind of exchange occurs – can it be understood as analogous to one between possibility and impossibility? But one, now, in which possibility and impossibility do not exist on the same level. The latter is a condition for the former – or rather, the former is unconditioned by the latter, which returns to ghost action, to leave behind human existence a trail of nothingness.

Then sight, like death, would be the sight of a strange crossover. Sight, becoming blind, just as death becomes impossible, reveals the condition of seeing and the condition of what makes dying and death eminently possible affairs.

Day – and perhaps the ordinary conception of death are, from this perspective, mere illusions – mere contractions or interiorisations. Death and life do not weigh the same; nor do blindness and vision, night and day. The first term in each couple is also name for what escapes and conditions the opposition. Conditions it? Unconditions it.

I found myself with two faces, glued one to the other. I was in constant contact with two shores. With one hand showing that I was indeed there, with the other – what am I saying? – without the other, with this body which, imposed on my real body, depended entirely on a negation of the body, I entered into absolute dispute with myself.

Having two eyes, one of which was possessed of extreme visual acuity, it was with the other which was an eye only because of its refusal to see that I saw everything visible. And so on, for all my organs. I had part of myself submerged, and it was to this part, lost in a constant shipwreck, that I owed my direction, my face, my necessity.

Thomas is doubled. He has two faces; he is in touch with two shores. One hand shows he is there and the other does not exist. He has a body and also a kind of negation of a body – the latter a body that does not work, does not function. It is not even a disabled body, but one that was never able to be able, that, out of phase with the ‘real’ body, doubles and blurs its actions with its own non-action, its capacity to act with an outstripping incapacity.

I found my proof that I existed, rather than becoming degraded, was reinforced to the point of becoming manifestly true. I made a supreme effort to keep outside myself, as near as possible to the place of beginnings. Now, far from achieving as a complete man, as a adolescent, as protoplasm, the state of the possible, I made my way toward something complete, and I caught a glimpse in these depths of the strange face of him who I really was and who had nothing in common with an already dead man or with a man yet to be born: a marvellous companion with whom I wished with all my might to blend myself, yet separate from me, with no path that might lead me to him.

Thomas has pierced the illusion, and has now the chance of seeing his real face. Who is his double, with whom he has nothing in common? A man who is already dead, or yet to be born – a man to come, or who reaches him from a past that has never quite happened. A companion who remains separate from him yet bound to him, who cannot be brought any closer but remains in his distance. In him, but outside of him: the outside inside, the one never here and always to come, the double is the one displaced, the survivor who does not coincide with his place, his time.

How has Thomas reached him? By struggling to keep outside his ordinary life – but holding himself, perhaps, in shipwreck and submergence. He is in the place of beginnings (Anne, too, I think, reached there) – but does anything, here begin? Better: the place without beginnings, without origins. Originary place where no foothold reveals itself and no action cannot be completed. Or better still – the place behind all places, the lag that attenuates the instant, time’s comet tail, the ghost of events.

Note, too, that he speaks of ‘proof’ – is it that Thomas has found something certain, indubitable, in a manner that cannot help but recall Descartes? The proof is reinforced, it seems to occur over and again, until it is ‘manifestly true’. But to whom is it manifest? To his companion? What kind of proof is this, that will not admit of demonstration?

How could I reach him? By killing myself: absurd plan. Between this corpse, the same as a living person but without life, and this unnameable, the same as a dead person but without death, I could not see a single line of relationship. No poison might unite me with that which could bear no name, could not be designated by the opposite of its opposite, nor conceived in relationship to anything. Death was a crude metamorphosis beside the indiscernible nullity which I was nevertheless coupled with the name Thomas.

How can Thomas reconcile his self-division? How can life be brought into contact with death? Not through an act of will – not through suicide. One cannot will one’s way into contact with the impossible. It must arrive of itself, since where it is, there can be no action. One must be brought into the experience in question.

And even death is too static a name for the nullity to which the ‘other’ Thomas belongs. But how can it be named, rather than calling for and dissolving all names, continually testing them, overturning their accustomed meanings and discarding them, used husks?

And isn’t this the role of this chapter? To speak by overturning the means of speech; to let words and things play in an indefatigable reciprocity, each changing the other, each continually altered by the other?

Was it then a fantasy, this enigma, the creation of a word maliciously formed to destroy all words? But if I advanced within myself, hurrying laboriously toward my precise noon, I yet experienced a tragic certainty, at the centre of the living Thomas, the inaccessible proximity of that Thomas which was nothingness, and the more the shadow of my thought shrunk, the more I conceived of myself in this faultless clarity as the possible, the willing host of this obscure Thomas. In the plenitude of my reality, I believed I was reaching the unreal.

The ‘other Thomas exists ‘within’ him (the outside inside). A Thomas of nothingness, a parasitical Thomas who remains obscure. I have said Thomas has pierced the veil, that he is able to see what is real; but this reality, in its plenitude, its excessiveness is such that it switched into the unreal. The real, the unreal: should it bother us that words seem to be able to so quickly change their polarity?

Perhaps this is because it is without division or differentiation; it exists all too much, but in a manner that is indeterminable. It is too close to Thomas and too far from him – and the same for his double, who seems to have his habitation there at the heart of ‘nothingness’ or the ‘unreal’.

‘I Think, Therefore I am Not’

O my consciousness, it was not a question of imputing to you – in the form of revery, of fainting away, of hiatus – that which, having been unable to be assimilated to death, should have passed for something worse, your own death. What am I saying? I felt this nothingness bound to your extreme existence as an unexceptional condition. I felt that between it and you undeniable ratios were being established. All the logical couplings were incapable of expressing this union in which, without then or because, you came together, both cause and effect at once, unreconcilable and indissoluble.

A shift. Thomas addresses his consciousness, and perhaps his sight, and his ability to be able. Nothingness, Thomas says, seems to be the condition of consciousness – albeit (but why does he say this?) an unexceptional one. How to think the relation between conditioning and conditioned? How to understand a union that was also in tension?

Was it your opposite? No, I said not. But it seemed that if, slightly falsifying the relationships of words, I had sought the opposite of your opposite, having lost my true path I would have arrived, without turning back, proceeding wondrously from you-consciousness (at once existence and life) to you-unconsciousness (at once reality and death), I would have arrived, setting out into the terrible unknown, at an image of my enigma which would have been at once nothingness and existence.

Is the ‘other’ Thomas simply the opposite of Thomas? Can nothingness be measured according to the same unit as existence?

And with these two words I would have been able to destroy, incessantly, that which was signified by the one by that which was signified by the other, and by that which the two signified, and at the same time I would have destroyed by their oppositeness that which constituted the oppositeness of these two opposites, and I would have finished, kneading them endlessly to melt that which was untouchable, by re-emerging right beside myself, Harpagon suddenly catching his thief and grabbing hold of his own arm.

Nothingness, existence – the sense of one of these words would destroy the sense of the other. No longer opposites, they would be comprehended in a single whole. With what solution? Harpagon, Moliere’s miser, only seizes himself when he attempts to catch a thief; he is hoarder and burglar both at once. But Thomas is now in the position of those who would assimilate the dying; he has sought to bring to measure the incommensurable that bestows the measure.

A sudden turn – a life-giving revelation.

It was then that, deep within a cave, the madness of the taciturn thinker appeared before me and unintelligible words rung in my ears while I wrote on the wall these sweet words: ‘I think, therefore I am not’.

Thomas, confronting who – his double, his obscure companion? – begins to write. ‘I think, therefore I am not’ – these words inscribed on the wall of a cave.

Isn’t thinking parallel with action with respect to possibility, to the economy of possibility? Doesn’t it spring from the same confidence in the world, the same ability to be able? Perhaps, too, there is an impossible thinking – a thinking of the impossible that issues from an inability upstream of anything a human being could achieve. Then who achieves it? Who thinks the impossible? No one. I think – therefore I am not. I am no one; nothingness has taken the place of my existence.

Sweet words, says Thomas, inspired by his vision. But why so? Words whose locus is madness – the loss of limits, the death of death. Words that are spoken out of an experience of thinking in which the thinker is sacrificed: surely this is the agony of thought, not its joy? Perhaps Thomas takes joy in the formulation, which seems to gather together so much of what he has been saying to himself. Perhaps it is the fact that it seems to come from without, that it was written on the walls of the cave by another, the madman. But isn’t this madman only himself?

Another turn.

The Lens

These words brought me a delicious vision. In the midst of an immense countryside, a flaming lens received the dispersed rays of the sun and, by those fires, became conscious of itself as a monstrous I, not at the points at which it received them, but at the point at which it projected and united them in a single beam. At this focus-point, the centre of a terrible heat, it was wondrously active, it illuminated, it burned, it devoured; the entire universe became a flame at the point at which the lens touched it; and the lens did not leave until it was destroyed. Nevertheless, I perceived that this mirror was like a living animal consumed by its own fire.

Joy – Thomas has been granted a vision. But how are these rich passages, written with such ardour, to be understood?

A lens is a focus. Consciousness comes to itself out of the focusing of more general light. It lives as it burns and sets the universe on fire. It is the flame that spreads along its beam. Like a star, it is a continuous explosion, consuming itself and living only in this continual dying.

It is a mirror that doubles the universe only to show that it was always on fire.

The earth it set ablaze was its entire body reduced to dust, and, from this unceasing flame, it drew, in a torrent of sulphur and gold, the consequence that I was constantly annihilated. It began to speak and its voice seemed to come from the bottom of my heart. I think, it said, I bring together all that which is light without heat, rays without brilliance, unrefined products; I bring them together and conjugate them, and, in a primary absence of myself, I discover myself as a perfect unity at the point of greatest intensity.

Thomas – the ‘other’ Thomas is annihilated at each moment. The lens lives from what it destroys, in the same way as life, for the living, depends on dying. Only in its burning absence from itself can the lens – consciousness – discover its unity. Consciousness is not – but only thus can it live. Consciousness lives – but only as it is not.

I think, it said, I am subject and object of an all-powerful radiation; a sun using all its energy to make itself night, as well as to make itself sun. I think: there at the point where thought joins with me I am able to subtract myself from being without diminishing, without changing, by means of a metamorphosis which saves me for myself, beyond any point of reference from which I might be seized. It is the property of my thought, not to assure me of existence (as all things do, as a stone does), but to assure me of being in nothingness itself, and to invite me not to be, in order to make me feel my marvellous absence.

The lens thinks itself; it is at once subject and object. But this depends on an ongoing annihilation; consciousness is night – just as it is also day. Endless alteration: being lives within nothingness, nothingness in being.

I think, said Thomas, and this invisible, inexpressible, nonexistent Thomas I became meant that henceforth I was never there where I was, and there was not even anything mysterious about it. My existence became entirely that of an absent person who, in every act I performed, produced the same act and did not perform it. I walked, counting my steps and my life was that of a man cast in concrete, with no legs, with not even the idea of movement. Beneath the sun, the one man the sun did not illuminate went forward, and this light which hid from itself, this torrid heat which was not heat, nevertheless issued from a real sun.

I think, therefore I am not. But it is also implied that the ‘agent’ of thinking is divided; to have the ability to think also implies an inability to think – and even a thinking of this inability: a double genitive. Then the exchange at issue here does not have being as its general equivalent. It is nothingness, impossibility, that is allowed its play.

Strange reversal, with the ‘other’ Thomas – ‘invisible, inexpressible, nonexistent’ – as its locus. Thomas experiences once again his own division; he acts, and another in him doubles this action without completing it. He walks, but another in him walks without walking – ‘with no legs, and not even the idea of movement’.

The Tragic Double

Another turn.

I looked before me: a girl was sitting on a bench, I approached, I sat down beside her. There was only a slight distance between us. Even when she turned her head away, she perceived me entirely. She saw me with my eyes which she exchanged for her own, with my face which was practically her face, with my head which sat easily on her shoulders. She was aleady joining herself to me. In a single glance, she melted in me and in this intimacy discovered my absence. I felt she was oppressed, trembling. I imagined her hand ready to approach me, to touch me, but the only hand she would have wanted to take was ungraspable.

She sees him by turning away. Another doubling – but isn’t this a way for Thomas to experience his own doubling, as though the girl were a special kind of  mirror? An external double, who reveals to him his internal division. But quickly she also becomes part of him; she is drawn to the ‘other’ Thomas, wanting to seize the hand of the one whose hand is unreal.

I understood that she was passionately searching out the cause of her discomfort, and when she saw there was nothing abnormal about me she was seized with terror. I was like her. My strangeness had as its cause all that which made me not seem strange to her. With horror she discovered in everything that was ordinary about her the source of everything that was extraordinary about me. I was her tragic double. If she got up, she knew, watching me get by, that it was an impossible movement, but she also knew that it was a very simple movement for her, and her fright reached a peak of intensity because there was no difference between us.

Somehow, her normality is the double of the ‘other’ Thomas; her ordinariness meets, in him, the extraordinary. There is no difference between them, only a kind of reversal, reminding each other of their strangeness. She is, Thomas reflects, his ‘tragic double’ – and he, presumably, is hers. But why tragic? Why is it so difficult for her to confront him, and vice versa?

I lifted my hand to my forehead, it was warm, I smoothed my hair. She looked at me with great pity. She had pity for this man with no head, with no arms, completely absent from the summer and wiping away his perspiration at the cost of unimaginable effort. Then she looked at me again and vertigo seized her. For what was there that was insane in my action? It was something absurd which nothing explained, nothing designated, the absurdity of which destroyed itself, absurdity of being absurd, and in every way like something reasonable.

I offered this girl the experience of something absurd, and it was a terrible test. I was absurd, not because of the goat’s foot which permitted me to walk with a human pace, but because of my regular anatomy, my complete musculature which permitted me a normal pace, nevertheless an absurd pace, and, normal as it was, more and more absurd.

She pities this ‘other’ Thomas who cannot act, and she pities the real Thomas whose actions carry with them a trailing phantom, a kind of slurring, which means the simplest effort is ghosted with the magnitude of what can never be achieved. The possible drawn back by the impossible, the hand that wipes the brow grown heavy: how terrifying for her to see his normality blended with the abnormality of the impossible!

Thomas appears reasonable, but she has caught him out. His normality, his completion, bears with it an absurd double. Worse: it is in that double that she confronts her own abnormality, her own incompleteness. Unpleasant mirror!

Then, in turn, I looked at her: I brought her the one true mystery, which consisted of the absence of mystery, and which she could therefore do nothing but search for, eternally. Everything was clear in me, everything was simple: there was no other side to the pure enigma. I showed her a face with no secret, indecipherable; she read in my heart as she had never read in any other heart; she knew why I had been born, why I was there, and the more she reduced the element of the unknown in me, the more her discomfort and her fright increased.

She was forced to divulge me, she separated me from my last shadows, in the fear of seeing me with no shadow. She pursued this mystery desperately and I felt her gathering herself up to throw herself into my absence as if into her mirror. There henceforth was her reflection, her exact shape, there was her abyss. She saw herself and desired herself, she obliterated herself and rejected herself, she had ineffable doubts about herself, she gave in to the temptation of meeting herself where she was not. I was her giving in. I put my hand on her knees.

Thomas’s strangeness is not deep, but spreads itself across his surface. There is no secret, no mystery of the depths; everything is clear, everything simple – but his is a terrifying obscurity. Thomas hides nothing; she can discover anything she likes about him, but the mystery remains, attaching itself to every one of her discoveries.

Thomas is absent, he bears a fascinating absence into which she would cast herself. As before a corpse, she cannot help but be drawn to a mystery that is entirely of the surface.

She disappears – who was she? -, falling into the void that he is, in a reversal of those who would absorb the dead through funerary rituals and obsequies. Thomas is the eternal corpse, the eternal other. And now, once again, he is alone.

Anguish

Another turn; the visions seem to have abated. But it is evening, whereas at the start of the soliloquy it was still night. Has a whole day passed? Or does Thomas still belong to a visionary time, to a time without minutes?

I am sad; the evening is coming. But I also experience the opposite of sadness. I am at that point where it sufficient to experience a little melancholy to feel hate and joy. I feel that I am tender, not only toward men but toward their passions. I love them, loving the feelings by which one might have loved them. I bring them devotion and life at the second degree: to separate us there is nothing more than that which would have united us, friendship, love.

In the depths of myself, at the end of the day, strange emotions are deposited which take me for their object. I love myself with the spirit of revulsion, I calm myself with fear, I taste life in the feeling which separates me from it. All these passions, forced within me, produce nothing other than that which I am and the entire universe exhausts its rage to make me feel something, vaguely, of myself, feel some being which does not feel itself.

Sad and happy; full of hate and joy, Thomas – or is it the ‘other’ Thomas who speaks – feels a tenderness and love for human beings. In his depths, in the night of his soul, strange emotions seize him; he loves himself and is revolted by himself; calmness and fear coincide; life is close and distant. But in the end, what he lacks is feeling – a lack in which everything confirms him.

Now calm comes down with the night. I can no longer name a single feeling. if I were to call my present state impassivity, I could just as well call it fire. What I feel is the source of that which I felt, the origin believed to be without feeling, the indiscernible impulse of enjoyment and revulsion. And, it is true, I feel nothing. I am reaching regions where that which one experiences has no relation with that which is experienced.

I go down into the hard rock of marble with the sensation of slipping into the sea. I drown myself in mute bronze. Everywhere hardness, diamond, pitiless fire, and yet the sensation is that of foam. Absolute absence of desire. No movement, no phantom of movement, neither anything immobile. It is in such great poverty, such absence, that I recognise all the passions from which I have been withdrawn by an insignificant miracle.

Without feeling, Thomas is at the source of feeling; he has reached that point where ‘that which one experiences has no relation with that which is experienced’. No relation – he has been separated from the world and from himself as one who inhabits the world.

Absent from Anne, absent from my love for Anne to the extent that I loved Anne. And absent, doubly, from myself, carried each time by desire beyond desire, and destroying even this nonexistent Thomas where I felt I truly existed. Absent from this absence, I back away infinitely. I lose all contact with the horizon I am fleeing. I flee my flight.

Where is the end? Already the void seems to me the ultimate in fullness I understood it, I experienced it, I exhausted it. Now I am like a beast terrified by its own leap. I am falling in horror of my fall. I aspire vertiginously to reject myself from myself. Is it night? Have I come back, another, to the place where I was? Again there is a supreme moment of calm. Silence, refuge of transparency for the soul. I am terrified by this peace. I experience a sweetness which contains me for a moment and consumes me.

Agitation. Periods of calm seem to alternate with intense movement. Thomas has lost the boundaries from which he would break; no horizon holds him; can he even be said to be fleeing? He flees flight; he falls because he is falling: there is no path, no destination, only a scattering of the will, a dispersal of desire.

It is as though Thomas has become his own mirror, that he confronted what the young girl saw in him, and what he saw in Anne. Terror, fright – Thomas is lost in the impossible; he cannot come to himself.

Calmness saves him. But what kind of tranquility is this?

If I had a body, I would grip my throat with my hands. I would like to suffer. I would like to prepare a simple death for myself, in an agony in which I would tear myself to pieces. What peace! I am ravaged by delights. There is no longer anything of me which does not open itself to this future void as if to a frightful enjoyment.

No notion, no image, no feeling sustains me. Whereas just a moment ago I felt nothing, simply experiencing each feeling as a great absence, now in the complete absence of feelings I experience the strongest feeling. I draw fright from the fright which I do not have. Fright, terror, the metamorphosis passes all thought. I am at grips with a feeling which reveals to me that I cannot experience it, and it is at that moment that I experience it with a force which makes it an inexpressible torment.

Thomas would like to coincide with this new feeling, to make it his; he would like to keep his appointment with his body and to put an end to his ceaseless drift. Finality – the desire to kill himself, to tear himself to pieces.

The void awaits him; fright; enjoyment. The complete absence of feelings is now felt with the greatest intensity. Fright at the lack of fright; terror at terror’s lack. Thomas cannot undergo the feeling that struggles with him. Inexpressible torment: he lives outside action, the chance of action.

And that is nothing, for I could experience it as something other than what it is, fright experienced as enjoyment. But the horror is that there emerges within it the consciousness that no feeling is possible, and likewise no thought and no consciousness. And the worst horror is that in apprehending it, far from dissipating it like a phantom by touching it, I cause it to increase beyond measure.

I experience it as not experiencing it and as experiencing nothing, being nothing, and this absurdity is its monstrous substance. Something totally absurd serves as my reason. I feel myself dead – no; I feel myself, living, infinitely more dead than dead. I discover my being in the vertiginous abyss where it is not, an absence, an absence where it sets itself like a god. I am not and I endure. An inexorable future stretches forth infinitely for this suppressed being.

The intensity of his feelings does not dissipate but increase. He experiences what he cannot assume as experience in the first person. And his reason, his capacity to think, is also usurped. Is he dead? More dead than dead – but alive.

Dying, living – is he, or is he not? But these words, these expressions, have lost their grip on him. How to speak of what seems to refuse words, even as it calls to them? It is not the ineffable that is at issue, but a demand that seems to use up words and cast them aside, even as it cannot do without them.

Hope turns in fear against time which drags it forward. All feelings gush out of themselves and come together, destroyed, abolished, in this feeling which molds me, makes me and unmakes me, causes me to feel, hideously, in a total absence of feeling, my reality in the shape of nothingness. A feeling which has to be given a name and which I call anguish.

Anguish names this light and terror: a mood doubled up, a void where feelings once were. Feeling of the lack of feeling. But anguish also seems a gateway or a threshold; the mood is able to meet the night, to respond to its absent presence, the way it comes forward only by withdrawing the world from itself.

Night

A final turn.

Here is the night. The darkness hides nothing. My first perception is that this night is not a provisional absence of light. Far from being a possible locus of images, it is composed of all that which is not seen and is not heard, and, listening to it, even a man would know that, if her were not a man, he would hear nothing. In true night, then, the unheard, the invisible are lacking, all those things that make the night habitable. It does not allow anything other than itself to be attributed to it; it is impenetrable.

It was night right at the outset of the soliloquy; it appears that it is night again, or that night has only now arrived. And note its features: nothing can be attributed to it; it has no qualities. It is only itself; it coincides with itself. The night calls for words only to turn them aside.

I am truly in the beyond, if the beyond is that which admits of no beyond. Along with the feeling that everything has vanished, this night brings me the feeling that everything is near me. It is the supreme relationship which is sufficient unto itself; it leads me eternally to itself, and an obscure race from the identical to the identical imparts to me the desire of a wonderful progress. In this absolute repetition of the same is born true movement which cannot lead to rest. I feel myself directed by the night toward the night. A sort of being, composed of all that which is excluded from being, presents itself as the goal of my undertaking.

Thomas is in the beyond, but this is no heaven. It is beyond, but not beyond – Thomas has taken a step that does not let him move forward. For all that, hasn’t his relation to the world been altered?

Night is said to be sufficient unto itself, and it is as though Thomas is part of this sufficiency – that his life was only that detour required to lead night back to itself, over and again. That Thomas himself were only a fold of the night which eternally unfolds him. That his life was only an episode in the eternal return of the night.

That which is not seen, is not understood, is not, creates right beside me the level of another night, and yet the same, toward which I aspire unspeakably, though I am already mingled with it. Within my reach there is a world –  I call it a world, as, dead, I would call the earth nothingness. I call it world because there is no other possible world for me.

Just as when one moves toward an object, I believe I am making it come closer, but it is the one that understands me. Invisible and outside of being, it perceives me and sustains me in being. Itself, I perceive it, an unjustifiable chimera if I were not there, I perceive it, not in the vision I have of it, but in the vision and the knowledge it has of me.

It is the night, the outside, that perceives him, Thomas. The night is looking at him: Thomas is only the return of the night to itself; his whole life the road night takes to come to itself. But does the night need him? Does it need Thomas, and the ‘other’ Thomas in each of us, in order to return to itself? Perhaps it cannot remain in simple tautology. Perhaps time always means its dispersal, demanding that the night adventure outside of itself. Night cannot escape its own ecstasy.

His perception of the night is only the night’s perception of Thomas. Then who is Thomas, the placeholder for the night? The one for whom the night, too, is a placeholder.

I am seen. Beneath this glance, I commit myself to a passivity which, rather than diminishing me, makes me real. I seek neither to distinguish it, nor to attain it, nor to suppose it perfectly negligent, by my distraction I retain for it the quality of inaccessibility which is appropriate to it. My sense, my imagination, my spirit, all are dead on the side on which it looks at me. I seize it as the sole necessity, that which is not even a hypothesis… as my sole resistance, I who am annihilating myself.

Thomas is real only as the night; what does he sense, his imagination and his meaning matter? As the night regards him, he is dead. But seizes this regard; it is necessary for him. He will endure it. Does he take comfort from the night’s regard? But it is impersonal. Then does he satisfy himself in having seen the truth? But in what sense has he seen it? He has been seen; Thomas, portion of the night, looks at himself. Seen – but Thomas only recommences the struggle with his companion.

I am seen. Porous, identical to the night, which is not seen, I am seen. Being as imperceptible as it is, I know it as it sees me. It is even the last possibility I have of being seen, now that I no longer exist. It is that glance which continues to see me in my absence. It is the eye that my disappearance requires more and more as it becomes more complete, to perpetuate me as an object of vision.

He is seen: Thomas’s self-awareness is only the self-awareness of the night. Thomas’s capacity to perceive likewise belongs to the night. Who is he now but the one witnessed by night? Who called into being but to the night, and to whom will he return, but that same night? But still, he is also apart from the night, separated from it. He also lives his own life. How to understand the way the night claims him and leaves him apart?

In the night we are inseparable. Our intimacy is this very night. Any distance between us is suppressed, but suppressed in order that we may not come closer to the other. It is a friend to me, a friendship which divides us. It is united with me, a union which distinguishes us. It is myself, I who do not exist for myself.

Inseparable – Thomas is the night; there is no distance between them. And yet, too, there is a division; theirs is a union of two. Thomas calls their relation friendship, amity – a word which came up in the narrator’s account of Anne’s vicissitudes. Another word to be used and burnt up. Thomas is bound to the night in a friendship severs his relations to the world. Amity, then, by way of distance, of interruption – of an interval that is not of the world, but divides the world from itself.

In this instant, I have no existence except for it, which exists only for me. My being subsists only from a supreme point of view which is precisely incompatible with my point of view. The perspective in which I fade away from my eyes restores me as a complete image for the unreal eye to which I deny all images. A complete image with reference to a world devoid of image which magnifies me in the absence of any imaginable figure. The being of a nonbeing of which I am the infinitely small negation which it investigates as its profound harmony.

Seen – as an image of everything. Thomas is the impossible, the ghost of action. As such, he is also the double of the world, its image – but an image which mirrors the world as what it is not and cannot be: not as potential, as a set of possibilities that might unfold into the future, but as the impossible, as the indefinite decay of the ability to be able. Thomas is an image – but this image has primacy over the ‘original’, which is only a contraction, a delimitation of the night.

In the night shall I become the universe? I feel that in every part of me, invisible and nonexistent, I am supremely, totally visible. Marvellously bound, I offer in a single unique image the expression of the world. Without colour, inscribed in no thinkable form, neither the product of a powerful brain, I am the sole necessary image. On the retina of the absolute eye, I am the tiny inverted image of all things.

For the eye, Thomas is all things; he saves presence in his very absence, his nothingness. That is, he saves the world as it is given to human experience, being the condition of that experience. Only Thomas, overflowing himself, Thomas without negation, can know the principle of totality. But can he know it? Only in a state of non-knowing, seeing the totality in a kind of blindness.

In my scale, I bestow upon it the personal vision not only of the sea, but of the hillside still ringing with the cry of the first man. There, everything is distinct, everything is melted together. To the prism that I am, a perfect unity restores the infinite dissipation which makes it possible to see everything without seeing anything.

He gives to the eye the vision of the first human beings – those in whom the ‘other’ Thomas has insinuated himself. And he shows it the sea, into which Thomas slipped at the outset of this peculiar novel. Everything is distinct – but everything is also melted together – death and life, nothingness and being. Thomas is once again the prism, the condition of all human sight, all human life.

I renew the crude undertaking of Noah. I enclose within my absence the principle of totality which is real and perceptible only for the absurd being who overflows totality, for that absurd spectator who examines me, loves me and draws me powerfully into his absurdity.

To the extent that I contain within me that whole to which I offer (as the water offered Narcissus) the reflection in which it desires itself, I am excluded from the whole and the whole itself is excluded therefrom, and yet more is the prodigious one who is absent excluded, absent from me and from everything, absent for me as well, and yet for whom I work alone at this absurdity which he accepts.

Thomas offers a reflection for the night to see itself, but not because he has the capacity to do so. He is not Narcissus, but the pool in which he drowns. Image of the world, he invites the world to tumble into his nothingness. The girl who disappeared into him had already sensed his monstrosity. Thomas saves the world like Noah, but he also brings about the flood, allowing it to overflow the totality of things of which he is the double.

All of us are condemned by the same logical proscription, all three of us (a number which is monstrous when one of the three is everything). We are united by the mutual check in which we hold each other, with this difference, that it is only with reference to my contemplator that I am the irrational being, representing everything outside of him, but it is also with reference to him that I cannot be irrational, if he himself represents the reason of this existence outside of everything.

Three? Presumably, the night, Thomas and everything, the totality. Thomas and the totality take the place of everything in turn. Each bears the burden of being everything.

Now, in this night, I come forward bearing everything, toward that which infinitely exceeds everything. I progress beyond the totality which I nevertheless tightly embrace. I go on the margins of the universe, boldly walking elsewhere than where I can be, and a little outside of my steps. This slight extravagance, this deviation toward that which cannot be, it is not only my own impulse leading me to a personal madness, but the impulse of the reason which I b
ear with me. With me the laws gravitate outside the laws, the possible outside the possible.

Madness is not the opposite of reason, but inhabits it, investing it. Then it is the impulse of reason to reach beyond itself and carry madness with it. Thomas progresses, but with what kind of steps? He is the impossible; he is all deviation.

Nothing can be understood if these terms are thought to be commensurable. Possibility and impossibility, day and night, life and death are not binaries; in each case, the latter term names what conditions the relation – conditions and unconditions it, insofar as it does not operate to open up a field where something is possible, but to plunge possibility into the impossibility of which it is only a fold. But here, too, the words possibility and impossibility, condition and uncondition are only synonyms for what cannot be properly named. 

The Creator

Thomas bears the whole world forward, offering it to that excess without negation. Now he proceeds to an anomalous region.

O night, now nothing will make me be, nothing will separate me from you. I adhere marvellously to the simplicity to which you invite me. I lean over you, your equal, offering you a mirror for your perfect nothingness, for your shadows which are neither light nor absence of light, for this void which contemplates.

Nothing will separate Thomas from the night. He will remain the night’s mirror, letting the night contemplate itself in the Narcissus’s pool of the ‘other’ Thomas.

To all that which you are, and, for our language, are not, I add a consciousness. I make you experience your supreme identity as a relationship, I name you and define you. You become a delicious passivity. You attain entire possession of yourself in abstention. You give to the infinite the glorious feeling of its limits.

Thomas is the detour that takes the night out of a self-subsistent tautology. Night relates to itself – it is named, defined, spoken about. In Thomas, the night gives limits to its own infinitude. Or this is Thomas’s gift: the limit.

O night, I made you taste your ecstasy. I perceive in myself the second night which brings you the consciousness of your barenness.

The night lives outside itself; it is ecstatic. Then if Thomas, too is ecstatic, it is only the night that throws itself forward in him. As the outside itself, the night becomes the object of Thomas’s consciousness. The subject, too – for Thomas is only a fold of the night.

You bloom into new restrictions. By my mediation, you contemplate yourself eternally.

The night delimits itself in new and wonderful ways. It is able to contemplate itself, to regard itself as Thomas – as both subject and object of his consciousness. But this contemplation is possible only because Thomas, fold of the night, is also separate from the night.

The night gives Thomas the possibility of contemplation, but it does not hold back this ability for itself. Or rather, it lives it only estranged from itself, in Thomas. Estranged, but also in intimacy, in friendship, the night’s creation of Thomas creates the night’s own mirror. But he can only usurp the position of contemplator; the night is watching in him; the night keeps vigil.

I am with you, as if you were my creation. My creation…. What strange light is this which falls upon me? Could the effort to expel myself from every created thing have made of me the supreme creator? Having stretched all my strength against being, I find myself again at the heart of creation. Myself, working against the act of creating, I have made myself the creator.

Here I am, conscious of the absolute as of an object I am creating at the same time I am struggling not to breathe myself. That which has never had any principle admits me at its eternal beginning, I who am the stubborn refusal of my own beginning. It is I, the origin of that which has no origin. I create that which cannot be created. Through an all-powerful ambiguity, the uncreated is the same word for it and for me. For it, I am the image of what it would be, if it did not exist. Since it is not possible that it should exist, by my absurdity I am its sovereign reason. I force it to exist.

Did the night create Thomas, or Thomas the night? Thomas is in excess of everything, expelled from the order of creation. He holds himself there – this is his stubbornness, his strength – where creation is impossible. Even as he is expelled from the world, however, the world interrupts itself in him. Thomas lives this interruption, but who lives? The night, the obscure – Thomas is the obscure; he is only the night.

The eternal beginning – Thomas, the other Thomas, is alive only in the return of what turns the present from itself. Thomas is at the origin, he inhabits the return of the origin; he can take himself as its creator. But strange creation that is also uncreation, the interruption of the world. Thomas embodies the uncreated, the impossibility of creation. He is the image of this nonexistence, the double of all action. He is the reason of absurdity, of madness; reason and condition, absurdity and uncondition.

O night, I am itself. Here it has drawn me into the trap of its creation. And now it is the one that forces me to exist. And I am the one who is its eternal prisoner. It creates me for itself alone. It makes me, nothingness that I am, like unto nothingness. In a cowardly way it delivers me to joy.

Thomas is the night, but he is also its prisoner, the night that forces him to exist. He is the sme as the night; his nothingness doubles its nothingness; the night lives on as the other Thomas. Yet this is also his chance, it is what calls him into existence. It is his joy. Has joy replaced anguish? Has Thomas’s soliloquy brought him to the verge of happiness? But it is a cowardly joy – a joy to which he has been abandoned and abandons himself.