• What is it about the mythic or hyperbolic term ‘cancer’ that frightens us by its very name, as if it were the unnameable itself? The reason might be that it claims to defeat the system of codes under the authority of which, alive and accepting life, we enjoy the security. of a purely formal existence, obeying a model sign according to a programme unfolding in apparently normative fashion from beginning to end. ‘Cancer’ may be thought to symbolise (and ‘realise’) the refusal to respond: here is a cell that ignores instructions, develops outside the law, in a way said to be anarchic – but it also does more: it destroys the idea of any programme, undermining both the exchange and the message, and the possibility of reducing everything to a sign-based simulation. Cancer, in this perspective, is a political phenomenon, one of the rare ways in which the system comes to be dislocated, and its universal programming and signifying power disarticulated by proliferation and disorder – a task accomplished in former times by leprosy, then by the plague. Something we cannot understand maliciously neutralises the authority of knowledge in its position of mastery. It is not therefore because it simply represents death at work [au travail] that cancer may be described as a singular threat: it is as a deadly malfunction [dérèglement], a malfunction more threatening than the fact of dying itself and endowing that fact with the characteristic of not allowing itself to be counted or taken into account, in the same way that suicide disappears from the statistics supposed to keep count of it. [If the so-called cancerous cell, reproducing itself indefinitely, is timeless, whoever is dying of it thinks, and this is the irony of their death: ‘I am dying of my timelessness.’]

The final sentence of the fragment quoted here does not appear in the first French edition of The Writing of the Disaster dated 18 September 1980.

[…] Through a sort of wayward proliferation, an uncontrollable dissemination that escapes the system, the cancerous cell works outside the law of the programme and destroys all idea of a programme. The cancerous cell is perhaps a Foucauldian resistance to the biopolitical forces that regulate and manage our lives – Foucault writes in the first volume of The History of Sexuality that suicide was once a crime, because the right to death was the power possessed by the sovereign over his people, but now it is a unique and individual act of resistance against forms of administering life – but Blanchot goes further: cancer is mortal malfunctioning, not simply death at work. The significance of this difference is clarified in the cancerous proliferation of the fragment: the irony of this death is that it eludes the subject. Blanchot would suggest that Foucault’s account of suicidal resistance is reliant on the will of a subject (we saw earlier that Blanchot understands romantic irony as an expression of poetic subjectivity); this cancerous proliferation is a different sort of incomprehensible and infinitely reflexive irony that exceeds. and contests subjectivity.

Holly Langstaff, Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot