Raconter sa propre mort: éléments d’une autothanatographie dans le récit blanchotien L’instant de ma mort

Abstract

In the brief text under the title L’instant de ma mort Maurice Blanchot recounts a singular event experienced by the character of his fiction: a young man was nearly executed towards the end of the second world war and escaped death by pure chance. Blanchot uses third-person narration and switches to first person only in the last sentence, creating a feeling of doubt about the truthfulness of the narrated incident and making the reader wonder whether the character, the narrator and the author himself are more than one person. The mystery seems unraveled thanks to former first-person references to the same event in La folie du jour. However, rather than assuming that this is a proof of fiction giving way to autobiography, one should see a bigger enjeu, which concerns the only experience capable of driving to the threshold of literature. This very experience transgresses the boundaries of the writer’s identity, questioning even the possibility of writing in the first person. L’instant de ma mort cannot be seen as a typical récit de vie for a further reason: what is narrated is actually a moment in a lifetime. It embraces the whole life as it concerns the borderline experience par excellence but the focal point is displaced: rather than the narration of one’s life, it is the narration of a suspended death. This suspended death, always behind us and yet to come, haunts every Blanchotian narration. It is this very question of death – deeply related to the literary experience and largelyexceeding literary genres – as well as the (im)possibility of testyfying for it that the paper examines.