Volume 9, No 1, Spring 2014 ISSN 1932-1066

Death and Authenticity Reflections on Heidegger, Rilke, Blanchot Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei Fordham University [email protected]

Abstract: This essay considers the relationship between death and authenticity, a concern in philosophy since Socrates' speech about his own death sentence in Plato's Apology. While death lies outside both ontology and phenomenology, a proper relationship to death has been central to existentialist thought. In Heidegger's philosophy, the notion of being- towards-death defines the singularity of existence, and death dramatically informs both Rilke's poetics and the literary theory of Blanchot. The essay shows how the relationship between death and authenticity in their works forms the horizon between the imaginable and the unimaginable, and forms a mode of thinking about the limits of thought and language.

Keywords: Death; writing; authenticity; authorship; Heidegger, Martin; Rilke, Rainer Maria; Blanchot, Maurice.

To what extent is death thinkable or imaginable, Blanchot's understanding of literature and language. and what would entail an authentic relationship to Death, as the absolute temporal limit, marks the death so thought or imagined? Certainly a central human being in a uniquely defining way, and so death existential theme in respect to death is authenticity. This haunts the imagination and delimits the horizon of what involves fear of death and the overcoming of such fear, is thinkable. While death is lamentable and sometimes philosophically pertinent since Socrates who, in Plato's tragic, it is implied, in Socrates' discussion, that the Apology, suggests that a virtuous relationship to death fear of death may occasion a kind of existential or means first of all to acknowledge our ignorance of it. ethical failure. What then would be authentic about an In modern literature and philosophy, death emerges authentic relation to death? Is it more or less authentic to as a problem in that, while of utmost concern to us, it fear the unimaginable, or rather to imagine death—that lies outside our experience and knowledge. Death is is, to domesticate it within the actualizations of human the event horizon of thought: there can be, properly imagining? To live in denial of death is to live within speaking, no ontology of death, since it is nothing, the confines of illusion, uninformed by the ecstatic and there can be no phenomenology of death, since temporality of human existence. Yet to imagine death it never appears. Yet death is the defining concept of would be to misunderstand its absolute alterity, the Martin Heidegger's phenomenological ontology of the radical possibility of our own impossibility. Throughout human being or Dasein, since the temporality of our works of Heidegger, Rilke, and Blanchot, explorations of existence, its finitude, structures our relation to Being as fear and authenticity are relative to central assumptions such. Similarly, death dramatically informs the poetics about the imaginability—or unimaginability—of death. of transcendence in Rainer Maria Rilke, and Maurice Insofar as death is accessible to thought and writing, it

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, "Death and Authenticity: Reflections on Heidegger, Rilke, Blanchot," Existenz 9/1 (2014), 53-62 First posted 4-24-2014 54 Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei comes to define the limits of both. A brief turn to Franz in dying, only becomes what it is, in the sense of an Kafka through Blanchot's interpretations will question identity as a relation of the self to the self, by means of to what extent human mortality, the embodied reality this idea of mortality as irreplaceability.… The identity of oneself is given by death, by the being-towards- of our vulnerability to dying, is recognized in casting 2 the problem of death in terms of authenticity. death that promises me to it. Dasein's own authentic being, then, is given by and Death and Existential Authenticity through death. Yet Dasein's not-yet having reached this extreme, however impending, seems to leave Dasein as a In Being and Time, Heidegger considers death in whole out of reach, since death never "s" except in respect attempting to grasp the possibility of being-a-whole to that which obliterates its very being. Thus Blanchot's of Dasein, or the human being concerned about its question whether one can die—peux-je mourir?—is about being. If the human being is defined ontologically the je. If I am only in death, then I never am. and existentially, as its "being there," how can this This radical singularization that death gives cannot be apprehended across the whole range of Dasein's be understood according to a biological account of existence? This range would have to include not only death. Heidegger differentiates the existential analysis the origin or nascency of existence (to which Heidegger of death (concerning Tod and sterben, to die) from other gives little attention, as Hannah Arendt has charged, designations, for instance the physiological perishing but for the notion of thrownness), but also its end. (verenden) which he employs to indicate the extinction Death is the end of Dasein, yet with respect to any of living beings. Demise (Ableben) is also set aside from given individual existence, it is always outstanding, death in the existential sense, as designating simply never-yet achieved, and the totality or wholeness of living out, as in using up, one's life, as in expiration. A Dasein evades us or is marked by impossible closure: psychological account of death, too, would not tell us for when Dasein dies, or as Heidegger puts it reaches anything about Dasein's death and its individualizing its most extreme possibility, Dasein is no longer there, nature, for psychology describes living through the is no longer, and thus is nothing. Along these lines one approach, tells about the experience of dying, rather can even ask, as Blanchot does, whether one can die at than about dying itself. The existential analysis of death, all, since death obliterates the individual who could be Heidegger argues, cannot have anything to do with the subject of that sentence. "an experience of…factical demising." Anthropology Yet Heidegger describes death as "Dasein's or ethnography will also not suffice to orient an ownmost possibility."1 The death of others is, for investigation of death. In a rare reference to so-called Heidegger, no clue either to death as such, at least not primitive peoples, Heidegger suggests that their ways in the existential sense of facing, and being marked by, of comporting themselves towards death in magic and the nothing it implicates. I can sacrifice myself to save cult may tell us about their understanding of existence, someone, but I still cannot die his or her death, and but this does not get at the heart of it, for it "already he or she cannot die mine. Death, rather, individuates requires an existential analytic and a corresponding Dasein even more than Dasein's life does: I can share in conception of death" (BT 292). And any religious notion others' opinions, participate in others' rituals, make the of life after death merely skips over the phenomenon same choices, think thoughts already spelled out and in question by projecting life across the chiasm toward utter sentiments, however inwardly felt, experienced another life. by others and even universally expressed. But death But is death, aside from biological perishing or is one's own, as finitude aligns a temporality—for inevitable temporal demise, a phenomenon at all? it is my ultimate future, my end—that radically Death is merely a possibility, though a certain one, and singularizes. Dasein's Jemeinigkeit, its mineness or is phenomenal only to the extent that a possibility is ownmost singularity, is—as Derrida emphasizes in his that horizon of expectation toward which we can be interpretation—given by death: comported, or from which we can turn away. Death as The sameness of the self, what remains irreplaceable possibility gives such horizon while never itself being given; it is mere possibility which Dasein can either, at 1 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper 2 Derrida, Jacques, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills, & Row 1962, p. 307. [Henceforth cited as BT] Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1996, p. 45. http://www.existenz.us Volume 9, No. 1, Spring 2014 Death and Authenticity: Reflections on Heidegger, Rilke, Blanchot 55 least existentially, evade, or take upon itself. So death from which it comes. That in the face of which one has is the condition of possibility for life lived existentially. anxiety is characterized by the fact that what threatens In the "preliminary sketch of the existential-ontological is nowhere.…it is already 'there' and yet nowhere; it structure of death," Heidegger describes death in an is so close that it is oppressive and stifles one's breath, existential sense: and yet it is nowhere. [BT 231] Death is a possibility-of-Being which Dasein itself has One cannot fear or embrace death, unless the very to take over in every case. With death, Dasein stands possibility and extremity of death is diminished by before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. This some presenting symbolic reification, some actualizing is a possibility in which the issue is nothing less than domestication of impossibility within the possibility of Dasein's Being-in-the-world. Its death is the possibility of the rendered imagination. no-longer being-able-to-be-there. If Dasein stands before That is to say, one cannot fear death as one fears itself as this possibility, it has been fully assigned to its something (etwas fürchten) but one can experience dread ownmost potentiality-for-Being. When it stands before itself in this way, all its relations to any other Dasein have or anxiety (Angst) regarding death's very indeterminacy, been undone. This ownmost non-relational possibility is for death comes at us from out of nowhere; it is near at the same time the uttermost one. [BT 294] but unlocalizable, it is nothing but nothingness itself. In anxiety I do not know when or how I will die, but I do Death is the uttermost possibility not only in being the know only that I will die. Death is not something that is last possibility, the end of the line, the final event, but to be put off as a future present; it is present as the most by being that which Dasein can never, at any moment, extreme and possibly last future; it can come like a thief outrun, or even reach, since when death occurs, in the night. One cannot fear it, but distracts oneself Dasein is no more. For thought, death is inherently from it or faces it with the trembling of anxiety—and in paradoxical; Death is the impossible possibility, and this context Heidegger cites Søren Kierkegaard, whose death is possibility in the form of impossibility: Fear and Trembling was known to him as Angst und As potentiality-for-Being, Dasein cannot outstrip the Zittern. Anxiety, in a call from nowhere that seems to possibility of death. Death is the possibility of the be inescapable, catches up with Dasein, and shakes up absolute impossibility of Dasein. Thus death reveals Dasein with a call of conscience such that facing death, itself as that possibility which is one's ownmost, which or facing mortality and the most extreme possibility, is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped becomes possible. [unüberholbare]. As such, death is something To face death authentically is regarded by distinctively impending. [BT 294] Heidegger as a kind of temporal projection as much as Even while death factically impends, ontologically it an existential attitude: anticipatory resoluteness is the evades our grasp. Death not only evades Dasein, but kind of authentic relationship to death which does not Dasein evades, or is, in everyday life, ever distracted evade death or put it off as a future present, but opens from its death. Everyday being-towards-the-end, up Dasein to the projection of the radical and most Heidegger argues, has the character of evasion: one extreme future possibility as determining the present says, "not yet," and puts off death as a future present itself. The future, not the present, becomes the primary moment that can be projected and pushed beyond dimension of time, determining the present and even the imaginable horizon. In this way Dasein lives in the past as that which is recuperated in the projection existential flight. "Dasein is dying as long as it exists, toward the uttermost horizon. That horizon is the most but proximally and for the most part, it does by way of extreme possibility; it is the possible as such and the falling" or by "fleeing in the face of it" (BT 295). Even in possibility of Dasein's very singularity of being. In an this case of distraction or flight, one cannot fear death, authentic relation to death, Dasein must comport itself for fear indicates, in Heidegger's analysis, a determinate toward the possible in a kind of expectation, a kind of object. For "that in the face of which we fear," he writes, anticipation, which is: "is a detrimental entity within-the-world which comes the possibility of understanding one's ownmost and from some definite region but is close by and is bringing uttermost potentiality-for-Being—that is to say, the itself close" (BT 230). What we feel regarding death is possibility of authentic existence. The ontological rather anxiety, for: constitution of such existence must be made visible by setting forth the concrete structure of anticipation of anxiety does not 'see' any definite 'here' or 'yonder' death. [BT 307]

Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts 56 Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

Yet in this expectation—and here is the point of Rilke articulates in The Notebooks an authentic or intersection with Rilke's poetics—we must be wary of personal death, as Malte recalls that of his grandfather the "tendency to annihilate the possibility of the possible Chamberlain Brigge, in juxtaposition to the impersonal by making itself available to us" (BT 305) in some kind and particularly modern, mass-produced (fabrikmäßig) of anticipatory actualization. Socrates of course pointed death epitomized by the Hôtel Dieu, with its 559 beds, out repeatedly that we do not know what death is, across from Brigge's Paris lodgings (MLB 11). Malte's or even whether it is an evil to be avoided. Yet in his fear is not of death itself but of an inauthentic death, of response to the death sentence handed down to him, he an anonymous, especially institutional or technological tries to think it through via images: death, precisely one that denies his Jemeinigkeit, a death For the state of death is one of two things: either that is not his own. Malte fears a death robbed not only it is virtually nothingness, so that the dead has no of specificity, but also of humanity. In his journals Malte consciousness of anything or it is, as people say, a surmises that: change and migration of the soul from this to another the wish to have a death of one's own is growing place. And if it is unconsciousness, like a sleep in ever rarer. A while yet, and it will be just as rare as which the sleeper does not even dream, death would a life of one's own.…One arrives, finds a life, ready 3 be a wonderful gain. made, one has only to put it on. One wants to leave or is compelled to: anyway, no effort: Voilà votre mort, Even this latter image resists imaging: death is nothing monsieur….one dies the death that belongs to the to be actualized, not even in the imagination, because disease one has…people die…from one of the deaths it is, precisely, and gives, precisely, nothing. Beyond attached to the institution…banal, without any fuss. rejecting a brooding over death and thus weakening its [MLB 17-8] character as possibility, Heidegger does not elaborate on this manner of making-available, but we may think of In contrast, an authentic death may be as robust and Heidegger's suggestion in the context of the imagination vociferous as a man's life. The death of Chamberlain Brigge of death in Rilke's poetry. Rilke's various renderings of is an authentic, expansive, personal and yet very public death set forth such anticipation in vivid figural images death that engages and disturbs the world around that alternatively personalize or personify death (in the him. Malte describes a recollection of his grandfather's novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge), and retrace death, which took months and rattled the household, its the structure of human transcendence (in Duino Elegies servants, and indeed the whole community. Such a death: and the Sonnets to Orpheus) so as to include its beyond. was something more. It was a voice, that voice which seven weeks before no one had known yet: for it was Imag(in)ing Death not the voice of the chamberlain. It was not Christoph Detlev to whom this voice belonged, but Christoph Rilke's writings engage death in every phase of his Detlev's death....it was like a king who, afterward and poetic development, and may be said to engender forever, is called the Terrible. That was not the death of at least two modes of figuring a human relation to just any dropsical person; it was the wicked, princely death. The first, especially prominent in Rilke's only death which the chamberlain had carried within him novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (published and nourished on himself his whole life long….He was dying his own hard death. [MLB 21- 3] in 1910),4 concerns the idea of an authentic death and its personification or organic rendering, analogous An authentic death arrives not only at life's end but, so to to a para-life or a seed within life itself. The idea of a speak, persists throughout the trajectory of past, present, death of one's own is one of the major themes of Rilke's and future. In his description of the chamberlain's writings and attracts Blanchot's interpretive attention. death, Rilke tends to personify death in order to render it intimate and singular; it is precisely not nothing 3 Plato, "Apology," in Loeb Classical Library Volume I: but an achievement of individuality with the vigor of Euthyphro/Apology/Crito/Phaedo/Phaedrus, trans. H. N. existential authenticity that surpasses that even of life. Fowler, London: William Heinemann/New York: G. Death is not that which comes at the extremity and P. Putnam's Sons 1919, p. 32 c-d. limit of possibility, but coexists alongside and within 4 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids it. In this passage Malte uses both personification and Brigge, trans. M. D. Herder Norton, New York: W. W. organic terms, such that death can be imagined: Norton: 1949. [Henceforth cited as MLB] http://www.existenz.us Volume 9, No. 1, Spring 2014 Death and Authenticity: Reflections on Heidegger, Rilke, Blanchot 57

They have all had a death of their own. Those men (SL 157). Here even Blanchot charges Rilke with who carried theirs inside their armor, within, like a purifying death's brutality (SL 154). prisoner; those women who grew very old and small, While the elegies and sonnets have drawn much and then on a huge bed, as on a stage, before the whole scholarly study, a little-discussed poem from the early family, the household and the dogs, passed away in New Poems (Neue Gedichte) hints at several aspects of discreet and seigniorial dignity. Even the children, and the very little ones at that, did not die just any child's death's possible figuration, to which Rilke will return death; they pulled themselves together and died that throughout his poetical oeuvre. In Todes-Erfahrung which they already were, and that which they would ("Experience of Death") death's positive figuration have become. or personification as found in the Malte novel can And what a melancholy beauty it gave to women be traced to what will be in its later rendering in the when they were pregnant and stood there, in their big sonnets and elegies life or nature's other side. In Todes- bodies, upon which their slender hands instinctively Erfahrung Rilke attempts to present death as a tragic rested, were two fruits: a child and a death. Did not the figure, or rather the mask of such, and this is—despite dense, almost nourishing smile on their quite vacant the title—not to figure it positively, but to secure its faces come from their sometimes thinking that both imagination within the interstices of experience. The were growing? [MLB 22] motifs of theatre in this poem—of masks and acting out Here death is poetically rendered as prisoner, ceremony, roles, of stage and applause—evoke the philosophical event, child, and as the temporal fruit, an entanglement concern for authenticity and inauthenticity; at the same of past and future, within that grows alongside life. time, the competing notion of reality (Wirklichkeit), and Authenticity requires that death be achieved not as an the metaphor of a real green, sunshine, and forest, as endpoint, but as an origin and telos of life itself. Death is it were, behind the stage of life as it is ordinarily acted to be included in a sense of life, and so our sensibility of out, indicates the death that, as Rilke suggests, lives living must radically expand toward life's ostensible other. alongside or beneath the stratum of our ordinary While in the novel the inclusion of death is related experience. The poem both figures death as actor, and to authentic individuality, Rilke achieves, in later anticipates a notion of death that is the other side or writings, a poetical acceptance of death as transcending more original background of life itself. Here is the poem personal selfhood. This involves death's sublimation, (all translations have been altered by this author):6 in the Duino Elegies, with the view that death is life's Todes-Erfahrung Experience of Death other side, an aspect of its wholeness from which Wir wissen nichts von diesem Hingehn, das We know nothing of this going-hence modern human consciousness generally turns away nicht mit uns teilt. Wir haben keinen Grund, that so excludes us. We have no grounds Bewunderung und Liebe oder Haß for showing Death wonderment and love but to which poetical consciousness may yield access. dem Tod zu zeigen, den ein Maskenmund or hate, since it wears that age-old mask

For the later Rilke, for instance in Sonnets to Orpheus tragischer Klage widerlich entstellt. of tragedy that hopelessly contorts it. of 1922, death belongs to the wholeness of life as its Noch ist die Welt voll Rollen, die wir The world is full of roles—which we spielen. still act. other side, to be embraced rather than feared and Solang wir sorgen, ob wir auch gefielen, As long as we keep worrying to please, despised. In the elegies (begun in 1912 and completed spielt auch der Tod, obwohl er nicht Death also acts a part—though without gefällt. pleasing. a decade later), the figures of fallen heroes and dead Doch als du gingst, da brach in diese Bühne But when you went, a streak of reality children are remembered in a poetic amplification of ein Streifen Wirklichkeit durch jenen broke in upon the stage through that time (specifically an inclusion of past and future in Spalt fissure durch den du hingingst: Grün wirklicher Grüne, where you left: green of real green, the present) that renders their loss relative to poetic wirklicher Sonnenschein, wirklicher Wald. real sunshine, real forest. remembrance. Rilke attributes to death a purifying Wir spielen weiter. Bang und schwer Erlerntes We go on acting. Fearful and reciting rather than debasing anonymity. This is an ideal hersagend und Gebärden dann und wann things difficult to learn and now and then aufhebend; aber dein von uns entferntes, inventing gestures; but your existence, which, as Blanchot writes, is "above the person: not the aus unserm Stück entrücktes Dasein withdrawn from us and taken from our brutality of a fact or the randomness of chance."5 And kann piece, in the Orpheus sonnets, there is the extreme profundity uns manchmal überkommen, wie ein can sometimes come over us, like a Wissen knowledge of dying, where the "world, things and being [will be] von jener Wirklichkeit sich niedersenkend, of that reality settling in, so daß wir eine Weile hingerissen so that for a while we act life ceaselessly transformed into innerness" or Innerlichkeit das Leben spielen, nicht an Beifall denkend. transported, not thinking of applause.

5 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982, 6 Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems, Bilingual Edition, trans. pp. 149. [Henceforth cited as SL] Edward Snow, Boston: North Point Press 2001, pp. 94-5.

Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts 58 Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

Rilke's speaker admits, from the outset, that death so that past and future, including the past childhood is beyond our knowledge, that it eludes us, and goes and the future death, may be suspended within it. on to describe death as that which we fear and deny But this fullness of a present swollen with past and as we act on the artificial stage of life. Yet Rilke's future eclipses the singularity and absoluteness of figurations even here, of death as the real that may loss, even as the speaker of the Duino Elegies declares shine through from behind the façade of life acted, does the singularity of what exists and what has existed: not admit the radical alterity of death Heidegger grants Ein Mal/ jedes, nur ein Mal. Ein Mal und nicht mehr it as impossibility of Dasein's possibility. In Rilke's last (Just once/ each, only once. Only once and no more) stanza, the speaker admits a precarious and transient (DE 52). Death is everywhere in the elegies; but if knowledge of that more profound reality which may modern representational consciousness has forgotten transport us eine Weile. and excluded death, Rilke supplants this with total Such transport may be fortuitous in the case remembrance: the transformation of transience into of human consciousness, but in Rilke's later poetry, all-encompassing poetic space. The angel lives on to particularly the elegies, death is thought through the approach us from the terrifying other side, but then angelic or orphic consciousness; such a being as an domesticates that for the human imagination. And angel or mythic poet would be able to see, as it were, so in 1922, in a Europe all-too shattered by death and both sides of nature, or life and its invisible other side. destruction, Rilke eulogizes, along with the dead youth, The emblem of angelic transcendence in Rilke's later the fallen hero. In the First Elegy: elegies has to do with the acceptance of death as such, es erhält sich der Held, selbst der The hero sustains himself, even his and is also coupled with a sense of violence: the angel Untergang war ihm destruction was to him Nur ein Vorwand, zu sein: seine letzte Only a pretext for being: his latest is terrifying, overwhelming, and the very plentitude Geburt. [DE 6] birth. of its being would crush the speaker were the call to In the Sixth Elegy Rilke's speaker continues the theme: be answered. In the Second Elegy the speaker repeats Wunderlich nah ist der Held doch den The hero is strangely proximal to those a sentiment announced in the first: Jeder Engel ist jugendlich Toten. Dauern died young. To abide schrecklich ("Every angel is terrifying").7 Yet the inverted Ficht ihn nicht an. Sein Aufgang ist Does not contain him. His ascent is Dasein. [DE 36] existing. transcendence from the angelic to the poetry of earth, presented in the final stanza of the Tenth Elegy, as a The poetic consciousness inspired by these eulogies happiness that, like rain and like catkins hanging from involves the risk of what Heidegger called death's the hazel trees, falls rather than ascends, requires not actualization, its positive figuration so that its radical merely a descent of the poet's aims to the human world, possibility—the possibility of the impossibility of but a horizontal dilation of the present that expands existence—is reduced to that imagination of death with beyond the boundaries of finitude. This transcendence which we can live. In Rilke's elegies, the absorption of of temporal limits, this absorption of time into space, death, and in particular of the figure of dead heroes allows death to be accommodated as the other side of and children, into a poetic whole, may risk sublimation nature, as Rilke refers to it in the 1913 essay Erlebnis. of loss rather than its radical confrontation. Poetic Self-transcendence in human poetic feeling is aimed remembrance is more, rather than less, ontologically to realize an overabundant Dasein filled with past robust than the finite life. The angel-figure, far from and future, including the radical future of death. An transcending death, highlights how much Rilke's affirmation about what has been achieved can be seen elegies, in absorbing the singularity and loss of in the Ninth Elegy: elements of the past into a consciousness of saturated plentitude, have integrated death into an "immanent Siehe, ich lebe. Woraus? Weder Kindheit See, I live. What from? Neither childhood 8 noch Zukunft nor future transcendence," or a "this-worldly" poetics. werden weniger….Überzähliges Dasein grows less….Excess of existence In these works by Rilke, we can discover the entspringt mir im Herzen. [DE 56] wells up in my heart. attempt to figure death within the poetic imagination. The world or life inhabited by the speaker in Todes- Death as seed, as growth, as a voice occupying and Erfahrung has been expanded in its temporal depth, overwhelming humanly inhabited spaces; and then

7 Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, Bilingual Edition, 8 Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, "Immanent trans. Edward Snow, Boston: North Point Press 2001, Transcendence in Rilke and Stevens," The German p. 10. [Henceforth cited as DE] Quarterly 80/3 (Summer 2010), 275-96, here p. 275. http://www.existenz.us Volume 9, No. 1, Spring 2014 Death and Authenticity: Reflections on Heidegger, Rilke, Blanchot 59 death as the relatively transcendent, that is, the not to be achieved" (SL 127-8). Such achievement is to be other worldly, but the other side of this world which a fashioning of our own nothingness: "My death must can be accommodated by a poetically figured angelic become always more inward," Blanchot writes (SL 126). consciousness—from a Heideggerian perspective, While Heidegger resists the tendency to poeticize inner these assignations or metaphors, this imaging and experience in favor of a more ecstatic and ontological imagining, may diminish the radical openness of structure of language, Rilke maintains the problem of death's possibility, its nothingness. consciousness in its open engagement with the world as his sphere of poetic investment. Blanchot accepts that Writing Death Rilkean intimacy. Secondly, Blanchot's interpretation appears in a work, The Space of Literature, devoted to Blanchot, for his part, interprets the theme of death in attempting to understand the relation between the Rilke in Heideggerian terms, with the concern for the impossibility of thinking death—what he calls "death's individual's distinction from everyday fallenness, into space" beyond the imagination—and the impossibility which one flees, taking refuge into commonality with of the author's presence to himself in language. The everyone else or the "they." What horrifies Rilke, and intimacy or estrangement of a relation to death is perhaps Blanchot, is not the terribleness of death itself analogous to that the poet has with language. In this but its banality, not fear but the "terrible in the form of way Blanchot approaches what Christina Howells, in the absence of anguish, daily insignificance" (SL 123). To her study of mortality and subjectivity, calls "the two the contrary, Blanchot describes a kind of intimacy with meanings of the death of the subject."9 death, a possibility of another experience of death than Blanchot's reflections on death inscribe the problem the distress of estrangement wrought by a "foreign" of the thinkability or imaginability of death upon the death that would be merely "borrowed, random" (SL paradoxes of language, particularly literary language 126). Of Rilke, Blanchot writes: that, for Blanchot, is already the scene of authorial The anguish of anonymous death, the anguish of effacement. In this light, Rilke's attempt to figure death, the "They die" and the hope for an "I die" in which like that of other modern writers such as Kafka, effects individualism retrenches, tempts him [Rilke] at first to a scene of contending paradoxes, expressing one want to give his name and his countenance to the instant (the impossibility of writing) through the other (the of dying: he does not want to die like a fly in the hum of impossibility of imagining death) and vice versa. What mindlessness and nullity; he wants to possess his death Blanchot attempts to conceptualize might be regarded and be named, be hailed by this unique death. From this figuratively as a palimpsestic void. Writing of death is perspective he suffers the obsession of the "I" that wants always writing across a nothing, an impossibility; and to die without ceasing to be "I"…. This "I" wants to die concentrated in the very fact of dying, so that my death this impossibility is reflected back into the paradox of might be the moment of my greatest authenticity, the literary language itself. Rendering this dual impossibility moment toward which "I" propel myself as if toward the is the very task of poetry when it reflects, "beyond the possibility which is absolutely proper to me, which is organic phenomenon, upon death's being," as Blanchot proper only to me and which secures me in the steadfast puts it (SL 125). If this way of formulating death sounds solitude of this pure "I." [SL 128] like the kind of actualization Heidegger rejects—since death is precisely nothingness or the impossibility of Yet aside from retaining the egological language of the being—Blanchot formulates it more precisely: Rilke's first-person pronoun, already absent from Heidegger's experience, for Blanchot, "opened onto that nocturnal terminology of Dasein, Blanchot's interpretation of death region where death no longer appears as possibility in Rilke differs from Heidegger's own understanding proper, but as the empty depths of the impossible" (SL of death in two profound ways. Firstly, Blanchot does 132). This range of articulation from death's being to not reject (as will Heidegger in his interpretation of its profound impossibility occurs through Blanchot's Rilke in the 1947 essay "What are Poets For?") the transition from an interpretation of the Malte novel to inwardness that still pertains to Rilke's understanding Rilke's elegies and sonnets as discussed above. of human experience and consciousness. "To say that Rilke affirms the immanence of death in life is no doubt to speak correctly, but it is also to construe only one 9 Christina Howells, Mortal Subjects: Passions of the Soul side of his thought. This immanence is not given; it is in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought, Cambridge: Polity Press 2011, p. 23. [Henceforth cited as MS]

Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts 60 Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

This dual impossibility is reflected in the poetic nothing (ein Hauch um Nichts), a breath that could be experience of language. For the self's effacement the wind, or the sigh of a god. Yet Rilke's task, like that in language, and the disaster of effacement is the of Orpheus, is not to confront the nothing as absolute ambiguous sense of the "death of the author" that impossibility, but to rescue beings, in poetry, from the thematically motivates Blanchot's account of literary death that could only be a bad infinity. Thus Rilke's writing. Blanchot's theory describes poetic or literary notion of Weltinnenraum or the world's inner space is language not only as absolutely neutralized of the interpreted by Blanchot as a salvation of things, in the author b