I cannot resist commenting once again on these lines from the last piece I am aware that Blanchot published ('The Watched Over Night').
Slowly, during those nights when I sleep without sleeping, I become aware – the word’s not right – of your proximity, which yet is distant. And then I convinced myself that you were there. Not you, but this repeated statement: ‘I’m going away, I’m going away’.
And suddenly I understood that Robert, who was so generous, so little concerned about himself, wasn’t speaking to me about himself, not for himself, but about all the extermination sites – if it was he who was speaking. He listed some of them. “Listen to them, listen to their names: Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec, Maidanek, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Birkenau, Ravensbruck, Dachau”.
I’m going away: but is Antelme who is speaking, or, somehow, the extermination sites themselves, these terrible names.
“But”, I say, speaking, not speaking, “do we forget?”
“Yes, you forget, the more because you remember. Your remembering does not keep you from living, from surviving, even from loving me. But one doesn’t love a dead man, because then you escape meaning and the impossibility of meaning, non-being and the impossibility of non-being”.
One doesn’t love a dead man – one doesn’t love the dead: but why not? Is there something about death which prevents love? Perhaps, in loving, we love the other because of the singular way of being, of his or her particularities, because of all that makes him or her familiar to us. And in the death camps? It is difficult to recognise the dying and the dead. Difficult, too, to retain a hold upon oneself in confronting them. Can you love? It is not a question of capacity or potential. Do you love? Yes, if you love the other as the unknown and are, as a lover, yourself the unknown. Yes, if your love strips you down to your nudity and you love the other who is no longer anyone you know. But is this love?
Impossible love. But why is it neither non-being nor the impossibility of non-being? Because it will not settle into a simple negativity which could then be put to work, nor indeed into a simple thesis which could then be negated. Nor will it allow itself to translated into meaning even as it refuses to disappear into non-meaning. Neither one nor the other: ne uter, it trembles at the boundary of sense and non-sense, being and non-being.
Rereading these lines, I realise that I have already lost sight of Robert Antelme, of the incomparable friend I had known. He was so simple and at the same time so rich in a knowledge that is lacking to the greatest minds. In the experience of servitude that was his, even though he shared it with others, he retained that true humanity from which he knew not to exclude those who were oppressing him.
The SS, as The Human Race attests, are driven to a compulsive rage to destroy because they know the prisoners belong to the same human race. What does Antelme know? That to so belong is to belong as no one in particular.
But he went even further. Not recognising, in the infirmary, a companion he had come to see, who was still alive, he understood that even in life there is nothingness, an unfathomable emptiness against which we must defend ourselves even while being aware of its approach; we have to learn to live with this emptiness. We shall maintain our fullness, even in nothingness.
I commented on these lines a couple of posts back.
This is why, Robert, I still have my place beside you, and this watched-over night where you just saw me is not an illusion where everything disappears, but my right to make you live even in that nothingness I feel approaching.
It is our nothingness, our common unity which binds us together.