Article in Law and Literature · July 2007 doi: 10. 1525/lal

 
2 8 4
L a w & L i t e r a t u r e
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Vo l u m e 1 9 , N u m b e r 2
the imagination of the reader. If only in imaginary form, the act of writ-
ing tears down the world in order to build it anew. 
Of course to speak of “labor” in the abstract, Hegelian sense is already to
point towards the Marxian, overtly political sense of the word as “to change
the world” (and not just interpret it). And indeed for Blanchot, the status of
the literary act turns out to be a question that cannot be separated from the
political valence of literature.
18
In particular, for Blanchot the labor of the
writer, at least in its intention, is ultimately indistinguishable from the labor
of the terrorist—the radical re-making of an entire world, the total negation
of the old in favor of something entirely new. Most radically, Blanchot says
that like the negative labor of the terrorist, which inevitably resorts to the
absolute negativity of death, the negative labor of the writer also has death
as its essence. Thus, he says, literature ’s “ideal moment” is “that moment
when ‘life endures death and maintains itself in it’ in order to gain from
death the possibility of speaking and the truth of speech.”
19
I will not extend this detour by attempting a full defense of this proposi-
tion here.
20
Suffice it to say that in the second half of the essay, after insisting
on a perfect analogy between literary writing and revolutionary terror,
21
Blanchot further tightens the knot between the two by locating within lan-
guage itself the same absolute negation characteristic of terrorism. Linguis-
tic meaning, he points out, presupposes the total annihilation of its signified
object:
A word may give me its meaning, but first it suppresses it. For me to be able
to say, ‘This woman,’ I must somehow take her flesh-and-blood reality away
from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the being,
but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that being,
its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost being—the very fact that it
does not exist.
22
One can understand this notion of “annihilation” as a purely linguistic con-
cept rather than as implicating death in its literal sense. To be meaningful, to
operate as a word at all, the word “woman” (to use Blanchot’s rather over-
determined example) must be able to signify the meaning “woman” even out-
side the presence of any woman, and even if there were no women left on earth
(and even if it turns out that there never had been any at all—think of the
meaningfulness of the word “dragon”).
23
That is the specifically linguistic rea-
son why the word only gives us the being as “the absence of that being, its
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