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

 
2 8 5
T h u r s c h w e l l
•
 
W r i t i n g a n d T e r r o r
nothingness.” Thus, Blanchot says, “my language does not kill anyone.” Nev-
ertheless, at the same time and by the same token, it is also true that language
only succeeds in endowing raw existence with meaning by virtue of the tran-
sience—the mortality—of that existence: 
Of course my language does not kill anyone. And yet, when I say, ‘This
woman,’ real death has been announced and is already present in my language;
my language means that this person, who is here right now, can be detached
from herself, removed from her existence and her presence, and suddenly
plunged into a nothingness in which there is no existence or presence; my lan-
guage essentially signifies the possibility of this destruction; it is a constant, bold
allusion to such an event. My language does not kill anyone. But if this woman
were not really capable of dying, if she were not threatened by death at every
moment of her life, I would not be able to carry out that ideal negation, that
deferred assassination which is what my language is.
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Blanchot thus provides a new and more profound sense to Paulhan’s origi-
nal intra-literary metaphor of “terrorist” literature. Beyond metaphor, the
operation of language is itself “terrorist” in the quasi-literal sense of erect-
ing the ideality of its meanings and concepts on the absolute annihilation of
its objects. 
Of course, Blanchot ultimately concludes that this total annihilation can
only ever be attempted and not actual. Despite literature ’s best efforts, the
world retains a stubborn moment of materiality that resists all attempts at its
negation, because, as Don DeLillo says (in a statement with which Blanchot
would entirely agree), “language is inseparable from the world that pro-
vokes it.”
25
The one part of the world that language cannot negate is the part
that makes up language itself, the thing-quality of words—the sounds, the
marks on paper, the material reality of which words are composed, which no
word can entirely negate because no word can exist and act without them.
Accordingly, Blanchot will say (in what became perhaps his signature theme
following the essay), “death,” insofar as it signifies total annihilation, 
also
signifies “the impossibility of dying,” and thus the terrorist impulse within
literature is doomed to failure.
26
To return to the original point, if Blanchot’s analysis is correct, then here
we have another reason to doubt that literature can negotiate the destructive
political narratives of our time. If, for the fundamental reasons that Blanchot
elucidates, writers, just insofar as they write, share with terrorists an
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