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

2 9 2
L a w & L i t e r a t u r e
•
Vo l u m e 1 9 , N u m b e r 2
the difference between murder and mortality, between the possibility of
killing and the (necessary) possibility of dying. Put in these terms, it is
clear which attitude toward death is more fundamental—murder pre-
supposes the mortality of its victim, but no one needs to be killed to die
(as indeed Blanchot himself recognizes, despite his apparent privileging
of “annihilation”).
54
But if that is the case, then there must also be room
for love in the artist’s aesthetic representation of the dead (lost, absent)
object of her identification, alongside of the annihilating idealization
that (Blanchot teaches us) constitutes the essence of every signifying
act. Thus if, as Blanchot says, “literature is the work of death in the
world” that “after having denied things in their existence…preserves
them in their being [and] causes them to have a meaning,”
55
then litera-
ture must 
also
be understood as this surplus within aesthetic representa-
tion, this act of love that preserves nothing and endows no significance
or meaning whatsoever beyond love itself, but that at the same time is
the source of “life” in the 
nature morte vivante
, the artwork as embodi-
ment of genuinely lived experience. This “life” is thus something other
than Blanchot’s (and Hegel’s) “‘life [that] endures death and maintains
itself in it’ in order to gain from death the possibility of speaking and the
truth of speech.”
56
It can neither “endure” nor survive death, it does no
work, and it produces neither speech nor truth, because it is not a nega-
tion but an affirmation—a relation to a finite other that seeks not to
exceed, transform or annihilate but to love. 
To return to DeLillo’s text, Lauren Hartke ’s disappearance into her
characters, like her desire to “disappear in Rey’s smoke, be dead, be
him,”
57
is a cipher for the nothingness of this loving affirmation which is
not the nothingness of a negation, even if the two cannot ultimately be
separated. One can only love an individual—a person (or thing, or idea)
with a name—but to use a name is already to presuppose that individ-
ual’s death. As Jacques Derrida put it, meditating on the death of his
friend Paul de Man,“[i]n calling or naming someone while he is alive, we
know that his name can survive him and 
already survives him
; the name
begins during his life to get along without him, speaking and bearing his
death each time it is pronounced in naming or calling.”
58
Without mor-
tality there could be no love. That, ultimately, is the meaning of the
“ultimate ambiguity” that Blanchot locates in death (something that his
later work seems also to recognize).
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LAL1902_07.fm Page 292 Thursday, May 24, 2007 12:21 PM

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