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

 
2 8 3
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
of that—but rather an extreme purity of the soul, and the freshness of commu-
nal innocence.”
16
Thus, just as the Terrorists of the French Revolution sought
to destroy the 
 
ancien régime
so totally that time itself would have to begin anew
with the revolutionary calendar, Paulhan’s literary terrorists seek an absolute
beginning in pure immediate expression. 
Although 
 
The Flowers of Tarbes
is never mentioned by name, the book
provided Blanchot with both his underlying theoretical problem and the
language of “terrorism” in which he addressed that problem in “Litera-
ture and the Right to Death.” It was Blanchot’s insight to recognize that
the superficially intra-literary question that Paulhan addressed in fact
extends beyond literature to encompass the relationship between lan-
guage in general and the world of human action. By bringing out the
philosophical question implicit in Paulhan’s literary question—“what is
literature, technique or expression?”—Blanchot demonstrates that what
is at stake in the question of literature is, as much as literature itself, the
relations among language, action—including political action—and
world. How, Blanchot asks in the first part of his essay, is the writer who
uses linguistic figures to express herself like or unlike other workers who
use materials to make something new in the world? In particular, he asks
(here following Hegel’s analysis of labor), is literary production a form
of labor, in which a human will negates the reality of something old—
the already-existing, worked-upon materials which must disappear into
the created object in the course of the labor—in order to project itself
into the world, in the form of the newly forged object? Or does the fact
that the writer’s “material” is language change the status of her work?
Blanchot argues that it both does and does not change its status. On one
hand, the writer’s act is like other labor insofar as it uses existing lan-
guage as material to be transformed into something new: “In order to
write, he must destroy language in its present form, denying books as he
forms a book out of what other books are not.”
17
On the other hand,
there is a fundamental difference between the labor of the writer and the
labor of other workers, because, unlike ordinary laborers, the writer’s
negation is 
 
total
. When a worker takes iron and stone and transforms
them through her labor into a stove, Blanchot says, she negates the par-
ticular iron and particular stone in order to make a particular stove. But
what the writer negates in writing a work of fiction is the 
 
entire world
, in
order to substitute the world of the fictional work for the actual world in
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