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the struggle for life that is becoming general in the West and dying (mourir) is a speech that
articulates, on the collapse of possessions and representations, the question: "What does it
mean to be?" An "idle" question. This is a speech that no longer says anything, that has
nothing other than the loss out of which saying is formed. Between the machine that stops or
kicks off, and the act of dying, there is the possibility of saying. The possibility of dying
functions in this in-between space.
Stopped at the threshold of the difference between kicking off and dying, the dying person is
prevented from saying this nothing that he is becoming, unable to do the act that would only
produce his question. It would even be sufficient for him to have as his place the one he
would receive in the language of the other, at this moment when he no longer has property or
papers to present. To be simply called: "Lazarus!" and traced by his proper name in the
language of another desire, without anything proper to him, in his death as at his birth, gives
him the right to it: this would be a kind of communication beyond mere exchange. In it the
necessary connection of desire with what it cannot have, with a loss, could be acknowledged.
To be called in that way would be to "symbolize" death, to find words (that convey no
informative content) for it, to open within the language of interlocution a resurrection that
does not restore to life.
But this place is refused the isolated person. The loss of his powers and social roles also
prevents him from having what this loss seemed to allow: access to the interpersonal relation
whose lexicon tells only: "I miss you."
There is nevertheless a first and last coincidence of dying, believing, and speaking. In fact, all
through my life, I can ultimately only believe in my death, if "believing" designates a relation
to the other that pre-cedes me and is constantly occurring. There is nothing so "other" as my
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death, the index of all alterity. But there is also nothing that makes clearer the place from
which I can say my desire for the other; nothing that makes clearer my gratitude for being
received without having any guarantee or goods to offer into the powerless language of
my expectation of the other; nothing therefore defines more exactly than my death what
speaking is.
Writing
The "last moment" is only the ultimate point in which the desire to say takes refuge,
exacerbates and destroys itself. No doubt the part of death that takes the form of expectation
has previously penetrated into social life, but it always has to mask its obscenity. Its message
is seen in the faces that are slowly decaying, but they have only lies with which to say what
they presage (be quiet, you stories of getting old told by my eyes, my wrinkles, and so many
forms of dullness), and we are careful not to let them speak (don't tell us, faces, what we don't
want to know).
The immoral secret of death is deposited in the protected caverns reserved for it by
psychoanalysis and religion. It resides in the vast metaphors of astrology, necromancy, or
sorcery, languages that are tolerated so long as they constitute areas of obscurantism from
which societies of progress "distinguish" themselves. Thus the impossibility of saying goes
much further back than the moment when the speaker's efforts are cancelled along with the
speaker himself. It is inscribed in all the procedures that quarantine death or drive it beyond
the limits of the city, outside of time, work, and language, in order to protect a place.
But in producing an image of the dying man, I proceed in the same way. I am participating in
the illusion that localizes death elsewhere, in the hospital or in the last moments: I am
transmogrifying it into an image of the other; by identifying this image with the dying person,
I make it the place where I am not. Through the representation, I exorcise death, which is shut
up next door, relegated to a moment that I assume is not mine. I protect my place. The dying
person whom I speak about remains ob-scene if he is not myself.
The reversal begins in the very work of writing, whose representations are only its result
and/or waste product. I ask myself what I am constructing, since "meaning" is hidden there in
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