“In his place, I will not try to analyze. He was perhaps suddenly invincible. Dead – immortal. Perhaps ecstasy. Rather the feeling of compassion for suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal or eternal. Henceforth, he was bound to death by a surreptitious friendship.”

This sparse little text is nonetheless vast and obscure. The story is about a man in the second world war, dragged out of his house to the sound of gunfire. He has rifles turned upon him – but then, abruptly, he’s released, to wander through the woods and see the farmlands burning around him.

Blanchot’s theories of literature as absence clarified a lot of things I’d felt about books, but never seen articulated. Both Lydia Davis and Paul Auster, two authors I adore profoundly, are amongst his foremost translators. Reading him I always have a sense that his writing is halfway between earth and heaven – but where ‘heaven’ is just empty oxygenless space where your organs would get crushed to nothing by pressure and you’d instantly expire just from your body being made so ridiculously small.

This story is no exception. It’s both philosophical and political, tying the injustice of war to the injustice of mortality. There’s critical speculation that it’s autobiographical and that Blanchot, like Dostoevsky, actually did have a near death-by-firing-squad experience. It’s unclear from the story how much is true – the narrator identifies with the ‘young man’, only to disavow their shared experiences. This is typical of Blanchot – there are never any certainties in his writing – not even death, which, always threatened, never actually arrives.

English translation published in The Instant of my Death along side Demeure by Jacques Derrida, Stanford University Press, 2000)