Thomas The Obscure by Maurice Blanchot Page A

showing that I was indeed there, with the other—what am I saying?—without the other, with this body which, imposed on my real body, depended entirely on a negation of the body, I entered into absolute dispute with myself. Having two eyes, one of which was possessed of extreme visual acuity, it was with the other which was an eye only because of its refusal to see that I saw everything visible. And so on, for all my organs. I had a part of myself submerged, and it was to this part, lost in a constant shipwreck, that I owed my direction, my face, my necessity. I found my proof in this movement toward the nonexistent in which the proof that I existed, rather than becoming degraded, was reinforced to the point of becoming manifestly true. I made a supreme effort to keep outside myself, as near as possible to the place of beginnings. Now, far from achieving as a complete man, as an adolescent, as protoplasm, the state of the possible, I made my way toward something complete, and I caught a glimpse in these depths of the strange face of him who I really was and who had nothing in common with an already dead man or with a man yet to be born: a marvelous companion with whom I wished with all my might to blend myself, yet separate from me, with no path that might lead me to him. How could I reach him? By killing myself: absurd plan. Between this corpse, the same as a living person but without life, and this unnameable, the same as a dead person but without death, I could not see a single line of relationship. No poison might unite me with that which could bear no name, could not be designated by the opposite of its opposite, nor conceived in relationship to anything. Death was a crude metamorphosis beside the indiscernible nullity which I nevertheless coupled with the name Thomas. Was it then a fantasy, this enigma, the creation of a word maliciously formed to destroy all words? But if I advanced within myself, hurrying laboriously toward my precise noon, I yet experienced as a tragic certainty, at the center of the living Thomas, the inaccessible proximity of that Thomas which was nothingness, and the more the shadow of my thought shrunk, the more I conceived of myself in this faultless clarity as the possible, the willing host of this obscure Thomas. In the plentitude of my reality, I believed I was reaching the unreal. O my consciousness, it was not a question of imputing to you—in the form of revery, of fainting away, of hiatus—that which, having been unable to be assimilated to death, should have passed for something worse, your own death. What am I saying? I felt this nothingness bound to your extreme existence as an unexceptionable condition. I felt that between it and you undeniable ratios were being established. All the logical couplings were incapable of expressing this union in which, without then or because , you came together, both cause and effect at once, unreconcilable and indissoluble. Was it your opposite? No, I said not. But it seemed that if, slightly falsifying the relationships of words, I had sought the opposite of your opposite, having lost my true path I would have arrived, without turning back, proceeding wondrously from you-consciousness (at once existence and life) to you-unconsciousness (at once reality and death), I would have arrived, setting out into the terrible unknown, at an image of my enigma which would have been at once nothingness and existence. And with these two words I would have been able to destroy, incessantly, that which was signified by the one by that which was signified by the other, and by that which the two signified, and at the same time I would have destroyed by their oppositeness that which constituted the oppositeness of these two opposites, and I would have finished, kneading them endlessly to melt that which was untouchable, by reemerging right beside myself, Harpagon suddenly catching his thief and grabbing hold of his own arm. It was then that, deep within a cave, the