What a strange, contradictory undertaking is this effort to act where immeasurable passivity reigns, this striving to maintain the rules, to impose measure, and to fix a goal in a movement that escapes all aims and all resolution. This contest seems to make death superficial by making it into an act like any other -- something to do; but it also gives the impression of transfiguring action, as if to reduce death to the level of a project were a unique opportunity to elevate the project toward that which exceeds it. This is madness, but it is madness we could not be spared without being excluded from the human condition (a humanity that could no longer kill itself would lose its balance, would cease to be normal). Suicide is an absolute right, the only one which is not the corollary of a duty, and yet it is a right which no real power reinforces. It would seem to arch like a delicate and endless bridge which at the decisive moment is cut and becomes as unreal as a dream, over which nevertheless it is necessary really to pass. Suicide is a right, then, detached from power and duty, a madness required by reasonable integrity and which, moreover, seems to succeed quite often. It is striking that all these traits can be applied equally well to another experience, one that is apparently less dangerous but perhaps no less mad: the artist's. Not that the artist makes death his work of art, but it can be said that he is linked to the work in the same strange way in which the man who takes death for a goal is linked to death.
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This is evident at first glance. Both the artist and the suicide plan something that eludes all plans, and if they do have a path, they have no goal; they do not know what they are doing. Both exert a resolute will, but both are linked to what they want to achieve by a demand that knows nothing of their will. Both strive toward a point which they have to approach by means of skill, savoir faire, effort, the certitudes which the world takes for granted, and yet this point has nothing to do with such means; it is a stranger to the world, it remains foreign to all achievement and
constantly ruins all deliberate action. How is it possible to proceed with a firm step toward that which will not allow itself to be charted? It seems that both the artist and the suicide succeed in doing something only by deceiving themselves about what they do. The latter takes one death for another, the former takes a book for the work. They devote themselves to this misunderstanding as if blind, but their dim consciousness of it makes of their task a proud bet. For it is as if they were embarking upon a kind of action which could only reach its term at infinity.
This comparison of art to suicide is shocking in a way. But there is nothing surprising about it if, leaving aside appearances, one understands that each of these two movements is testing a
singular form of possibility. Both involve a power that wants to be power even in the region of the ungraspable, where the domain of goals ends. In both cases an invisible but decisive leap intervenes: not in the sense that through death we pass into the unknown and that after death we are delivered to the unfathomable beyond. No, the act of dying itself constitutes this leap, the empty depth of the beyond. It is the fact of dying that includes a radical reversal, through which the death that was the extreme form of my power not only becomes what loosens my hold upon myself by casting me out of my power to begin and even to finish, but also becomes that which is without any relation to me, without power over me -- that which is stripped of all possibility -- the unreality of the indefinite. I cannot represent this reversal to myself, I cannot even conceive of it as definitive. It is not the irreversible step beyond which there would be no return, for it is that which is not accomplished, the interminable and the incessant.
Suicide is oriented toward this reversal as toward its end. The work seeks this reversal as its origin. That is a first difference. Suicide, to a certain extent, denies the reversal, doesn't take
account of it, and is only "possible" in this refusal. Voluntary death is the refusal to see the other death, the death one cannot grasp, which one never reaches. It is a kind
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of sovereign negligence, an alliance made with visible death in order to exclude the invisible one, a pact with the good, faithful death which I use constantly in the world, an effort to expand its sphere, to make it still viable and true beyond itself, where it is no longer anything but the other death. The expression "I kill myself" suggests the doubling which is not taken into account. For "I" is a self in the plenitude of its action and resolution, capable of acting sovereignly upon itself, always strong enough to reach itself with its blow. And yet the one who is thus struck is no longer I, but another, so that when I kill myself, perhaps it is "I" who does the killing, but it is not done to me. Nor is it my death -- the one I dealt -- that I have now to die, but rather the death which I refused, which I neglected, and which is this very negligence -- perpetual flight and inertia.
The work wants, so to speak, to install itself, to dwell in this negligence. A call from there reaches it. That is where, in spite of itself, it is drawn, by something that puts it absolutely to the test. It is attracted by an ordeal in which everything is risked, by an essential risk where being is at stake, where nothingness slips away, where, that is, the right, the power to die is gambled.
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