Silent Witnesses: Doris Salcedo and Blanchot

Abstract

Maurice Blanchot’s sparse 1994 text The Instant of My Death re-tells a story that intersects at the moment of gunshots and silences. Relating to an event in Nazioccupied France, the story is located where ontological certainties embedded in the silences are made insecure by the traumatic nature of the events that they are called upon to verify. In the story, a young man is faced with imminent death by a firing squad. He is saved, however, when his enemies are momentarily distracted and a Russian soldier tells him to ‘disappear’. As a result, the young man is saved to live with the uncanny feeling of having survived his death as well as the guilt at the death of his neighbours who did not share his good fortune. The three voices of Blanchot’s text, that of the narrator, that of the young man, and that of Blanchot himself, make the idea of a singular viewpoint problematic and blur the boundaries of identity. Who is the young man? At the same time, the affective impact of the event, ‘this unanalyzable feeling’, plays havoc with conventional temporal progression, placing death and the overcoming of the fear of death, or ‘perhaps already the step beyond’, in the middle of life. If the young man hears the thud of bodies falling beside him, he is—albeit momentarily—alive. No thud: dead. It is not the presence of gunshot but, rather, the absence of a fall that marks out death. The man survives as a witness of his own death, and as the blindfolded witness of the death of others. This auditory witnessing, or hearing of silences, haunts the young man, who lives the rest of his life, or should it be the rest of his death, awaiting the thud. Blanchot’s text reminds us that the witnessing of death might not require the visual evidence of absence. In the case of many ‘forcibly disappeared’ people in the Latin American context, this silence is a double-witness. It is the absence of the ‘thud’—the fall to the ground—that we witness. This sense of listening to that silence runs strongly