To die, to think, to write: covenants of the authorial self

Abstract

The poet thinks of the word and dies in it. The poet “dies of think” (Quignard) and dies of write. To thinking, to die, to write are simultaneous acts to the effect of the writing and any distance from death. Sometimes a strong experience of helplessness can illuminate the vertigo of this encounter that allows the author to act as “dead.” This is what happens to Blanchot in a short, hybrid text between fiction and self-writing - the moment of my death - that motivated Derrida to write a long essay. Dead from the moment he is uttered, the author double himself in the service of what comes to him: a new self and a new real that thought allows by writing. To yield to the unknowable is to disappear and let your body and ideas do their work in the staging of an “imaterial” death. Like the dream, the thought is produced from concepts / words that invent liames and senses between the scattered images, where we are / have always been lost. Around the above the article intends to reflect on the writing in connection with the death, from the thought of Blanchot and some predecessors (Hegel, Valéry), with the objective to approach not only the specificity of the literary, but still some common language, named as testimony , in order to find the undecidability. In place of limits, the concept of thresholds is suggested to investigate some covenants of the authorial self, in Herberto Helder, Gonçalo M. Tavares and in Blanchot himself.