From Word To Word

I am always confronted with the limit of my being, of my language, and of my responsibility that is posed by my death. I am confronted as if by a door and a threshold, and my passing of this door always remains a necessary impossibility. It will always remain necessary for me to pass this threshold that is my death, and it will never be possible for me to survive the passage of this limit, and yet this threshold and this limit remain determinative. To attend to the limit, therefore, to attend to what lies beyond the limit, is to to die constantly, is to constantly accept my own extinction, even as I recognize that this death and this extinction always remain to come.

This preoccupation is experienced as a kind of agony, because it always falls short of its intention until the moment when it can no longer be preoccupied at all. It will never succeed in crossing the threshold, never succeed in broaching the limit, for when the moment of death arrives, it is always too short, too prolonged, too sudden, too delayed, too sharp, too dull to be recognized for what it is, and so my preoccupation will always fail to know the moment of my death, no matter how attentive it is, no matter how watchful. The only death which my preoccupation will discover is a death that I have survived, and therefore not my death at all. Any limit that it can surpass will have left my limit intact.

If I persist, then, in a preoccupation with the limit and with the beyond of the limit, it will always be the case that I will need to occupy the moment of death repeatedly, not to cross it, which will always remain impossible until the moment when it becomes unrepresentable, but to survive it in the expectation that there will come a death which I will not survive. I cross the limit of the threshold, not expecting to find its beyond, which will forever remain inaccessible to me, but in order to inhabit the threshold as a kind of waiting for the threshold that remains to be crossed. Thus, a concern for the limit and its beyond is experienced as the agony of a death that does not kill, the agony of threshold that opens only onto another threshold. Any attempt to avoid this pain and this agony, this repetition, would necessarily abandon the limit and its beyond.