This essay examines certain intersections between writing and extinction through an eco-deconstructive account of the psychoanalysis of water. Jacques Derrida has often drawn attention to the interplay between the sound ‘O,’ and ‘eau,’ in Maurice Blanchot's own proper name, as well as in his novels, récits and theoretical works; both the zero-degree of organic excitation towards which the death drive aims and the question of water. Sandor Ferenczi's notion of thalassal regression suggests that the desire to return to the tranquility of the maternal womb parallels a response to a traumatic prehistoric extinction event undergone by organic life once forced to abandon its aquatic existence. Through Gaston Bachelard's Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, however, one can double the imaginary of water along the axes of a personal death organic life defers and delays, and an impersonal extinction it cannot. Derrida's unpublished 1977 seminar on Blanchot's 1941 novel Thomas the Obscure, however, allows us to imagine an exteriority to extinction, the possibility
“An Inert and Neutral State of Form”: Zero-degree Writing, Photography, and Early Prose Narrative in French
