In the work of Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Auster, the step or pace is a way to think the disjointure of the present, my distance from my self, and the inaccessibility of the world of the other. If I am only because I am following and followed by my self at a certain distance, the pace (in French, le pas) is a way of thinking this being not (in French, pas). This double pas, this pace/not, is considered at length in Parages, in which Derrida approaches Blanchot’s work, but it also repeatedly finds its way into the work of Auster too, a longtime reader and translator of Blanchot.
This paper, therefore, follows behind Auster and Derrida who, both so fascinated by Blanchot, in turn follow him as if in step with each other. It reads, for example, Blanchot’s observation that “I sense that you are following me, you who are nevertheless in front of me” in the context of Auster’s novel City of Glass (1985), and its account of Daniel Quinn’s pace/not toward Peter Stillman, arguing that, for Auster, the “I” cannot be thought without the other that it follows at a distance. Furthermore, Blanchot’s comment on “The void of the future: there death has our future. The void of the past: there death has its tomb” relates to what Auster terms our “posthumous life, an interval between two deaths,” which is the interval of the pace, the pas, within which Auster’s characters mean, to use Derrida’s phrase, “to go write-on-living,” to live on to the end.