Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Thu 27 Mar 2008 06:30 AM PDT
Joshua Schuster
Other Voices, v.1, n.1 (March 1997)
At the end of his life, poised to
fulfill a sentencing of death by poison, Socrates finds himself most
sincerely and serenely in a meditation on the relationship of truth and
death. "[T]he one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper
manner is to practice for dying and death." (Plato 64) Socrates, who
never takes his tenure in the world too seriously, finds the art of dying,
of undoing the soul from the body, as the process of elevation to the
consummation of truth. "It seems likely that we shall, only then, when we
are dead, attain that which we desire and of which we claim to be lovers,
namely, wisdom, as our argument shows, not while we live; for if it is
impossible to attain any pure knowledge with the body, then one of two
things is true: either we can never attain knowledge or that we can do so
after death." (66e) Only the dead have access to pure knowledge. Thus the
Platonic forms are the realm of the dead. Knowledge is entombed in the
forms, only to be accessed by the soul, stripped of the world by death.
Life itself is only a brief respite from death, for "it truly appears that
the living never come from any other source than from the dead." (70d)
Only the dead can bring the living into life. "What comes from being
alive? Being dead. And what comes from being dead? One must agree that
it is being alive." (71d) Socrates banks his confidence with death in the
trust of the immortality of the soul, a commutable essence which is
"deathless and indestructible." For Socrates, the "unified vision" of
philosophy comes at the closing of the eyes in reaching death. The task
of this essay will be to ask: why is philosophy so important that one
would have to die to realize it?
The death debate occupies a unique vantage point from the birth of
philosophy throughout ancient Greek thinking where the various approaches
to dying mark distinctly different schools of thought. For example,
Epicurus sides with Socrates, remarking that the good life is best at
dying, such that "the art of living well and the art of dying well are
one." (Epicurus 55) On the other hand, perhaps in an attempt to kill death
(and dethrone Socrates), Aristotle refutes the primacy of death with the
prime of life. "Then should we count no human being happy during his
lifetime, but follow Solon's advice and wait to see the end? And if we
should hold that, can he really be happy during the time after he has
died? Surely that is completely absurd, especially when we say happiness
is an activity." (Aristotle 361) For Aristotle, the soul feeds off the
body, and the soul disintegrates along with the body's decay. It appears
then, from the beginnings of philosophy, thought and interpretation of
death cannot be severed from the understanding of life, and death plays
the fundamental role in any epistemology reaching at the limits of truth.
So too, I think, death remains the imperative horizon today, the
background limit against which we project a certain understanding of our
own society. But, as any historian will immediately point out, both the
role and reception of death has changed, perhaps even aged, and maybe the
end is getting older. This does not mean we are getting better at death,
nor is death getting tired of us; on the contrary. If anything, we are
losing our ability to see death, to speak of an end, to resolve our own
resolutions (and in that sense, perhaps death is gaining on us). Philippe
Ariés, the eminent "historian of death," describes how societies in the
Middle ages sought to "tame" their deaths by preparing for them; since
people were usually forewarned of their coming deaths, one could await
one's end, follow the proper protocol in order to be ready for God's
judgment. Society also kept its preparatory role. The dying person's
bedchamber was a public place to be entered by family and children
(compare this to today's hygiene of keeping death as invisible as possible
to the public, and most certainly away from children), and the dead
co-existed much more plainly with the living, so that cemeteries were a
commonplace in the plaza square of the church. Death was, in many
respects, a collective arrangement.
In contrast, Ariés describes today's death as "wild". The calm
with which death was once approached has given way to contemporary
society's shock and shame towards death which finds itself both unnamable
and forbidden to be comprehended. The secularization of death
(Ariés, however, prefers not to argue that modern death is being
de-Christianized) has produced contradictory practices; the death business
has boomed, particularly in America where mortuaries vie for advertising
space, while dialogue on death has been suppressed, and public mourning is
seen as unacceptable, an inability to properly cope. Not only does
secular culture have a very difficult time of speaking about death, but in
addition the language by which we speak of death is now inseparable from
medical discourse, such that the statistics of "vital signs," health
insurance plans, and cataloging and codifying death as constituted by a
vast array of diseases are the only vocabularies with which death is
condoned to speak. Ariés correctly points out that the space of
death has moved from the dramatic place of the home and community to the
undramatic, antiseptic, and sanitized hospital.
Death in the hospital is no longer the occasion of a ritual
ceremony, over which the dying person presides amidst his assembled
relatives and friends. Death is a technical phenomenon obtained by a
cessation of care, a cessation determined in a more or less avowed way by
a decision of the doctor and the hospital team.... Death has been
dissected, cut to bits by a series of little steps, which finally makes it
impossible to know which step was the real death, the one in which
consciousness was lost, or the one in which breathing stopped....
[Doctors] are the masters of death--of the moment as well as of the
circumstances of death--and it has been observed that they try to obtain
from their patient "an acceptable style of living while dying." The
accent has been placed on "acceptable." An acceptable death is a death
which can be accepted or tolerated by the survivors. It has its
antithesis: "the embarrassingly graceless dying," which embarrasses the
survivors because it causes too strong an emotion to burst forth; and
emotions must be avoided both in the hospital and everywhere in society.
One does not have the right to become emotional other than in private,
that is to say, secretly. (Ariés 88-89)
*****
Can we understand this question? Can I, myself,
pose it? Am I allowed
to talk about my death?
--Jacques Derrida
But, since we have yet to ask, what is death? We have avoided
asking for the simple reason that we do not know who to ask. Who could
tell us, guide us to ask the right questions, lead us into familiarity
which we presume corresponds with knowledge? Is there a question which
can question the non-empirical, what is outside epistemology, what has no
thought, what is at the limits of limits? It seems to me a philosophical
commonplace now, as many claim, that "death can only be represented." [1] On one level, this assertion may be
true, but in order to speak competently about the passage of dying, I must
already have an understanding and recognition of death, a
pre-theoretical understanding of death. This is already to suggest
that death lurks not in representationality, but in between the spaces of
what is representable.
When Heidegger reaches a crucial point in Sein und Zeit in
which he seeks to link Dasein's possibility to the world as a whole, he
begins the very questionable articulation of the authenticity of
Dasein, a notable attempt to shift away from the Aristotelian "essence
[ousia] is actuality [energeia]." The "ending" of Dasein,
dying as constituting Dasein's totality, must be considered as both before
and beyond representation. "In 'ending,' and in Dasein's Being-a-whole,
for which such ending is constitutive, there is, by its very essence, no
representing." (239) In the context of Heidegger's argument, death cannot
be represented because, existentially, there is no dying "as," no dying
for an Other that would take the Other's death away. Dying, or
Being-towards-death, is purely individualistic or "non-relational"; dying
individualizes Dasein, and as such dying is Dasein's ownmost possibility,
so that "death is in every case mine, in so far as it 'is' at all." (239)
Heidegger quotes the "is" to point out that death can only be understood
as a possibility, a not-yet which precedes the ontic "is". Thus any
existential analysis of death must precede a metaphysical or biological
event of the "is" of death (another strike at Aristotle). "In dying, it
is shown that mineness and existence are ontologically constitutive for
death. Dying is not an event; it is a phenomenon to be understood
existentially." (239) Events must "take place," but death is the
non-place, the no-where which is non-being. Strictly speaking, dying
reveals itself not as "is" but as is not. Thus the totality of Being is
fundamentally linked to its own negativity, its own non-Being. The
philosopher Giorgio Agamben will later attempt to decipher the meaning of
this originary negativity. [2]
Mineness is my ownmost potentiality-for-Being, but this
potentiality cannot cheat death, cannot "outstrip" its impending ending.
"Thus death reveals itself as that possibility which is one's ownmost,
which is nonrelational, and which is not to be outstripped." (239)
Heidegger broaches the issue of mineness earlier precisely to designate
what is at "issue." Mineness is what is at "issue" for me, which is my
own Dasein, my own being-there. "That Being which is an issue for
this entity in its very Being, is in each case mine." (212) Mineness is
my Dasein, my hereness, as well as my orientation towards death. Mine is
what is proper to me, my property; mineness is my immanence. However,
mineness is not necessarily authenticity. Rather, mineness is the
precondition of any Dasein to allow for the possibility of either
authenticity or inauthenticity. A selection of activities Heidegger
associates with inauthenticity--being busy, excited, interested, or ready
for enjoyment--are telling examples (note hedonism is not directly linked
with mineness nor with authenticity). One can never shake, escape, or
"outstrip" one's mineness, though Heidegger asserts that "the They"
[das Mann] do a fine job of avoiding addressing their fundamental
mineness. Heidegger is not acting "selfish" here, nor is he positing
mineness as the essence of a subject, but I think one can conclude that
mineness is a form of self-ishness. Mineness is simply my state, or mood,
of being here or there; thus by extension, mineness is the state of the
unity of the mind and body, a self. This is to suggest the form and
content of Being cannot be separated, that there is no Being without the
mineness of my own Dasein, and that for any "me" to exist, one must
already have a pre-theoretical understanding of mineness, and of
death.
There is no death without mineness either. Only a being with
mineness can die (much later Heidegger will later remark that animals do
not die, they only perish). We cannot "give" someone our death since
mineness is not something "I" can exist without; mineness is a given and
not giveable. Heidegger does not insist as much on the prevalent usage of
the term "mineness" as I do, but I find that Heidegger primarily
approaches the thought of death through the position of mineness. This
will effect a certain approach to limits in Heidegger's thinking. What is
most mine, my ownmost possibility, is "the possibility of the
impossibility of any existence at all." (242) What is most possible is my
impossibility. Mineness is intimately linked both with what is most
familiar and totally unfamiliar to me, my possibility and my
impossibility, my unlimited limits. Thus there is no possibility without
the impossibility of mineness. Any foundation of life must take the
individual's fundamental orientation towards death as part of its
practice. Every foundation of knowledge of oneself must take into account
the fundamental orientation of that knowledge towards its own demise.
I want to compare this mineness with a certain possibility of the
"we" in the writing of Foucault. "We" is read as "we humans," "the
humanity of us," "our human being." Foucault absorbs much of the
analytical strategy of Heidegger but presses some soft spots in
Heidegger's elaborations in order to approach an array of implicit
extremes. By Foucault's time, the Heideggerian rhetoric of "authenticity"
had been abandoned by most as potentially fascistic, including Heidegger
himself (although, of course, "everyone's" reasons are quite different,
including Heidegger's). Heidegger also refrains from using the term
"mineness" after his "turn" in an attempt to move away from the categories
of human being and theorize about Being in general. But as I pointed out
earlier, the concept of mineness, which precedes and founds the
possibility of authenticity or inauthenticity, still remains as the proper
appearance of humanity. Foucault begins here, with what Heidegger
considers the proper property of humanity, but Foucault reconceptualizes
the rift between mine-ness and they-ness. In Madness and
Civilization Foucault argues that the social splitting of categories
of "them" and "me" precondition a code, seen as a moral need, to identify
and expel the Other. In his next major work, The Order of Things,
Foucault unites the theme of "them" and "me" into the manifestation of the
"we" which finds itself revealed by a certain historical conditioning.
In order for a notion of "us" to appear, the background of
knowledge constituting fields must relay to the foreground a foundation
for the ability of a particular historical practice to be disclosed.
Foucault suggests it is only the conceptual field of modernity,
beginning roughly at the end of the 18th century, which enables "humanity"
to appear.
What is just beginning to appear knowable is the end of a certain
way of knowing. History is now confronting an end which is not its fully
realized completion or totalizing closure but its undoing and dissolution.
Foucault calls this conceptualizing of limits the "analytic of finitude,"
an analytical category which allows understanding to be revealed but
remains as a finite conception from which understanding cannot escape.
Foucault locates the initial conception of the analytic of finitude in
Kant's epistemological questioning (and, although less direct, his ethical
concern to treat man as an end). If for Kant, the question is, What are
the limits of knowledge? What is it possible to know?, Foucault then
asks, How is knowledge constituted by its own limits, limitations, and
death? Just like Nietzsche's elaboration of perspectivism, and
Heidegger's placement of death (finitude) within humanity such that
the limits of knowledge link with the disclosure of the ability to know,
Foucault remarks, "To be finite, then, would simply be to be trapped in
the laws of a perspective...." (372) There is no universal or infinite
intellection; our tools of understanding have limits, and when those
limits are pressed the tools fall apart uselessly. And yet it is only
with these same tools that we can construct our systems of knowledge.
When we seek the fundamental foundations of knowledge we do not find
stable absolutes, the essence of truth or Being, but, rather, the rubble
of our own means of inquiry, the breaks and ruptures which are the
instabilities that constitute the source of our ability to know. In the
essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault links his method to
Nietzsche's strategy of genealogy: "The search for descent is not the
erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously
considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the
heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself." (147)
While Foucault is still initially gesturing at this genealogical
method in The Order of Things, the "analytic of finitude" reveals
that the human sciences are based on an underlying disjointed and
discontinously folded method of constitution. As knowledge reaches
towards its origins, its "accidentally" disrupts its foundations and
shows that our limits of knowledge are caught up in their own dissolution.
"[B]y rediscovering finitude in its interrogation of the origin, modern
thought closes the great quadrilateral it began to outline when the
Western episteme broke up at the end of the eighteenth century: the
connection of the positivities with finitude, the reduplication of the
empirical and the transcendental, the perpetual relation of the
cogito with the unthought, the retreat and return of the origin,
define for us man's mode of being." (335) By uncovering knowledge's own
finitudes, one discovers that historical inquiry has constituted a subject
called "humanity" on the limits of its own limits, that is, the finitudes
themselves make humanity possible. The modern cogito addresses
itself not in what it thinks, but what it does not think, what thought is
unthought, and articulates itself in the elsewhere of thinking. Humanity
finds the limits of its knowledge and the constitution of its being not in
what is thought, but what is unthought. The unthought can be both the
not-yet and the always-already thought, the not-yet knowable (and never to
be known) which is the foundation and priority of all activity of
knowledge. As understanding approaches its finitude, "modern thought is
advancing towards that region where man's Other must become the Same as
himself." (328)
Foucault praises linguistics and psychoanalysis as examples of
thought at its limits which discovers at the center of knowledge not
humanity, but a sort of anti-humanity, a dead end if you will. Both
linguistics and psychoanalysis find humanity suspended in a web of
language, a language which mediates humanity and allows humanity to
constitute an image of itself. But language is not such a stable support
network; rather language's promise of solidity is something like
quicksand, an infinitely regressing system which cannot comprehend its own
foundation since it has no center or originary meaning to rest on. "From
within language experienced and transversed as language, in the play of
its possibilities extended to their farthest point, what emerges is that
man has 'come to an end', and that, by reaching the summit of all possible
speech, he arrives not at the very heart of himself but at the brink of
that which limits him; in that region where death prowls, where thought is
extinguished, where the promise of the origin interminably recedes."
(383) If humanity reveals itself only in and by language, humanity must
accept a certain condemnation of silence to never be able to speak of its
own origins and ends. Humanity is thrust into the foreground only to be
distanced from its foundations, its background, a horizon which cannot
speak and which, when approached, undoes thinking (as meaning is undone at
the roots of language, the self at the roots of psychoanalysis), leaving
only a horizon of the dead.
It is, then, in this context that Foucault speaks of humanity as a
recent invention. Only with the elaboration of specific systems of
thought which could inquire not into humanity's ideal or essence, but the
functioning of the foreground and the silhouette of humanity against the
enabling background. "We shall say, therefore, that a 'human science'
exists, not whenever man is in question, but wherever there is
analysis--within the dimension proper to the unconscious--of norms, rules,
and signifying totalities which unveil to consciousness the conditions of
its forms and contents." (364) The subject of humanity was constituted
during a certain moment in history which "dissolved" language, that is,
an era which knowingly constructed its understanding of humanity
"objectively," in between the spaces of representationality which show how
humanity is deployed. According to Foucault, the human sciences address
humanity in so far as people live, speak, and produce (biology, philology,
and economics), and create its model by isolating and questioning the
functioning of humanity when the norms and rules break down, and on that
basis rebuild knowledge by showing how a functional representation of
humanity can come into being and be deployed (and thus, Foucault will
later argue, perfect the techniques of normalization and socialized
encoding of rules via totalizing methods of power).
As language is now re-coalescing at its limits, combining thought
and unthought, the Other of knowledge must give itself over to the Same.
Where the limits of thinking reveal its own basis as its foundational
limitations, a new way of thinking is constituted which, as Levi-Strauss
says, "dissolves humanity." Foucault writes, "Since man was constituted
at a time when language was doomed to dispersion, will he not be dispersed
when language regains its unity?" (386) The "death of man" seems a
relatively peaceful event, not where humanity explodes with enormous
violence, but a moment where humanity withdraws into the background such
that a new array of knowledge can be foregrounded. Foucault does not yet
have the advantage of a fully elaborated theory of language; however, if
such a unity of language is not philosophized, humanity will forever find
itself in a dying state, undoing itself by its own logic without our
awareness. Foucault seems to ask that humanity die gracefully so that we
can direct our energy to elaborating what is not yet thought, and approach
a new horizon of articulation.
For first and foremost, the "death of man" marks the failure of
the ability to meaningfully ask the question "What is the essence of
humanity?" The absolute of humanity, the end of the meaning of being is
no longer the issue. Foucault will later shift to speaking in terms of
the making of a "subject" rather than the more vague notion of the "human
sciences," and the death which we are witnessing in our era emphasizes the
applicability of Foucault's theory to social re-evaluation. Such a death
mandates new questions: How is a certain formation of humanity
foregrounded? How are subjects made and how can they be changed? What is
the relationship of the formation of the subject and truth? Out of the
ashes of the "death of man" Foucault is able to move on and begin to
question more how our basic concepts of the constitution of humanity were
formed and, by understanding the historically changing ways of
articulating a subject, one can slowly adjust one's own thinking to
re-arrange the making of ourselves.
There continues an intensified orientation towards possibility and
potentiality that the thought of the event (or the non-event as a
non-taking place) of death, as our ownmost possibility, enables. Foucault
does not seek a somber funeral or lament a sad goodbye but rather strives
for a renewed intensification towards the unthought (as if dancing on
humanity's grave). Or as an American Leftist, Joe Hill, commented, "Don't
mourn, organize!" In the echo of this cry I'd like to discuss the
writings of Jacques Derrida, who, discussing the logic of death, briefly
articulated a statement on "The Ends of Man" early in his career, and only
recently has rewritten a longer attempt to address the issue in the
book-length essay Aporias. Both a pervasive unraveling of ends and
a thinking at the limits of truth permeates Derrida's philosophy,
motivating Derrida as well to consider the link between finitude and
knowledge. Derrida tends to assume Heidegger's project while steering it
away from any nostalgia for presence of Being, and to some extent, Derrida
is not as sentimental concerning death as Heidegger. There is a hint of
morbidity in the early Heidegger, and a silencing propheticism in his
later writing, both of which Derrida disregards. Instead, Derrida
invigorates his writing with the creativity of an aestheticist and a
stylist. There is a certain liveliness, at times dynamically countered by
a mournful lyricism, with which Derrida broaches death.
In the essay "The Ends of Man" Derrida, as with Foucault, begins
with a consideration of the "we." Derrida also senses a tinge of a
humanistic categorization in any theorizing from the "we" which tends to
affirm a unity of knowledge and anthropology. Foucault is never addressed
directly in the article, except for a citation as an epigram from the
conclusion of The Order of Things, but a subtle critique of
Foucault's "ends" does trickle through Derrida's readings. There is,
however, no doubt that the two have deep affinities. For example, this
sentence which Derrida floors with italic emphasis: "The thinking of
the end of man, therefore, is always already prescribed in metaphysics, in
the thinking of the truth of man," (Derrida, 1982:121) while
highlighted by typical Derridean vocabulary, could just have easily come
from Foucault's texts, perhaps in the section on the analytic of finitude.
However, the title of Derrida's article already indicates a shift away
from Foucault as it implicates a plurality: the ends of man. In
Derrida's articulations, there is not one End, the completion of an act,
the conclusion of a jury, the closing up of a shop. Such finality, the
finished project, the mark of an absolute finitude, is scrupulously denied
in Derrida's work, if at first to point out that such fame of an End
always implies the causal relationship of a beginning, an origin, a
center. To a certain extent, Foucault's book ends with The End. And at
the end of The End: another beginning? Alas, that would merely repeat the
same beginning-to-end ratio. Nietzsche enters repeatedly, endlessly here;
the eternal return mimics the end as much as it absorbs it. For Derrida,
The End is an open ended question: the ends are perhaps endless.
When Derrida turns to "Reading Us," however, his focus is on the
ends of thinking in Heidegger. In the later writings of Heidegger, there
is a tendency to privilege a circularity of discovery in the ontological
redemption of "in my end is my beginning." Heidegger questions ends as a
point of abandonment, a higher completion to be reached which overcomes a
past so as to remove it, to leave behind one end for another. Instead,
Heidegger wants to stay within a realm of both beginning and end,
passively waiting for a nearer understanding of the nearness of beginnings
and endings to appear, a nearness of presences, the Being of beings.
Describing Heidegger's lineage of thinking, Derrida develops this theme
very acutely:
However, Derrida will return to Heidegger's interest in the
relationship of truth and death in a later work with a slightly different
emphasis. Interestingly, Derrida's book Aporias includes, and sets
himself off with, a critique of our eminent "historian of death" Philippe
Ariés. Pouncing on Aris's lack of philosophical rigor, Derrida rightly
points out that Ariés assumes we all know what death is and we can
speak
of death unproblematically and transparently. To rebound into a more
philosophically demanding and nuanced notion of death, Derrida, without
surprise, returns to Heidegger, who conceives of an existential analytic
of death which necessarily already precedes any metaphysical or biological
or historical account of death. But Derrida wants to emphasize a
previously glossed over statement in Sein und Zeit. Derrida cites
Heidegger's sentence on "[death] as the possibility of the impossibility
of any existence at all" (242) as a paradoxical statement of possibility
as impossibility. If such possibility is the condition of the ability to
receive the disclosing of truth and of impossibility, then truth is bound
up in its own paradox.
Derrida cites this "possibility as impossibility" as an aporetic
moment. Aporia, from the Greek, means an inconclusive argument, a
stalling point in thinking which provides no obvious solution, literally a
non-passable situation, a place without pores [a-poria]. Derrida
does not claim to be able to unblock the problem, if that is even
desirable or possible, but enacts a circulation of questions to try to
better understand the non-understandability of the aporia. "What is the
place of this unique aporia in such an "expecting of death" as "expecting"
the only possibility of the impossible? Is the place of this nonpassage
impossibility itself or the possibility of impossibility? Or is it that
the impossible be possible? Is the aporia the impossible itself?"
(Derrida, 1993:73) Derrida clearly sees no gain in dissolving or absorbing
the impossible, rather he questions whether or not the place of
impossibility can be located at all, and whether such a place of
non-placeability is already involved in the constitution of any place.
There is no place without the possibility of its displacement. In this
approach, Derrida does not give the Other over to the Same but attempts to
incorporate the Other as Other, the impossibility as possibility.
Thus, if "death is possibility par excellence" (63), and
possibility is always bound up in impossibility, then death is truly the
aporetic experience par excellence. One, in fact, never experiences death
as death, rather one only "awaits" death at the limits of truth, waiting
for the arriving of the ending. The question of whether I can die at all,
"Is my death possible?", is now re-posed at the limits of the impossible.
We see in Derrida's recent work concerning the issue of death a
still precariously involving attempt to articulate the features and
fractures of what passes between representation, the pre-theoretical as
before the foregrounding of understanding. Today, there continues a
vastly growing philosophical and social interest in these limits, such
that we are witnessing a sort of dawn of the dead. However, in each of
the three philosophers there is not an attempt at humanizing death but of
a premonition of death as what undoes humanity. And if we listen, if we
re-make, if we attempt the impossible, only then does death reveal itself
as a generative act. It is in this generation to come that I think
exhibits itself so hopefully in Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida, three
thinkers for whom death is what is most intimate. At stake is precisely
this question of intimacy, such that thinking towards what is unthought,
while revealing what is our ownmost possibility, also brings us closer in
belonging to such possibility, a belonging to what we can most know about
ourselves among one another. At the limits of a will to knowledge, then,
death and the limits of truth must meet in a meeting which can never take
place. We, busy unlearning and unthinking the world, cannot leave its
completion to the dying.
Endnotes:
1 See, for example, the introductory
statement of Death and Representation, eds. Sarah Webster Goodwin
and Elisabeth Bronfen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
2 Giorgio Agamben's major
philosophical work, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity,
addresses this relationship directly. Agamben begins with a hint from
Heidegger, who writes in On the Way to Language, "Mortals are they
who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so. But animals
cannot speak either. The essential relation between death and language
flashes up before us, but remains still unthought." (107-8) Accepting
the task of thinking what is unthought, Agamben performs an eloquent
close reading of the thematics of death in Heidegger and Hegel, while
relating death to Voice and negativity. Agamben's analysis is profound
and demanding and while I introduce his work here only in a footnote, his
understanding partially guides me though my essay.
3 The similarities here between
Foucault and Jürgen Habermas should be immediately noticeable. While
the two certainly differ in consideration of the ends of the lifeworld,
there is certainly an affinity between the two in considerations of
background and foreground interpretation. In my opinion, there is
evidence here that Foucault anticipated a good deal of Habermas's position
and already applies a sophisticated critique of Habermas's account, an
elaboration on the reclaimation of the enlightenment which pays little
attention to the notion that the foundations of the enlightenment
presuppose and intend their own dissolution (Adorno did not fail to argue
this as well).
4 In The Unknowable Community
Blanchot quotes Jean-Luc Nancy: "If the community is revealed by the
death of the other person, it is because death is itself the true
community of mortal beings: their impossible communion. The community
therefore occupies the following singular space: it takes upon itself the
impossibility of its own immanence, the impossibility of a communitarian
being as subject." (10-11) Blanchot takes as his resources the work of
Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, along with the recent writings of
Jean-Luc Nancy, in an attempt to articulate what cannot be avowed, a
"transmission of the untransmittable." (18) It is Bataille who first
addresses this unspeakable communality as "the negative community: the
community of those who have no community." (24) Bataille's interest in
death is well known, particularly in relation to the transgressive, but
Blanchot is interested here in perhaps a latent and tacit ethics of the
co-responsibility of death groping around in Bataille. Interestingly,
Blanchot and Agamben both orient themselves towards a consideration of
negativity at the same time in the 1980's. Agamben's most widely
acclaimed work, The Coming Community, picks up where Nancy and
Blanchot leaves off.
Agamben, Giorgio, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1991).
Ariés, Philippe, Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle
Ages to the Present, tr. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1975).
Aristotle, "Nichomachean Ethics," in Selections, tr. Terence Irwin
and Gail Fine (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995).
Blanchot, Maurice, The Unavowable Community, tr. Pierre Joris
(Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1988).
Derrida, Jacques, "The Ends of Man," in Margins of Philosophy, tr.
Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
-----. Aporias (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1993).
-----. "Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok," tr.
Barbara Johnson, in Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man's Magic
Word, tr. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986).
Derrida discusses the psychology of mourning, the crypt, and the living
dead in this introduction.
Epicurus, Letters, Principle Doctrines, and Vatican Sayings, tr.
Russel M. Geer (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1964)
Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things (New York: Random House,
1970).
-----. "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice, tr. Donald Bouchard (Ithica: Cornell University Press,
1977).
-----. Interview, "An Ethics Of Pleasure," conducted in English by
Stephen Riggins on June 22, 1982 in Toronto. Foucault Live (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1996).
Heidegger, Martin, selections of "Being and Time," in Existentialism:
Basic Writings, eds. Charles Guignon and Derk Pereboom (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1995).
Newsweek, "Teaching Us How to Die," November 25, 1996.
Plato, "Phaedo," Five Dialogues, tr. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1981).
Death Reckoning in the Thinking of Heidegger,
Foucault, and Derrida
Copyright © 1997 by Joshua Schuster, all rights reserved
[T]hose more involved in modernity ... come to die in the hospital
because it has become inconvenient to die at home.
Death is just the exhaustion and failure of medical operations. Mourning
in public is seen as bad taste; too much grieving arouses not empathy but
repugnance. Funerals are marked mostly by formalities, the agenda is
performed with rigidity (the dead make stiffs of everyone else); of
primary importance is to show no feelings: one must act professional.
However, forced mourning is the repression of mourning. We hide both the
event and the meaning of death in institutions and silence, both of which
support each other. In a recent issue of Newsweek, the issue of
death graced the cover in tribute of the recently deceased Cardinal Joseph
Bernardin. The only people who were permitted to discuss their deaths in
the magazine were clergy or those who had AIDS or cancer. If we are to
find a secular way of speaking about death, we must also approach death
from a new in-road, from politics, to aesthetics, even by way of
environmentalism and ethics.
Is my death possible?
All knowledge is rooted in a life, a society, and a language that have a
history; and it is in that very history that knowledge finds the element
enabling it to communicate with other forms of life, other types of
society, other significations: that is why historicism always implies a
certain philosophy, or at least a certain methodology, of living
comprehension (in the element of the Lebenswelt), of interhuman
communication (against a background of social structures), and of
hermeneutics (as the re-apprehension through the manifest meaning of the
discourse of another meaning at once secondary and primary, that is, more
hidden but also more fundamental). (Foucault, 1970:372-3)
History is "enabled" by a certain set-up of a philosophy. Such a
background arrangement allows for a particular realm knowledge to appear,
to be speakable, to be comprehensible, to be knowable. "Living
comprehension" presupposes the world as lived (Lebenswelt), as
populated by agents who have the capacity of understanding. Comprehension
is fostered by the intersubjective communicative ability of humans whose
dialogue is only permitted within the bounds of social structures
(language is an example of a social structure). [3] Only through the interpretation of manifest
meanings (practices) can hermeneutics reveal the underlying and more
foundational system of meaning (methods). Thus the background paradigm of
the Lebenswelt, social structures, and fundamental interpretive
methods allow for knowledge to be disclosed within a certain realm of
living comprehension, interhuman communication, and meaning. We can only
access the background from our foregrounded condition, and it would be a
mistake to assume our knowledge of the world is not preconditioned by a
certain arrangement of the ability to know. In the thinking and the language of Being, the
end of man has been prescribed since always, and this prescription has
never done anything but modulate the equivocality of the end, in
the play of the telos and death. In the reading of this play, one
may take the following sequence in all its sense: the end of man is the
thinking of Being, man is the end of the thinking of Being, the end of man
is the end of the thinking of Being. Man, since always, is its proper
end, that is, the end of its proper. Being, since always, is its proper
end, that is, the end of its proper. (134)
Heidegger does not posit a mere linear connection between beginning
and end but rather implies the complicity of both in allowing for the
thinking of Being to appear. The closer we get to the end, the closer we
get to the beginning. The closer we get to closeness, the nearer we near
the proper presencing of the end of thinking, which is the thinking of
Being. A lingering conception of the "proper," which hints at essence,
still remains in Heidegger's philosophy, the roots of which we noticed in
his connection of mineness with my ownmost possibility of death. Yet
Derrida is suspicious that the ends might meaningfully meet the beginnings
in a fuller realization of the presencing of Being. "The end is in the
beginning" is perhaps too explicitly tautological, and "risks sinking into
the autism of closure" (135) Derrida warns. Derrida is doubtful of any
"proper" foundation of humanity, and instead affirms a radically
non-foundational notion of play as the de-focusing and deconstructing of
stable essences. For, if death is indeed the possibility of the
impossibility and therefore the possibility of appearing as such of the
impossibility of appearing as such either, then man, or man as
Dasein, never has a relation to death as such, but only to
perishing, to demising, and to the death of the other, who is not the
other. The death of the other thus becomes again "first," always
first.... The death of the other, this death of the other in "me," is
fundamentally the only death that is named in the syntagm "my death."
(76)
My death is an impossibility: I cannot die alone. I can only know of the
other's death such that I die as other, that the other's death in "me" is
my ownmost possibility as impossibility; death is the absolute which gives
me over to the other. Dying as other is my ownmost possibility of my
impossibility, my playing out of the aporetic moment. If the death of the
other is always "first," Derrida suggests one can take into consideration
an "originary mourning" as a foundation of the constitution of truth;
perhaps here we see a glimpse of an ethics of death, of the inextricable
co-mingling of self and other (why shouldn't we mingle at this funeral?)
at the limits of one's ownmost possibility, what Maurice Blanchot calls an
"unavowable community" of the sharing of dying. [4] While we are a long way away from any workable
everyday ethics here, there is nonetheless a real interest in opening up
the possibility of locating a common space for what we all share in our
separations from which we are further separated, our ownmost possibility
of otherness. The shift of emphasis away from Heideggerian proper
property to impossible possibility, from withdrawl into listening to
awaiting and interactivity highlight a renewed attempt at thinking within
and beyond the limits of metaphysical ontology. Awaiting one's own death,
and death as such as the dying of the other are the irreducible aporetic
situations which follow from possibility as impossibility, from the
relationship of truth as untruth. For Derrida, possibility as
impossibility is the definition of deconstruction par excellence, and much
of Derrida's philosophy can be seen as a permutation on this theme.
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