schuster - death reckoning in the thinking of heidegger, foucault, and derrida

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Death Reckoning in the Thinking of Heidegger,Foucault, and Derrida

Joshua Schuster

Other Voices , v.1, n.1 (March 1997)

Copyright © 1997 by Joshua Schuster, all rights reserved

At the end of his life, poised to fulfill a sentencing of death by poison, Socrates findshimself 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 fordying and death." (Plato 64) Socrates, who never takes his tenure in the world tooseriously, finds the art of dying, of undoing the soul from the body, as the process ofelevation to the consummation of truth. "It seems likely that we shall, only then, when weare 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 pureknowledge with the body, then one of two things is true: either we can never attainknowledge or that we can do so after death." (66e) Only the dead have access to pureknowledge. Thus the Platonic forms are the realm of the dead. Knowledge is entombed inthe forms, only to be accessed by the soul, stripped of the world by death. Life itself is onlya brief respite from death, for "it truly appears that the living never come from any othersource than from the dead." (70d) Only the dead can bring the living into life. "What comesfrom being alive? Being dead. And what comes from being dead? One must agree that itis 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." ForSocrates, the "unified vision" of philosophy comes at the closing of the eyes in reachingdeath. The task of this essay will be to ask: why is philosophy so important that one wouldhave to die to realize it?

The death debate occupies a unique vantage point from the birth of philosophy throughoutancient Greek thinking where the various approaches to dying mark distinctly differentschools of thought. For example, Epicurus sides with Socrates, remarking that the goodlife is best at dying, such that "the art of living well and the art of dying well areone." (Epicurus 55) On the other hand, perhaps in an attempt to kill death (and dethroneSocrates), Aristotle refutes the primacy of death with the prime of life. "Then should wecount no human being happy during his lifetime, but follow Solon's advice and wait to seethe end? And if we should hold that, can he really be happy during the time after he hasdied? Surely that is completely absurd, especially when we say happiness is anactivity." (Aristotle 361) For Aristotle, the soul feeds off the body, and the souldisintegrates along with the body's decay. It appears then, from the beginnings ofphilosophy, thought and interpretation of death cannot be severed from the understandingof life, and death plays the fundamental role in any epistemology reaching at the limits oftruth.

So too, I think, death remains the imperative horizon today, the background limit againstwhich we project a certain understanding of our own society. But, as any historian willimmediately point out, both the role and reception of death has changed, perhaps evenaged, and maybe the end is getting older. This does not mean we are getting better atdeath, nor is death getting tired of us; on the contrary. If anything, we are losing our abilityto 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


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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 itspreparatory role. The dying person's bedchamber was a public place to be entered byfamily and children (compare this to today's hygiene of keeping death as invisible aspossible to the public, and most certainly away from children), and the dead co-existedmuch more plainly with the living, so that cemeteries were a commonplace in the plazasquare 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 onceapproached has given way to contemporary society's shock and shame towards death

which finds itself both unnamable and forbidden to be comprehended. The secularizationof 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 deathhas been suppressed, and public mourning is seen as unacceptable, an inability toproperly cope. Not only does secular culture have a very difficult time of speaking aboutdeath, but in addition the language by which we speak of death is now inseparable frommedical discourse, such that the statistics of "vital signs," health insurance plans, andcataloging and codifying death as constituted by a vast array of diseases are the onlyvocabularies with which death is condoned to speak. Ariés correctly points out that thespace of death has moved from the dramatic place of the home and community to theundramatic, antiseptic, and sanitized hospital.

[T]hose more involved in modernity ... come to die in the hospital because it has

become inconvenient to die at home.

Death in the hospital is no longer the occasion of a ritual ceremony, over which thedying person presides amidst his assembled relatives and friends. Death is atechnical phenomenon obtained by a cessation of care, a cessation determined in amore or less avowed way by a decision of the doctor and the hospital team.... Deathhas been dissected, cut to bits by a series of little steps, which finally makes itimpossible to know which step was the real death, the one in which consciousnesswas lost, or the one in which breathing stopped.... [Doctors] are the masters ofdeath--of the moment as well as of the circumstances of death--and it has beenobserved that they try to obtain from their patient "an acceptable style of living whiledying." The accent has been placed on "acceptable." An acceptable death is adeath which can be accepted or tolerated by the survivors. It has its antithesis: "theembarrassingly graceless dying," which embarrasses the survivors because itcauses 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 becomeemotional other than in private, that is to say, secretly. (Ariés 88-89)

Death is just the exhaustion and failure of medical operations. Mourning in public is seenas bad taste; too much grieving arouses not empathy but repugnance. Funerals aremarked mostly by formalities, the agenda is performed with rigidity (the dead make stiffsof 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 themeaning of death in institutions and silence, both of which support each other. In a recentissue of Newsweek , the issue of death graced the cover in tribute of the recentlydeceased Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. The only people who were permitted to discusstheir deaths in the magazine were clergy or those who had AIDS or cancer. If we are tofind 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?

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 simplereason that we do not know who to ask. Who could tell us, guide us to ask the rightquestions, lead us into familiarity which we presume corresponds with knowledge? Isthere a question which can question the non-empirical, what is outside epistemology, whathas no thought, what is at the limits of limits? It seems to me a philosophicalcommonplace 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, Imust already have an understanding and recognition of death, a pre-theoreticalunderstanding of death. This is already to suggest that death lurks not inrepresentationality, but in between the spaces of what is representable.

When Heidegger reaches a crucial point in Sein und Zeit in which he seeks to linkDasein's possibility to the world as a whole, he begins the very questionable articulation ofthe 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'stotality, must be considered as both before and beyond representation. "In 'ending,' and inDasein's Being-a-whole, for which such ending is constitutive, there is, by its veryessence, no representing." (239) In the context of Heidegger's argument, death cannot berepresented because, existentially, there is no dying "as," no dying for an Other that wouldtake 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 ownmostpossibility, so that "death is in every case mine, in so far as it 'is' at all." (239) Heideggerquotes the "is" to point out that death can only be understood as a possibility, a not-yetwhich precedes the ontic "is". Thus any existential analysis of death must precede ametaphysical or biological event of the "is" of death (another strike at Aristotle). "In dying, itis shown that mineness and existence are ontologically constitutive for death. Dying is notan event; it is a phenomenon to be understood existentially." (239) Events must "takeplace," 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 fundamentallylinked to its own negativity, its own non-Being. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben will laterattempt 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 whichis 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 casemine." (212) Mineness is my Dasein, my hereness, as well as my orientation towardsdeath. 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 anyDasein to allow for the possibility of either authenticity or inauthenticity. A selection ofactivities Heidegger associates with inauthenticity--being busy, excited, interested, orready for enjoyment--are telling examples (note hedonism is not directly linked withmineness nor with authenticity). One can never shake, escape, or "outstrip" one'smineness, though Heidegger asserts that "the They" [ das Mann ] do a fine job of avoidingaddressing their fundamental mineness. Heidegger is not acting "selfish" here, nor is hepositing mineness as the essence of a subject, but I think one can conclude that minenessis 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 tosuggest 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 apre-theoretical understanding of mineness, and of death.

There is no death without mineness either. Only a being with mineness can die (muchlater 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; minenessis a given and not giveable. Heidegger does not insist as much on the prevalent usage ofthe term "mineness" as I do, but I find that Heidegger primarily approaches the thought ofdeath through the position of mineness. This will effect a certain approach to limits inHeidegger's thinking. What is most mine, my ownmost possibility, is "the possibility of theimpossibility 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 fundamentalorientation towards death as part of its practice. Every foundation of knowledge of oneselfmust take into account the fundamental orientation of that knowledge towards its owndemise.

I want to compare this mineness with a certain possibility of the "we" in the writing ofFoucault. "We" is read as "we humans," "the humanity of us," "our human being." Foucaultabsorbs much of the analytical strategy of Heidegger but presses some soft spots inHeidegger's elaborations in order to approach an array of implicit extremes. By Foucault'stime, the Heideggerian rhetoric of "authenticity" had been abandoned by most aspotentially fascistic, including Heidegger himself (although, of course, "everyone's"

reasons are quite different, including Heidegger's). Heidegger also refrains from using theterm "mineness" after his "turn" in an attempt to move away from the categories of humanbeing and theorize about Being in general. But as I pointed out earlier, the concept ofmineness, which precedes and founds the possibility of authenticity or inauthenticity, stillremains as the proper appearance of humanity. Foucault begins here, with whatHeidegger considers the proper property of humanity, but Foucault reconceptualizes therift between mine-ness and they-ness. In Madness and Civilization Foucault argues thatthe social splitting of categories of "them" and "me" precondition a code, seen as a moralneed, 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" whichfinds itself revealed by a certain historical conditioning.

In order for a notion of "us" to appear, the background of knowledge constituting fieldsmust relay to the foreground a foundation for the ability of a particular historical practice tobe disclosed. Foucault suggests it is only the conceptual field of modernity, beginningroughly at the end of the 18th century, which enables "humanity" to appear.

All knowledge is rooted in a life, a society, and a language that have a history; and itis in that very history that knowledge finds the element enabling it to communicatewith other forms of life, other types of society, other significations: that is whyhistoricism always implies a certain philosophy, or at least a certain methodology, ofliving comprehension (in the element of the Lebenswelt ), of interhumancommunication (against a background of social structures), and of hermeneutics (asthe re-apprehension through the manifest meaning of the discourse of anothermeaning at once secondary and primary, that is, more hidden but also morefundamental). (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 ), aspopulated by agents who have the capacity of understanding. Comprehension is fosteredby the intersubjective communicative ability of humans whose dialogue is only permittedwithin the bounds of social structures (language is an example of a social structure). [3] Only through the interpretation of manifest meanings (practices) can hermeneutics revealthe underlying and more foundational system of meaning (methods). Thus the backgroundparadigm of the Lebenswelt , social structures, and fundamental interpretive methods allowfor knowledge to be disclosed within a certain realm of living comprehension, interhumancommunication, and meaning. We can only access the background from ourforegrounded condition, and it would be a mistake to assume our knowledge of the worldis not preconditioned by a certain arrangement of the ability to know.

What is just beginning to appear knowable is the end of a certain way of knowing. Historyis now confronting an end which is not its fully realized completion or totalizing closure butits undoing and dissolution. Foucault calls this conceptualizing of limits the "analytic offinitude," an analytical category which allows understanding to be revealed but remains asa finite conception from which understanding cannot escape. Foucault locates the initialconception of the analytic of finitude in Kant's epistemological questioning (and, althoughless direct, his ethical concern to treat man as an end). If for Kant, the question is, Whatare the limits of knowledge? What is it possible to know?, Foucault then asks, How isknowledge constituted by its own limits, limitations, and death? Just like Nietzsche'selaboration 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 aperspective...." (372) There is no universal or infinite intellection; our tools ofunderstanding 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, thebreaks and ruptures which are the instabilities that constitute the source of our ability toknow. In the essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault links his method toNietzsche's strategy of genealogy: "The search for descent is not the erecting offoundations: on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously considered immobile; itfragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imaginedconsistent 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 underlyingdisjointed and discontinously folded method of constitution. As knowledge reachestowards its origins, its "accidentally" disrupts its foundations and shows that our limits ofknowledge are caught up in their own dissolution. "[B]y rediscovering finitude in itsinterrogation of the origin, modern thought closes the great quadrilateral it began to outlinewhen the Western episteme broke up at the end of the eighteenth century: the connectionof 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, onediscovers that historical inquiry has constituted a subject called "humanity" on the limits ofits own limits, that is, the finitudes themselves make humanity possible. The moderncogito addresses itself not in what it thinks, but what it does not think, what thought isunthought, and articulates itself in the elsewhere of thinking. Humanity finds the limits of itsknowledge 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-yetknowable (and never to be known) which is the foundation and priority of all activity ofknowledge. As understanding approaches its finitude, "modern thought is advancingtowards 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 whichdiscovers at the center of knowledge not humanity, but a sort of anti-humanity, a dead endif you will. Both linguistics and psychoanalysis find humanity suspended in a web oflanguage, a language which mediates humanity and allows humanity to constitute animage of itself. But language is not such a stable support network; rather language'spromise of solidity is something like quicksand, an infinitely regressing system whichcannot comprehend its own foundation since it has no center or originary meaning to reston. "From within language experienced and transversed as language, in the play of itspossibilities extended to their farthest point, what emerges is that man has 'come to anend', and that, by reaching the summit of all possible speech, he arrives not at the veryheart 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 interminablyrecedes." (383) If humanity reveals itself only in and by language, humanity must accept acertain 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, itsbackground, 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 withthe elaboration of specific systems of thought which could inquire not into humanity's idealor 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, notwhenever man is in question, but wherever there is analysis--within the dimension properto the unconscious--of norms, rules, and signifying totalities which unveil to consciousnessthe conditions of its forms and contents." (364) The subject of humanity was constitutedduring a certain moment in history which "dissolved" language, that is, an era whichknowingly constructed its understanding of humanity "objectively," in between the spacesof representationality which show how humanity is deployed. According to Foucault, thehuman sciences address humanity in so far as people live, speak, and produce (biology,philology, and economics), and create its model by isolating and questioning thefunctioning of humanity when the norms and rules break down, and on that basis rebuildknowledge by showing how a functional representation of humanity can come into beingand be deployed (and thus, Foucault will later argue, perfect the techniques ofnormalization and socialized encoding of rules via totalizing methods of power).




As language is now re-coalescing at its limits, combining thought and unthought, the Otherof knowledge must give itself over to the Same. Where the limits of thinking reveal its ownbasis 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 timewhen language was doomed to dispersion, will he not be dispersed when languageregains its unity?" (386) The "death of man" seems a relatively peaceful event, not wherehumanity explodes with enormous violence, but a moment where humanity withdraws intothe background such that a new array of knowledge can be foregrounded. Foucault doesnot yet have the advantage of a fully elaborated theory of language; however, if such aunity 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 thathumanity die gracefully so that we can direct our energy to elaborating what is not yetthought, and approach a new horizon of articulation.

For first and foremost, the "death of man" marks the failure of the ability to meaningfullyask the question "What is the essence of humanity?" The absolute of humanity, the end ofthe meaning of being is no longer the issue. Foucault will later shift to speaking in terms ofthe making of a "subject" rather than the more vague notion of the "human sciences," andthe death which we are witnessing in our era emphasizes the applicability of Foucault'stheory to social re-evaluation. Such a death mandates new questions: How is a certainformation of humanity foregrounded? How are subjects made and how can they bechanged? What is the relationship of the formation of the subject and truth? Out of theashes of the "death of man" Foucault is able to move on and begin to question more howour basic concepts of the constitution of humanity were formed and, by understanding thehistorically changing ways of articulating a subject, one can slowly adjust one's ownthinking to re-arrange the making of ourselves.

There continues an intensified orientation towards possibility and potentiality that thethought of the event (or the non-event as a non-taking place) of death, as our ownmostpossibility, enables. Foucault does not seek a somber funeral or lament a sad goodbye butrather strives for a renewed intensification towards the unthought (as if dancing onhumanity'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 inhis career, and only recently has rewritten a longer attempt to address the issue in thebook-length essay Aporias . Both a pervasive unraveling of ends and a thinking at thelimits of truth permeates Derrida's philosophy, motivating Derrida as well to consider thelink between finitude and knowledge. Derrida tends to assume Heidegger's project whilesteering it away from any nostalgia for presence of Being, and to some extent, Derrida isnot as sentimental concerning death as Heidegger. There is a hint of morbidity in the earlyHeidegger, and a silencing propheticism in his later writing, both of which Derridadisregards. Instead, Derrida invigorates his writing with the creativity of an aestheticist anda stylist. There is a certain liveliness, at times dynamically countered by a mournfullyricism, with which Derrida broaches death.

In the essay "The Ends of Man" Derrida, as with Foucault, begins with a consideration ofthe "we." Derrida also senses a tinge of a humanistic categorization in any theorizing fromthe "we" which tends to affirm a unity of knowledge and anthropology. Foucault is neveraddressed directly in the article, except for a citation as an epigram from the conclusion ofThe Order of Things , but a subtle critique of Foucault's "ends" does trickle throughDerrida'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 endof man, therefore, is always already prescribed in metaphysics, in the thinking of the truthof man, " (Derrida, 1982:121) while highlighted by typical Derridean vocabulary, could justhave 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 itimplicates a plurality: the ends of man. In Derrida's articulations, there is not one End, thecompletion of an act, the conclusion of a jury, the closing up of a shop. Such finality, thefinished 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 abeginning, 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 samebeginning-to-end ratio. Nietzsche enters repeatedly, endlessly here; the eternal returnmimics 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 inHeidegger. In the later writings of Heidegger, there is a tendency to privilege a circularityof discovery in the ontological redemption of "in my end is my beginning." Heideggerquestions ends as a point of abandonment, a higher completion to be reached whichovercomes 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 anearer understanding of the nearness of beginnings and endings to appear, a nearness ofpresences, the Being of beings. Describing Heidegger's lineage of thinking, Derridadevelops this theme very acutely:

In the thinking and the language of Being, the end of man has been prescribedsince always, and this prescription has never done anything but modulate theequivocality 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 thinkingof Being, man is the end of the thinking of Being, the end of man is the end of thethinking 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 ratherimplies the complicity of both in allowing for the thinking of Being to appear. The closer weget to the end, the closer we get to the beginning. The closer we get to closeness, thenearer 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 ownmostpossibility of death. Yet Derrida is suspicious that the ends might meaningfully meet thebeginnings 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 insteadaffirms a radically non-foundational notion of play as the de-focusing and deconstructing ofstable essences.

However, Derrida will return to Heidegger's interest in the relationship of truth and death ina 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 Ariésassumes we all know what death is and we can speak of death unproblematically andtransparently. To rebound into a more philosophically demanding and nuanced notion ofdeath, Derrida, without surprise, returns to Heidegger, who conceives of an existentialanalytic of death which necessarily already precedes any metaphysical or biological orhistorical account of death. But Derrida wants to emphasize a previously glossed overstatement in Sein und Zeit . Derrida cites Heidegger's sentence on "[death] as thepossibility of the impossibility of any existence at all" (242) as a paradoxical statement ofpossibility as impossibility. If such possibility is the condition of the ability to receive thedisclosing 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 theGreek, means an inconclusive argument, a stalling point in thinking which provides noobvious solution, literally a non-passable situation, a place without pores [ a-poria ]. Derridadoes not claim to be able to unblock the problem, if that is even desirable or possible, butenacts 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 nonpassageimpossibility itself or the possibility of impossibility? Or is it that the impossible bepossible? Is the aporia the impossible itself?" (Derrida, 1993:73) Derrida clearly sees nogain 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 isalready involved in the constitution of any place. There is no place without the possibility ofits displacement. In this approach, Derrida does not give the Other over to the Same butattempts to incorporate the Other as Other, the impossibility as possibility.

Thus, if "death is possibility par excellence" (63), and possibility is always bound up inimpossibility, then death is truly the aporetic experience par excellence. One, in fact, neverexperiences 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.

For, if death is indeed the possibility of the impossibility and therefore the possibilityof appearing as such of the impossibility of appearing as such either, then man, orman as Dasein , never has a relation to death as such, but only to perishing, todemising, and to the death of the other, who is not the other. The death of the otherthus becomes again "first," always first.... The death of the other, this death of theother in "me," is fundamentally the only death that is named in the syntagm "mydeath." (76)

My death is an impossibility: I cannot die alone. I can only know of the other's death suchthat 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 ownmostpossibility of my impossibility, my playing out of the aporetic moment. If the death of theother is always "first," Derrida suggests one can take into consideration an "originarymourning" as a foundation of the constitution of truth; perhaps here we see a glimpse ofan ethics of death, of the inextricable co-mingling of self and other (why shouldn't wemingle at this funeral?) at the limits of one's ownmost possibility, what Maurice Blanchotcalls an "unavowable community" of the sharing of dying. [4] While we are a long wayaway from any workable everyday ethics here, there is nonetheless a real interest inopening up the possibility of locating a common space for what we all share in ourseparations 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 atthinking 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 whichfollow from possibility as impossibility, from the relationship of truth as untruth. ForDerrida, possibility as impossibility is the definition of deconstruction par excellence, andmuch of Derrida's philosophy can be seen as a permutation on this theme.

We see in Derrida's recent work concerning the issue of death a still precariously involvingattempt to articulate the features and fractures of what passes between representation,the pre-theoretical as before the foregrounding of understanding. Today, there continues avastly growing philosophical and social interest in these limits, such that we are witnessinga sort of dawn of the dead. However, in each of the three philosophers there is not anattempt at humanizing death but of a premonition of death as what undoes humanity. Andif we listen, if we re-make, if we attempt the impossible, only then does death reveal itselfas 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 isunthought, while revealing what is our ownmost possibility, also brings us closer inbelonging to such possibility, a belonging to what we can most know about ourselvesamong one another. At the limits of a will to knowledge, then, death and the limits of truthmust meet in a meeting which can never take place. We, busy unlearning and unthinkingthe world, cannot leave its completion to the dying.

Endnotes:

1 See, for example, the introductory statement of Death and Representation , eds. SarahWebster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1993).

2 Giorgio Agamben's major philosophical work, Language and Death: The Place ofNegativity , addresses this relationship directly. Agamben begins with a hint fromHeidegger, who writes in On the Way to Language , "Mortals are they who can experiencedeath as death. Animals cannot do so. But animals cannot speak either. The essentialrelation between death and language flashes up before us, but remains stillunthought." (107-8) Accepting the task of thinking what is unthought, Agamben performsan eloquent close reading of the thematics of death in Heidegger and Hegel, while relatingdeath to Voice and negativity. Agamben's analysis is profound and demanding and while Iintroduce 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 immediatelynoticeable. While the two certainly differ in consideration of the ends of the lifeworld, thereis certainly an affinity between the two in considerations of background and foregroundinterpretation. In my opinion, there is evidence here that Foucault anticipated a good dealof Habermas's position and already applies a sophisticated critique of Habermas'saccount, an elaboration on the reclaimation of the enlightenment which pays little attentionto the notion that the foundations of the enlightenment presuppose and intend their owndissolution (Adorno did not fail to argue this as well).

4 In The Unknowable Community Blanchot quotes Jean-Luc Nancy: "If the community isrevealed by the death of the other person, it is because death is itself the true communityof mortal beings: their impossible communion. The community therefore occupies thefollowing singular space: it takes upon itself the impossibility of its own immanence, theimpossibility of a communitarian being as subject." (10-11) Blanchot takes as hisresources the work of Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, along with the recent writingsof Jean-Luc Nancy, in an attempt to articulate what cannot be avowed, a "transmission ofthe untransmittable." (18) It is Bataille who first addresses this unspeakable communalityas "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, butBlanchot is interested here in perhaps a latent and tacit ethics of the co-responsibility ofdeath groping around in Bataille. Interestingly, Blanchot and Agamben both orientthemselves 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 Nancyand Blanchot leaves off.

Works Cited:

Agamben, Giorgio, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (Minneapolis: Universityof 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 HillPress, 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. BarbaraJohnson, in Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man's Magic Word , tr. NicholasRand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986). Derrida discusses the psychology ofmourning, 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. DonaldBouchard (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1977).

-----. Interview, "An Ethics Of Pleasure," conducted in English by Stephen Riggins on June22, 1982 in Toronto. Foucault Live (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996).



ile://C:\My Documen \Schuster Death Reckoning in the Thinking of Heidegger Foucault and Derrida ht 01/24/20041:05:47 AM

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).

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