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PREFACE

THE STATEOF DEATH

JONATHANSTRAUSS

In reality,there is perhaps a greater distance betweenold age and youth

than there is betweendecrepitudeand death,for here one mustnot consider
death to be somethingabsolute. ... Death is not armed with a blade,
nothing violent accompanies it, life ends by imperceptiblenuances....
(D. J.)
Wedare ... to assert, on the basis of a knowledgeof the structureand
propertiesof the humanbody and a large numberof observations,that death
can be cured. (m.)
-Diderot and d'Alembert,Encyclopediel
But if Man is Action, and if Action is Negativity "appearing"as Death,
Man, in his humanor speaking existence, is only a more or less deferred
death,and one that is conscious of itself.
Therefore:to recognizeDiscourse philosophically,or to recognizeMan
as one who speaks, is to accept unambiguouslythefact of death and to
describe ... its significance and reach. Now, this is precisely whatphilosophers beforeHegel omittedto do.
-Alexandre Kojeve, Introductionacla lecturede Hegel
Death changed in the nineteenthcentury.The shift probablybegan duringthe Enlightenment, when, as Philippe Aries has argued,people learnedfor the first time to fear
theirmortality-not just the terrorsanduncertaintiesof theirdemise or the anguishover
an eventualpunishmentfor their sins, but extinctionitself [1: 112-14, 125]. Withinthe
spaceof a few decades,deathbecamea sheerandunredeemableabsence,anunconsolable
loss, and a confrontationwith pure negativity. During those years, death was transformedfrom a nuancebetween differentstates to an absolute.It became, in itself, infinite and sublime, a nothingness whose discovery, like that of the zero, unleashedunknown andlimitless powers.These now had to be grappledwith, to be graspedtheoretically as well as practically,in both the intimacyof privatefears andthe communalityof
public legislation.And once deathwas recognized as an absoluteit could be put to use
as one, for both the individualand the social collective.
Hegel, as Kojeve taught,was the first to harnessthe new forces of mortalitywithin
an intellectualmechanismworthyof theirscope. "Death,"he wrotein the prefaceto the
1807 Phenomenologyof Spirit, ". .. is of all things the most dreadful,and to hold fast
what is dead requiresthe greateststrength"[19]. This power to grasp one's demise, to
confrontit and "tarry"with it, was whathe called the Subject-at once the isolatedunit
of humanityconfrontedby the limits of its mortalityandthe key to the social ordersthat
all translations
1. Hereandthroughout,
aremineunlessotherwiseindicated.

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dependon it, in a pragmaticsense. As justice and enfranchisementincreasinglyrely on

the responsibilityof single subjects,so does deathrise in importanceas the final determinerof socially answerableindividuality.In this setting,wheremortalityis the limit of
the subject,society becomes a stateof death,a collective groundedin the transcendental
absoluteof a nothingnessthat intervenesregularlyand practicallywithin the events of
life.
In such a state, executions are not merely exercises of authorityor purgings of
unassimilableelementsfromthe social body;they arealso, andmost significantly,spectacles of the transcendentalgroundsof the social itself. Here, death is democraticnot
merely because it is the universalleveler, not simply because it imposes a one hundred
percent experience tax on all bracketsof the population,but because it produces the
uniformunits of untransferablehumanity,individuals,who at once sufferthe obligation
to conformto the state and enjoy the, at least theoretical,enfranchisementto transform
it. Throughoutour days, in the most insignificantdetails, we feel this mortalisolation
organizingour legal relationto our social context, and in each case my death to come
draws a line aroundme, saying: this is you. My metro pass and airline tickets will be
valid, my response to the jury duty summonsrequired,and my vote counted, unless I
die. It does not matterthatI have changedlovers, or favoritecolor, or publishedmy first
novel, or droppedinto an abyss of clinical depressionduringthe month, my carte orange will still be accepted. Or again, if I have killed someone, it is of no consequence
that I no longer take pleasurein my food or that I have undergonea religious conversion.2I am still the criminalandI still owe the statethe sufferingof my punishment.My
responsibilityis as untransferableas my deathto come. Whereas,for instance,the guilt
of Ganelon,in the Chansonde Roland, is punishedon thirtyof his family members,the
jurisprudencethatdevelops over the nineteenthcenturysets as its goal the punishment
of an individualfor only the crimes thathe or she committedas that same individual.3I
alone am accountable,and only I must die.
If it is true thatmy death defines me, as has been arguedthroughoutthe past two
centuries,then every person who calls to me, from the policeman in the street to the
lover in my bedroom,speaks with the authorityand in remembranceof that death. On
theirlips always comes the affirmationof my mortality.But this social orderis just and
justified to the extent thatdeathis, in fact, an absolute.Weredeathotherwise,its apparent absolutenesswould thenbe the ideologicalruseof anotherinterest,andwe would be
consigned to this gloomy realm of the dead, this constant,stutteringreiterationof our
mortality,not out of ontologicalnecessity but throughan impositioncoming from some
otherquarter.And if deathwere otherwise,life could be, too.
But that "otherwise"would entail an epistemic shift, a regroundingand reexperiencing of humanexistence. Fantasiesof such an life have hauntedthe imaginationof
the last two centuries.The preoriginal"f8lure"thatcuts like a curse across generations
of the Rougon-Macquartfamily in Zola's novels; the speakingof the dead, even Death
itself, throughthe tables tournantes;the idealizationof love and the subsequenteroticization of death-all of these indicatethe rejectionof an isolated and death-basedsubjectivity.4So do projectionsof such an unsubjectivizedexperience onto a prehistoric
culturalor prelinguisticinfantilepast.The Freudianconstructionof an undifferentiated
2. For a recentexampleof thefailure of a death-rowreligious conversionto secure reprieve,
see the case of Karla Faye Tucker,reportedin the New YorkTimes of January 1 and 27 and
February3-5, 1998. Despite several argumentsthat Tuckerhad become a differentperson since
the crimesfor which she was convicted,she was nonethelessexecuted.
3. See laisses 278, 286-88, especially verses 3958-59: ".XXX.en i ad d'icels ki suntpendut.
/ Ki humetrai'stsei ocit e altroi."
4. On the "felure,"see Gilles Deleuze, "Zolaet la flure," Logique du sens 373-86.

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relationbetween an infantand its mother,the Deleuzian fantasiesof desiringmachines

and bodies without organs evoke a world in which neither mortalitynor subjectivity
penetrate.Similarlyfor the animalsin Rilke's poetry.Or when Georg Lukacsimagines
the Weltanschauungof people living in epic Greece. "Forthe questionwhich engenders
the formal answersof the epic is: how can life become essence," he wrote. "And if no
one has ever equalled Homer-nor even approachedhim-for, strictly speaking, his
works alone are epics-it is because he found the answer before the progress of the
humanmind throughhistory had allowed the question to be asked" [30, see also 3233].This is the fantasy of a world in which the essence of humanlife is impartednot
throughdeathbut throughan unverbalizedliving thatstill dominatesandgives meaning
to languageitself in the form of poetry.
For those who study the culturalsignificance of death, the Frenchnineteenthcentury is an unendingfeast day, and across the disciplines its necrophiliais being scrutinized with increasingintensity.The topic is inexhaustible.This issue of Diacritics does
not intend to be comprehensiveor even to give a sense of the range of possibilities.
Instead,the essays gatheredin this volume have been solicited and writtenwithin the
space cleared by fantasizinga "deathotherwise."They have been invited to reflect on
the state of death as a modem construct.Often the lure of a mortal subjectivityhas
proventoo strongto resist, andtherearemoments,even in what follows, when deathis
takenas an ontological absoluteandthe determiningcriterionof meaningfulindividual
experience.This does not mean thatthe essays arefaulty;it indicatesinsteadthe pervasiveness and strengthof the Hegelian model of death as well as the difficulty and the
importanceof the-workthese authorshave undertaken.

Throughthe sheernumberof capitalexecutions it administered,the FrenchRevolution

reacheda historicalsummitand became, at least in its most dramaticand intense moment, the Terror,an almost explicitly death-basedstate. By this I mean the death not
only of the ancien regime,but also, if we are to follow Hegel's interpretation,the death
of the individualas such. The Revolution not only saw the inventionof a generalized
representativegovernment,butalso, accordingto Hegel,realizedthatgovernmentthrough
a practiceof abstraction,in which each particularpersonwas subsumedinto a political
collectivity, or universal. By submittingto and identifying with the general will, the
individualtransformedhim- or herself into an embodimentof that generality.This is
why, for Hegel, the guillotine could never err:the death it delivered could only touch
the individual,who was eitheran enemy of the state (andthereforedeservedto die) or a
memberof it (and had thereforealreadysacrificedhis or her individuality)[355-63].
But we might go fartherand say thatthe individualis abstractedthroughthe very possibility of being represented.Like the paper currency,or signe, which came into use
duringthe period and rapidlyplummetedin value throughoverproduction,the value of
the universalrepresentationof will devaluedthe individuallives thatit was supposedto
signify.5Alienatedfrom itself into a generalrepresentation,the "individualconscious5. One of the most vexing concerns about representativegovernmentwas the need to alienate the authorityof thepeople's willfrom the individualswho were supposedto representit, or, in
otherwords,to maintainan inviolableseparationbetweenthegeneralityand the individualwithin
representationitself. "If the people in a body is the true sovereign,"Marat wrote, "it is to that
body that everythingmust be subordinated;when it cannot exercise sovereignpower by itself, it
exercises it throughits representatives.... Asfor its representatives,theirauthoritymustalways
be limited;otherwise,as absolute mastersover theEmpire,theycould, at theirwill, takeaway the

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ness ...," accordingto Hegel, "putaside its limitation;its purposeis [now] the general
purpose, its language universal law, its work the universal work" [357]. In attaining
citizenship,underthese terms, each person casts off concrete specificity to become a
sign of his or her own particularity.The Subject-citizenis, in this sense, the deathof the
individualhe or she was and, in some vestigial way, continuesto be.
In "DavidPaintingDeath,"DidierMaleuvrereadsJacques-LouisDavid'sDeath of
Marat to show how the "state of death"can be localized in visual art. He reads the
of Marat'snonexistenceinto the materialityof a paintedcanvas,wherethe
"translation"
instant of demise is situated in the fluctuationbetween representation(the image as
what it depicts) and the materialityof the paint and canvas themselves. By referringto
David's otherworks and by drawingon earliertheoreticaltexts in aesthetics,Maleuvre
arguesthatthe noncoincidenceof image and material,the fact thatone registerseither
the pictureor the paint, but not both at the same time, was probablyintendedby the
painteras a visual metaphorfor the noncoincidenceof a person with his or her own
death.
We could arguethatwithin its historicalcontext, the workingthroughof deathand
representationthat Maleuvreidentifies in David's canvas is partof a broaderissue of
representationthat was being workedout simultaneouslyin the inventionof the state.
Marathimself had been especially vocal in calling for executions to protectthe nascent
republic,and it was this vociferousnessthatultimatelyled to his murder.6Accordingto
Maleuvre,the mutualantagonismbetween the specificity of a materialobject and the
image it createsis figuredin the depictionof Marathimself, the championof the guillotine in the service of the state. In the painting, as in the republic itself, as in Hegel's
readingof the Terror,that mutualantagonism,that noncompossibility,is identified as
death.The paintingis, in this sense, a displacementof the guillotine. Or rather,both the
paintingandthe guillotineareworkingthrougha similar,morefundamentalissue about
the relationsamong death, representation,and individualitythat were coeval with the
violent birthof a new state and social order.
Although Maleuvrecarefully nuances his position, it should be noted in passing
that he views death as the groundingof selfhood. "To be a self," he writes, "is to be
mortal,or an entity in whom the concept of limitedness is foremost" [24]. While he
questionswhetherthatlimitednessmust, in fact, be defined by deathand contendsthat
"deathis an instance,ratherthan the blueprint,of our overall awarenessof being limited, that is, of subjectivity,"he will eventually conclude that "it is as self-admittedly
finite beings that we see, and being self-admittedlyfinite means that we are mortal"
[24]. This last propositioneither evacuates the specific meaning of mortalityas the
condition of one who will die or reestablishesan equivalencebetween death and subrights of the citizens, attack the fundamental laws of the State, overturnthe constitution,and
reduce thepeople to servitude"[160].
6. On November10, 1789, Marat wrotein L'amidu peuple: "is thereany comparisonto be
madebetweena small numberof victimswhomthepeople sacrifice tojustice, duringan insurrection, and the innumerablemass of subjects that a despot reducesto abjection,or that he surrenders to his fury, his avarice, his vainglory,his whims? Whatare a few drops of blood that the
populace has shed to recover itsfreedom, in thepresent revolution,next to the torrentsthat have
been spilled by a Tiberius.. ." [178-89]. On December 18, 1790: "Stopwasting time tryingto
imaginemeans of defense;you have but one left: a generalinsurrectionandpopularexecutions..
.. Six monthsago, five or six hundredheads would have been enough to pull you backfrom the
abyss. Today... it may be necessary to cut offfive or six thousand;but even if it were twenty
thousand,there cannot be a moment'shesitation"[183]. And on January30, 1791: "Blindcitizens! Willyou never open your eyes? Six months ago, five hundredsevered heads would have
assuredyour happiness:to save youfrom perishing,you will beforced to cut off perhaps a hundred thousand"[185].

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ject-producinglimitation.This observationdoes not vitiateMaleuvre'sargument,whose

main thrustlies elsewhere, but does indicate the gravitationalpull of death-basedsubjectivity as a means for giving sense to experience,even within argumentsthatostensibly deny it.7
and the Politics of (Im)mortality,"Marie-H6lkneHuet concenIn "Chateaubriand
trates on the authorand statesman'snecrophilic relation to the past. Chateaubriand's
personalconcern to reestablisha legitimate Bourbonmonarchythat he himself recognized to be beyond resuscitationled him, she argues,to identify with the membersof a
historicalregime not as they were in life but as they became in death.And the place of
this afterlife was his writings."History,"she contends,"playedthe role of ghostwriter
his own life preordainedand written from beyond the
of Chateaubriand'sMWmoires,
grave by a ruinedmonarchy"[38]. This living of the past amounted,one could argue,to
living death itself as a state-to living as if one were dead and could experience that
deadness.In actingthis way, Chateaubrianddemonstratedthathe viewed deathnot as a
mere privative;instead,his own experiencesbecame the parametersof a richerunderstandingof mortality,in which demise andnonexistencederivedtheirmeaningfromthe
losses sufferedthroughhis relationsto pastness, caducity,and world history.By conceiving of death in terms of other losses, Chateaubriand'smorbidfascinationallowed
him to imagine mortalitynot as a purefinality,but as a concept whose meaningcomes
from infinitely complex, lived relationsamong past and present.
Allan Stoekl approachesthe connectionsamongstate, individual,and the administrationof mortalitythrougha fictional episode of capitalpunishment.VictorHugo's Le
dernierjour d'un condamnedepicts the judicial/carceralmechanicsand psychological
effects of its first-personnarrator'simpendingexecution, but Stoekl's concern is less
with capitalpunishmentas a means of enforcingstatecontrolthanas an example of the
broaderidea of "closure."Focusing on the parallels between narrativefinitude and
mortalitythat Hugo creates and arguingthatthe novel's ending "contaminates"everything that precedes it, Stoekl offers an extremely suggestive narratologicalmodel for
understandingthe psychological effects of finality on subjective structure.The case in
point is exceptional,in thatHugo's condemnedhero can, not too surprisingly,"thinkof
nothing but death." Still, despite its extremity,the imposed "pathological"state that
Stoekl describes might be considered to be simply an acute manifestationof a more
general social condition, in which society uses deathto enforce norms and structures.
MauriceBlanchot,for one, identifiedthis "extraordinary"
situationas the humancondition itself when he asserted,in a readingof Rilke, that "to the extent thatwe suffer the
perspectiveof a life limitedandmaintainedby boundaries,'we see only death'"[L'espace
litteraire191]. Stoekl's suggestionsthatthis conditionis pathologicaland thattrueclosure is impossible contradictthose who, like Blanchot,would arguethat at bottomit is
the finality of death alone that gives structureand meaningto lived experience.8
Victor Hugo reappearsin Jann Matlock's "Ghostly Politics," which looks to the
seances thatthe authorconductedfor several years in the companyof his intimates.In
exile on the island of Jerseyand broodingover the losses of his daughterand his country,Hugo allowed himself to be initiatedinto the mysteriesof the tables tournantesby
a close friend who was dying of cancer.The spiritistmovement and the table-rapping
7. This attractionleads Maleuvreto assert,for instance: "It is as mortals that we see, and
only mortalssee." His position is similar to Jeff Malpas's,who argues that animals cannot have
a world or possessions because worlds and possessions depend on a sense of subjectivelimitation.Animalscannot have such a subjectivesense, he contends,because they have no awareness
of death. For a critiqueof thatposition, see my article "AfterDeath" in this issue.
8. For examplesof other attemptsto derive subjectivityfrom the narrativefinality of death,
see my article "AfterDeath" in this issue.

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craze thatit inspiredhad swept acrossFrancein the mid-century,and to a certainextent

Hugo was simply caughtup in a fad. But spiritismwas quickly seized upon by political
groups in supportof theirconflicting ideologies. Not only did the dead themselves begin to weigh in on currentsocial andlegislative argumentsandvoice theiropinions,but
they upended previous notions of mortality throughthe very fact of their speaking.
Soon, the vast new perspectiveson life and afterlife that they offered startedto enter
political discourseas criteriaand contexts for making decisions. When deathchanges,
the state too must change. Although Hugo himself was ambivalentabout the value of
the writingsthathis seances producedand forbadethem to be publisheduntil afterhis
own death,Matlockdemonstratesthatthese unusual,and often maligned,texts express
a significantpolitical agenda.
The question of how to read these spectral pages returnsin Suzanne Guerlac's
"PhantomWrites."Like Matlock, she is intriguedby the interpretiveproblems that
these works create. She turnsto MauriceBlanchotas a guide to making sense of them.
"Blanchot,"she writes,"helpsus takethis strangetext seriously,not as transcript,but as
writing"[82]. In her handling,this text of dubiousparentage(is it by the ghosts or is it
by Hugo?) becomes a contemplationof the relation between death and writing, for
when the dead speak,languagebecomes different,or at least reveals itself in new lights.
"It is as if the revolutionof the tomb had turnedlanguageitself into a ghostwriter,"she
argues, "and Hugo saw himself, so to speak, in literature."The seance texts were a
contemplation,as well, of the relationbetweendeathand subjectivity.Hugo questioned
the ghost of Andre Ch6nier,for instance, "aboutpersonal identity and its continuity
acrossthe absolutelimit of death-'have you remainedwhatyou were?'"[74], he asked
the spectral voice. With the help of Blanchot, Guerlac finds in the "transcripts"the
elements of a nexus of death, writing,and self-identitythat would become a dominant
intellectualprogramby themiddleof the followingcentury.Heidegger,Kojeve,Blanchot,
Bataille, and the returnof Hegel all seem foreshadowedin these ghostly documents.
But if Blanchothelps us to read Hugo, the converse is equally true. In the second
half of heressay,Guerlactracesthe developmentof Blanchot'sideology of deaththrough
his own writings.Thatdevelopmentis deeply groundedin a Kojevian-influencedreading of Hegel. To the extent thatliterature,for Blanchot,is gratuitousand "unengaged"
(in a Sartreansense) with the social issues of its particularmoment, it "dies" to the
contingent world of specific concerns and "now implies the immanenceof the absolute." As literature,then, language embodies the force of the negative and becomes
creative activity precisely because it is not engaged in the specificities of a particular
moment. "Hegel,"as Blanchotreads him, "hasenabledthe commutationof subjective
consciousness and language into action"[87]. Guerlacdescribesthis relationbetween
languageand action througha figure of speech: "Artis put to deathand resurrectedas
passionaterelationto the absolute. For Blanchot, death becomes, in a sense, the allegory of this relation.... [D]eath'itself'-literal death-designates precisely thatwhich
consciousness can never grasp from within" [87]. By observing that death functions
allegorically for Blanchot, Guerlacis able to ask whetherit can ever be more than a
figure of speech. Does it make sense to groundfigurativedeathin a purported"reality,"
if thatrealityis unknowable?And if deathis only a figure, why privilege this particular
one?
Guerlac's observationabout figurative language allows us to rereada troubling
passage that she cites from Blanchot's"La litt6ratureet le droit Ala mort."After commentingthatthe words "thiswoman"entail the linguistic annihilationof the woman in
question,Blanchotadds,"if this womanwere not reallycapableof dying... I could not
accomplishthis ideal negation"[P 313]. The reasonfor this can be seen in the way that
deathentersinto the relationbetweenspeakers:"Myspeech is the warningthatdeathis,

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in this very moment, unleashed into the world," he writes, "thatbetween the I who
speaks and the being whom I call on it has suddenlyrearedup: it is between us like the
distance that separatesus," and in this sense, "realdeath is ... alreadypresent in my
language"[P 313]. As the separationbetween speakers,or between wordsandthe realities they designate,deathis the negationthatlanguageeffects. But if language is negative by virtueof its distancedrelationto the "realities"it signifies, as Blanchotargues,it
is hardto understandwhy one shouldtry to derive thatnegativityfrom somethingmore
primordial.And even if one accepts that the term "negativity"must be taken from a
nonlinguisticsource, two problemsarise. First, Blanchot will subsequentlyarguethat
"negationcan only be effected on the basis of the realitythatit negates"[P 316], which
means thatlanguageshould not be the enactmentor even displacementof "real"death,
but insteadits annihilation.Thatis to say thatalthoughBlanchot'sargumentis based on
languagebeing a form of death,it should,by his reasoning,actuallybe the determinate
negationof it-a nondeath.Second, it is unclearwhy linguistic negation,if it is derivative, could not derive from other absences. Why, for instance, should the separation
between me and "this woman"come from death,insteadof the otherway around?
"Deathalone allows me to grasp what I want to reach,"Blanchot writes. "It is in
words as the only possibility of their meaning. Withoutdeath, everythingwould collapse into absurdityand nothingness"[P 313]. The incalculablevalue of Guerlac'sessay is the way in which it leads us to question the validity of that statement.While
Blanchotcontendsthatdeath,as an epistemologicalabsolute,gives languageits meaning, the "transcript"of Hugo's Jersey seances argues otherwise. Its text, accordingto
Guerlac,"at once literalizes death and its foundationalrelationto writing, throughits
claim to be a historicaldocument,a transcript,andat the same time ... trivializesit. The
text itself is too literary,too well structured.It does not appearto take the groundingof
writingby deathquite seriously or absolutelyliterally"[89].
While Guerlac'sarticletends towarda critiqueof mortalityas an epistemological
surety,in "AfterDeath,"I have attemptedto reconsiderits use as an ontological absolute in forming subjectivity.What emerges tangentiallyelsewhere, I have triedto state
explicitly. If for Blanchot,deathgives meaningto language,and for Maleuvreit allows
people to see, therearea host of writers,most notablyMartinHeideggerandAlexandre
Kojeve, who have arguedthat death impartssubjective structure,indeed humanity,to
humanexperience.By examiningthe most compelling articulationsof this proposition
over the last two hundredyears, I contendthatdeathis not an ontological absolute,but
should instead be considered a fiction derived from other experiences of loss, most
significantlythat of otherpeople. Since it is unknowableto me directly,since I cannot
experience it, my death is imaginable only through the deaths of others, despite
Heidegger's assertions to the contrary.Or rather,not even throughtheir deaths, but
from their sheer alterity.Similarly,my death is an awarenessof myself that I can only
have throughthe idea of the otherswho will surviveit, and it is in this sense a blind spot
of my self-knowledge.Death always takes me frombehind,is only reflectedin the eyes
of others.And so, my individualityis not groundedin mortality,but ratherin the experience of those othersandin theirineffabledifferencefromme. It comes fromthe preontological condition thatEmmanuelLevinas has called ethics.
In the final essay of this volume, Alphonso Lingis writes about this relation between others and my own death. In a series of musings, his article thinks through
Heidegger and Hegel by placing their argumentsin the context of daily experiences,
such as compassion, and extraordinaryevents, such as childbirthor killing. He begins
with a question that echoes the existentialist philosopherJos6 FerraterMora: "when
someone with whom we sharedour life dies, do we not feel thatsomethingof ourselves
has died too? In several senses of the word, we die with others"[106]. Unlike Ferrater

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Mora,however,he does not use this premiseas a way to graspan impossibleexperience

of one's own annihilation,but insteadto contextualizedeathwithin a rangeof interpersonal experiences.9Perhapsthe most powerfulgestureof the essay is its refusalto know
death, a position that not only allows Lingis to critique others, such as Socrates and
Heidegger,for their presumptionsto understandwhat death is (the former saw it as a
cure, the latteras nothingness);more significantly,it permitshim to formulatea radically open-endedidea of possibility.Takenin its unknowability,deathrepresentsa different kind of futuritythan is imaginable by either Socrates or Heidegger. "For our
sense of the real futureis not simply the logically possible-what I representnow by
varying the layout of the actual ... ," Lingis argues."Whatis really futureis actually
possible, and the actuallypossible is possibly impossible"[107].
Lingis rejects the Hegelian idea that mortalitycan be harnessedas the negative
force of humanaction and creativity."Death,"he observes, "is stalkingme, and strikes
when it will. This exteriorityof death underminesthe . . . project to appropriatethe
power of death, to make of it my own ecstasy and power" [1081.And in rejectingthis
conception of death as appropriablepower, Lingis also rejects the subjectivitythat it
underwrites."Hegel,"he continues, "assumesthat one lives in orderto become completely self-conscious. And thatin every encounterwith others,they will be treatedas
the means to this self-consciousness.... But a descriptivephenomenologyof human
life and behaviorshows thatself-consciousnessis at best a means for acquiringcertain
skills. One does not live in orderto writeone's autobiography"[109]. By treatingothers
as instrumentsor tools, both Hegel and Heideggermake of my death the basis of subjectivity and humanmeaning.By consideringa "dyingwith others,"on the otherhand,
Lingis is able to imagine a futurityandradicalform of possibilitythatarenot limitedby
a morbidattachmentto death.
And if his article seems to have no end, it is perhapsbecause he has refused to
attemptan ultimateunderstandingof death,has refusedthe impulseto "terminate"death
instead of treatingit as an ongoing issue in life and a living concern. By not ending,
Lingis removes this narrativeand conceptualfinality from death.His articlecannotbe
summarizedas a proposition,and it ends without conclusion. This is an interminable
writingon death, a writingof life.
I would like to thank the contributorsfor their exceptional work and good humor
throughout.
WORKS CITED
Anonymous. La version d'Oxford.Les textes de la Chanson de Roland. Vol. 1. Ed.
Raoul Mortier.Paris:La Geste Francor,1940.
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9. See FerraterMora177-203;for example,"I thereforeagreewithGabrielaMarcel's

contention that the death of a human being, in particular the death of a loved one, cannot be
consideredas a purely externalevent"[177] and "AsRobertMehl has written,the experienceof
another'sdeath 'exhibitsan aspect throughwhich it is convertedinto an experienceof one's own
death,'for 'the Other'spresence is never a qualitythat belongs exclusivelyto him'" [177-78].

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