AWAITING (AT) THE ARRIVAL
Kamis, 19 November 2015
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Although Heidegger, deeply rooted in this tradition, repeats it, he also suggests a remarkable re-articulation of it. Forms of anthropological knowledge supposedly treat death according to culture and history; bio-genetic disciplines presumably treat death according to nature. No matter how necessary and enriching they may be, these forms of knowledge must presuppose a concept of death properly speaking-this is, in sum, what Heidegger says. Only an existential analysis can provide such a concept of death to these forms of knowledge. Heidegger describes this relation of dependence by using the classical idea of order, an order of priority, precedence, and presupposition (vorliegen, voraussetzen), which is also an order of foundation: there is the founding basis of the foundation and the founded structure that presupposes it. The existential interpretation of death (hence, the existential analysis of Dasein) "precedes" (liegt vor) any biology and ontology of life. It also founds (fundiert) any investigation of death--and Heidegger names a series: historiological, biographical, psychological, and ethnological investigations. Any "typology" of the forms of dying and of the modalities according to which demise (Ableben) is experienced (er!ebt) "already presupposes the concept of death" (setzt schon den Begriffdes Todes voraus). This "already" (schon) marks the time of the problematic closure: the field of anthropology (the history and the typology of the forms of demise) can only establish the markers of its problematic field by already, always already, presupposing a concept of death. The existential analysis of Dasein alone can provide this concept-an analysis that is not only the fundamental anthropology presupposed by it, but also the analysis of a Dasein that is not yet determined as human (subject, ego, conscience, person, soul, body, etc.). In order to identify the different ways of living (er!eben) the demise (Ab!eben), that is, the ways of living as such the moment of"leaving life," the moment, in the lived experience (Er!eben) of the passing as a living thing, the passage out of life (Ableben), and in order to speak competently of these modes of passage, of the one who passes or of the other who allows the one to pass or cross, one must already know what death means, and how to recognize death properly speaking. One must already have an understanding or a comprehension (Verstandnis) of what death is for Dasein: an understanding of the word "death" as an understanding of what relates this word to its meaning. This logic of presupposition consists in raising the question of what, already and from the outset, makes possible every statement, every determination, every theme, every project, and every object. In this context, such a logic of presupposition is also a logic of, or a request for, foundation. Indeed,
Heidegger says that the existential interpretation of death precedes, is presupposed by all other discourses on death, but also founds (fondiert) them. Such a request for the foundation or for the condition of possibility often speaks the language of methodology, of "methodic" order ("in good methodology," Heidegger says, the existential analysis comes, in terms of order, before biology, psychology, and other disciplines, which will be discussed in a moment; it is superordinate to them, "methodisch vorgeordnet," p. 248). There is a methodological order here in every sense of the term: (I) an order in the sense of the logic of a whole, an element, or a milieu (in the sense
These two borders blur somewhat and thereby blur the borders of the very concept of death. Aries writes:
"Every corpus was sending me to another one. [Should this be a surprise?] The first goal of my research had lost its ability to motivate me, since other, more essential problems that were taking me to the depths of being were covering it. I could guess that there were relations between the attitude before death [his real theme, which is not death itself, but behavior before demise], in its most common and general aspects, and the variations in the consciousness of the self and of the other, the sense ofthe individual destiny or ofthe large, collective fate. I was thus moving up the stream of history, happy to stumble, on this side, on a border of culture, the burial adsanctos, the border of another world. I had increased the time period beyond the limits allowed the most liberal historical usage." (p. 236, my emphasis)
There would be too much to say, in the time that we have here, about the methodological or theoretico-metaphysical axioms that govern Aries's work. And to point out the limits of these axioms and the limit of his thought about limits is not to denigrate the interest of his work. Consider, for example, his article "Collective Unconscious and Clear Ideas" (in Essais, pp. 236-37), in which, in a way that is both interesting and disappointing, Aries again discusses the "border" and the "limit" (his terms). This time, not only the limit between the biological and the cultural is in question, but also "classificatory hypotheses" and what is calmly called a "theoretical and speculative problem!", with an exclamation mark, and put off for later:
"I tend to underestimate the influence of religious and cultural systems: neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment appears as a decisive landmark in my periodization. The Church interests me more insofar as it indicates and reveals unnoticed feelings than as a pressure group that would have governed feelings at their sources. According to me, the large drifting movements that put beliefs and attitudes into motion-attitudes before life and death-depend on more secret, more hidden motors, at the limit of the biological and the cultural, that is, at the limit of the "collective unconscious." [The term is underlined Aries, who thinks that here he can use all these terms and concepts beliefs, attitudes, life, death, limit, biological and cultural, collective unconscious-as if their intelligibility was guaranteed and did not l cover up abysses or, if the historian finds the following hypothesis more reassuring, did not cover up mountains of archives that up to this day and for some time still to come have not been classified and are unclassifiable.] It animates elementary psychological forces, such as self-consciousness, desire to be more, or, on the contrary, sense of collective sociability, and so on."
Then, alluding to a debate that opposes him to Michel Vovelle, the other well-known historian of death:
"Vovelle also acknowledges the importance of the collective unconscious, but, AfIn fact, it ["the theoretical or speculative problem!"] determines the historian's practice, for how is it possible to distinguish things and then to organize them without a classificatory hypothesis? And how is it possible to establish such an overall conception, whether it is acknowledged or not?" (All quotes are from p. 237).
This "overall conception" obscurely predetermines at least two things. (I) On the one hand, it predetermines everything that stems from the delimitation of the problematic field: Is this "history"? (history of what?) of "ideas and attitudes," as is said? (what are those?), of the "collective unconscious"? (what is that?), of "self-consciousness"? (what is that?), of the "effects" (on social practices, of science and technology? is this psychoanalysis? psychoanalysis of what?) (2) On the other hand, in the hypothesis where it would be history, and since it presents itself under this name, this so-called "overall conception" obscurely, and in a blurred or blurring way, predetermines the intra-historical delimitations, that is, the periodization with which Aries admits having difficulty, even though he is more modest than Thomas and limits himself to the Christian West from the Middle Ages to the present. Recall that he admits having a lot of difficulty with certain borders of periodization, but in fact his difficulties are much greater than he admits. Sometimes he warns against anachronism (for example, Essais, p. 17), but on a number of occasions he must mention "anachronistic" occurrences, that is, significant occurrences that do not belong to the time within which the historian both thinks he can inscribe them and assumes that they can be inscribed. One even has the impression that a certain anachronism is the rule with respect to these delimitations. "Life will have been so short": this means that one always dies in an untimely way [a contretemps]. The moment of death no longer belongs to its time [son temps], at least by a certain aspect that, nonetheless, does not fail to historicize itself and perhaps provide the occasion of the history with which historians deal. One should ask why this anachronism insists with respect to death. In particular, I refer to what Aries judges to be "close to modern eroticism" (p. 85), even though it happened before modernity, and also to what describes "The death of the libertine," which is the title of a chapter in L'Homme devant fa mort (II: 24-25). Discussing arts of dying, which are as much, and indeed first of all, ways of living (such as Bellarmin's de arte bene moriendi), Aries insists upon the recurrence of ideas that announce the Enlightenment before the Enlightenment and that, no matter how "anachronistic" or "exceptional" they may seem, are nonetheless recurrent, "verified and confirmed" by testimonies. In order not to multiply the examples, I am thinking above all of Sade's extraordinary will. It would deserve an analysis that I must unfortunately leave aside. This will, "written with seriousness and conviction," Aries notes, is defined by the historian as "both utopian for the eighteenth century and already anachronistic for the year 1806" (What is this category, the "already anachronistic"?) It is "utopian" and "already anachronistic" because it "testifies to a complete confusion of two opinions that were up to then dose to one another, but separate: the contempt for the body and the radical refusal of immortality." Faced with the internal contradictions of this will which, as Aries himself notes, requests both that one monumentalize the traces of the effacement that it calls for and that one carry out a ceremony of the absence of ceremony, the historian never wonders whether the anachronism and the internal aporia of this may not signify something other than just the untimeliness of an eccentric who is mistaken about the time he lives in.
As Thomas will also do, just as he dismissed the "theoretical," the "speculative," or the "overall conception," Aries does not hesitate to call "metaphysical" everything that the historian must respectfully leave aside and assume accessible to common sense or universal experience. Metaphysical the metaphysical nature of death: such would be the "deepest reason" for the problems of limits and borders encountered by the historian. But instead of asking himself what "metaphysical" means here and without stopping at these "deep reasons," Aries courageously pursues his inquiry and describes what he dares to call the "slowness of his progression," namely, the fact that he devoted "fifteen years" to this task. Fifteen years! Fifteen years seem enormous to the historian for writing a history o[,death in the West from the Middle Ages to the present; according to him, this slowness is ultimately explained by the metaphysical obscurity of death, by the "metaphysical nature of death":
"It may be surprising that it took me so long to arrive here: fifteen years of research and meditation on the attitudes before death in our Western Christian cultures! The slowness ofmy progression must not be attributed only to material obstacles, to a lack of time, or to a weariness in front of the immensity of the task. There is another, deeper reason, which has to do with the metaphysical nature of death: the field of my research moved backward when I thought I was reaching its limits, and I was each time pushed further, both upstream and downstream in relation to my starting point (p. 12)."
Why underline Aries's term "metaphysical"? At least he should be credited for not citing Heidegger, whereas, we recall, Thomas wildly attributes to Heidegger what he calls the "metaphysical truth" of a sentence that is not even Heidegger's. Let us return briefly to the Heideggerian delimitation of problematic closures. What disciplines or problematics, according to Heidegger, do not elucidate their presupposed foundations, the very foundations of which the existential analysis of death must remind them? They include not only the anthropological sciences, ethnology, psychology, history-in short all the theories dealing with a culture of death. Metaphysics and theology are also included there. Indeed, for methodological reasons, Heidegger distinguishes the existential analysis of death, which legitimately comes first, from any other discourse on death-discourses from biological or anthropological disciplines, to be sure, but also from metaphysics or theology. With respect to all these problematics, the existential analysis is both anterior and free, first and neutral. Anthropological knowledge can be psychologies or ethnologies of death. In the best hypothesis, psychology (and Heidegger would probably include here psychoanalysis, rightly or wrongly) can be a psychology of the dying, hence of the living, of whoever is still on this side of death, rather than a
discourse on dying. (What Heidegger then notes could easily turn itself against the existential analysis of death. Dasein cannot testify to death either; it is also as one living or dying that it attests to being-for-death.) At that point, it remains that, in Heidegger's view, if so-called psychology remains a psychology of life, that is, of the dying rather than of dying, this merely reflects, like a reflection (Widerschein), the fact that Dasein does not die or does not properly die (nicht eigentlich stirbt) in the course of an experience, of a living, or of a lived experience as one sometimes says somewhat ridiculously in order to translate Erleben, Erlebnis. Dasein never has the Erleben of its own demise (Ableben), or of its own death (Sterben). This, however, does not mean that it cannot testify, according to a concept of testimony (Bezeugung) that should be , questioned here because it plays a major role in Being and Time and because it is neither simply phenomenological nor free of all phenomenology, at least if Erlebnis is the measure of the phenomenological.
According to a similar outline, what holds for psychology, psychoanalysis, even phenomenological psychology also holds for ethnology, a discipline specializing in the study of the cultural borders separating the relation to death, to murder, to the sacrifice of life, to mourning, and to burial. Heidegger devotes only one sentence to it, in a paragraph that returns to the presuppositions, and therefore to the problematic closure, of any "typology" of "dying." After having mentioned just as briefly the psychology of the dying, he notes that the same holds for the study of the relation to death "among primitive peoples" (bei den Primitiven), and also for the study of their attitudes, magic, and cults. This primarily (primar) sheds light on the fact that the primitives in question have access to Dasein, to death for Dasein, and to an understanding of Dasein (Daseinsverstandnis) that also requires, therefore, an existential analysis and a concept that corresponds to this understanding. There is therefore no limit to the universality of this analysis. Even if one considered it as an anthropology, which it is not, at least it would be in this respect general or fundamental, because it is universal.
The same prqblematic closure and therefore the same methodological presuppositions concern the "metaphysics of death" (Metaphysik des Todes). The existential analysis of death is also anterior, neutral, and independent with regard to all the questions and all the answers pertaining to a metaphysics of death: the questions and answers that concern survival, immortality, the beyond (das Jenseits), or the other side of this side (das Diesseits) , that is, what one should do or think down here before death (ethical, juridical, and political norms). Since this figure of the border and of the line between the here and the beyond [l'en-deraet l'au-delil] is of particular interest to us here, we should note that, after having excluded from the existential analysis all considerations about the beyond and the here (the "on this side," das Diesseits, which must not be translated by the Platonic or Christian "down here"), arguing that they are founded, dependent, and derivative with regard to the existential analysis, Heidegger nevertheless stresses that the existential analysis stands, not in "immanence," as Martineau, losing the thread, writes in his translation, but purely on this side: it is rein "diesseitig. "It is on this on the side of Dasein and of its here, which is our here, that the oppositions between here and over there, this side and beyond, can be distinguished. In the same direction, one could say that it is by always starting from the idiomatic hereness of my language, my culture, and my belongings that I relate myself to the difference of the over there. To wonder what there is after death only has meaning and is legitimately possible (mit Sinn und Recht)-it is only "methodologically certain" (methodisch sicher: Heidegger rarely claims methodological order " and derivative legitimacy as often as in these pages)-if one has elaborated a concept ofthe ontological essence of death and if one remembers that the possibility of being of every Dasein is engaged, invested, and inscribed in the phenomenon of death (in dieses hereinsteht). I do not have time to discuss further this methodologism, which poses as its axiom that one can only start from here, from this side: the best point of departure is the point from which we can start and that is always here. Where does one start from, if not from here? Such is the thrust of a question that may not be as invincible as it looks. This question can be addressed to the same axiomatic that, at the beginning of Being and Time (§§2, 3, and 4), justifies "the ontico-ontological priority [Der ontisch-ontologische Vorrang]" of Dasein, the "exemplary" point of departure of the existential analysis in Dasein, as this particular power of questioning that we are, we here, we who can pre-understand being, comprehend it pre-ontologically, wait for each other [nous attendre], expect [nous attendre-a], listen to and understand each other [nous entendre]. Concerning the existential analysis of death (§49), the same decision characterizes the point of departure: the decision is taken here. Heidegger's determination seems to be both decisive, that is to say, incisive, taking itself to be immediately justified by the very fact that the decision is made here concerning the here, and nonetheless rather anxious. Indeed, Heidegger allows something .undecided to remain suspended as to whether the point of departure is "on this side" and not on that side of a possible border. For, perhaps in a form of avowal, he then declares: "Whether such a question is a possible theoretical question [theoretische is underlined] at all must remain undecided here [bleibe hier unentschieden]." He does not use the indicative: this remains undecided (bleibt unentschieden). Instead, by another decision whose performative incision must remain still undisputable and undisputed (let us rather say, irrecusable or uncontested, for what is involved is a matter of testimony and not of proof), he uses the subjunctive: "that it remain undecided, must remain undecided" (subjunctive, bleibe unentschieden, and "here," bleibe hier unentschieden). The theoretical question concerning the here, the "this side" as point of departure must remain here, on this side, undecided, that is to say, decided without any theoretical question, before any theoretical question: without proof. It must remain this way because one cannot do otherwise, it is necessary; and it must remain this way because, as soon as one cannot do otherwise, one must do it this way, it is better to do it this way: here, in any case. The theoretical question can only be raised afterwards, and its nature can only be speculative, not phenomenological. Such is the authoritative conclusion of the paragraph: "Die diesseitige ontologische Interpretation des Todes liegt vor jeder ontisch-jenseitigen Spekulation"; "insofar as it operates on this side [citra, intra, on this side of the border: diesseitige] the ontological interpretation of death precedes all ontical speculation operating beyond, on the other side [as ultra, meta, trans]."
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