FINIS
Kamis, 19 November 2015
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"Limits
of truth”, with the prudence of quotation marks, is of course a citation. A
concession to the times: today one would scarcely risk putting forth such a
disquieting phrase without sheltering oneself behind some kind of paternity. In
this case, Diderot's authority will appear all the more reassuring since he
seems to denounce a "general defect”, in particular that of "letting
oneself be carried beyond the limits of truth”.
How
can one cross the borders of truth? And what "defect" would this
betray, what "general defect"?
Crossing
this strange border and "letting oneself be carried beyond
the limits of truth" must be possible, indeed inevitable, in order for
such a defect to exceed the singular cases, and thereby spread
its contagion to the point of becoming "general”.
What
does "beyond" mean in this case? By itself, the expression "limits
of truth" can certainly be understood---and this would be an indication---as
the fact that the truth is precisely limited, finite, and
confined within its borders. In sum, the truth is not everything, one would
then say, for there is more, something else or something better: truth is
finite [finie]. Or worse: truth, it's finished [c'est fini].
However, by itself, the same expression can signify---and this time it
would not be an indication but the law of a negative prescription---that
the limits of truth are borders that must not be exceeded. In both these
cases it remains that a certain border crossing does not seem impossible as
soon as truth is confined. As soon as truth is a limit or has limits, its own,
and assuming that it knows some limits, as the expression goes, truth would be
a certain relation to what terminates or determines it.
How
would Diderot account for this passage beyond truth, a passage that is
certainly illegitimate, but so often repeated or deadly, by defect, a
"general defect"? Most of all, in what name does he sometimes ask to
be pardoned? For, in a kind of
challenge, Diderot asks to be pardoned. In sum, he provokes us to think what the
pardon can be when it touches upon the limits of truth. Is it a pardon among
others? And why, in this transgression of truth, would death be part of the
game?
Diderot
asks pardon for Seneca, more precisely for the author of De brevitate
vitae (whose reading he is right to recommend, from the first
word to the last, despite the brev'ity of life that will have been so short, in
any case). In his Essai sur fa vie de Seneque Ie philosophe, Diderot
pretends to contend with the philosopher. In truth, he points his accusing
finger back toward himself, Diderot, and toward what he calls autobiographico
more, "the story of my life”. While pretending to accuse
Seneca, for whom he apparently demands pardon, Diderot in truth asks pardon for
himself, from
This detect of letting oneself be carried by the
interest of the cause that one is defending beyond the limits of truth is such
a general defect that Seneca must sometimes be pardoned for it.
I did not read the third chapter [of De
brevitate vitae] without blushing: it is the story of my life. Happy is he
who does not depart convinced that he has lived only a very small part of his
life!
Diderot
thus implies, in a sigh, something that he does not confide in the open, as if he
had to address such a universal complaint in secret. One could use the future anterior to translate the time of this
murmuring: "Ah! how short life will have been!” Then he concludes:
This treatise is beautiful. I recommend its
reading to all men, but above all to those who are inclined toward perfection
in the fine arts. They will learn here how little they have worked, and that
the mediocrity of all kinds of productions should be attributed just as often
to the loss of time as to the lack of talent.
Now
if, aroused by curiosity, we reread this chapter of De fa brievete de fa vie,
which made Diderot blush because he reflected in advance upon "the
story of my life”, what would we find? Well, we would discover that this
discourse on death also contains, among so many other things, a rhetoric
of borders, a lesson in wisdom concerning the lines that delimit
the right of absolute property, the right of property to our own life, the
proper of our existence, in sum, a treatise about the tracing of traits as the
borderly edges of what in sum belongs to us [nous
revient], belonging as much to us as we properly belong to it.
What
about borders with respect to death? About borders of truth and borders of property?
We are going to wander about in the neighborhood of this question. Between
Diderot and Seneca, what can, first of all, be at stake is knowing what the
property of "my life" is, and who could be its "master"; it
is also knowing whether to give is something other than to
waste, that is, whether "to give one's life by sharing
it" is in sum something other than "wasting one's time”. Wasting one's
time would amount to wasting the only good of which one has the right to
be avaricious and jealous, the unique and property itself, the unique property
that "one would take pride in guarding jealously”. What is therefore in
question is to think the very principle of jealousy as the primitive passion
for property and as the concern for the proper, for the proper possibility, in
question for everyone, of his existence. It is a matter of thinking the very
and only thing to which one can testify. It is as if one could first be---or
not be---jealous of oneself, jealous to the point of dying [crever]. Thus,
according to Seneca, there would be a property, a right of property to one's
own life. In sum, the border (finis) of this property would be
more essential, more originary, and more proper than those of any other
territory in the world. As Seneca says, one is never surprised enough by
a certain "blindness of human intelligence" with respect to these
borders (fines) and to these ends. Of what end (finis) does
one mean to speak of here? And why does this end always arrive early?
Prematurely? Immaturely?
1. Men do not suffer anyone to seize their estates,
and if there is even the slightest dispute about the limit of their lands [fines:
si exigua contentio de modo finium: it is indeed a question of tracing and negotiating
(traiter) the limits, de finibus], they rush to
stones and arms; yet, they let others trespass upon their own life [in vitam
suam] nay, they themselves even lead in those [ipsi etiam]
who will eventually possess it. No one is to be found who is willing to share his money, yet to
how many does each one of us give one's life by sharing it! In guarding their
fortune [in continendo patrimonio] men are often closefisted, yet, when
it comes to the matter of wasting
time, they show themselves most prodigal of the only thing that one would take
pride in guarding jealously [as another French translation puts it, and as the
English translation by Basore also puts it, "the case of the one thing in which
it is right to be miserly": in eo cujus unius honesta avaritia est].
2. And so I should like to lay hold upon someone
from the company of older men and say: "I see that you have reached the
farthest limit of human life [ad ultimum aetatis humanae] , you are
pressing hard upon your hundredth year, or are even beyond it. Come now, recall
your life ..., look back in memory and consider ... how little of yourself was
left to you: you will perceive that you are dying before your season [quam
exiguum tibi de tuo relictum sit: intelleges te immaturum mori].
This
exhortation is addressed to a centenary, and virtually to anyone who finds
himself at a major turning point in life, a day of some fearsome birthday. But
after having wondered, in sum, why man---and not the animal---always dies
before his time, while also understanding that he dies immaturus,
immaturely and prematurely, Seneca describes the absolute imminence, the
imminence of death at every instant. This imminence of a disappearance that is by
essence premature seals the union of the possible and the impossible, of fear
and desire, and of mortality and immortality, in being-to-death.
What
does he conclude from this? That to put off until later, to defer (diffirre),
and above all to defer wisdom, wise resolutions, is to deny one's condition
as mortal. One then gives in to forgetting and to distraction; one dissimulates
to oneself being-to-death:
You live as if you were destined to live forever,
no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already
gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant
supply, so all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is
perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of
immortals.... What foolish forgetfulness of mortality [Quae tam stulta
mortalitatis obliviol to defer [diffirre] wise resolutions [sana consilia] to
the fiftieth or sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which
few have attained.
What
should be understood here by the end?
In his De finibus, Cicero is, as always, attentive to the crossing of borders between languages, Greek and Latin. He is careful to justify his translations, whose stakes he no doubt assesses. That is not all. What does the author of Libellus de optima genera oratorum also do, he who was one of the first to give advice to translators (notably to avoid the literality of verbum pro verbo)? He goes so fur as to worry about crossing the borders of language, thereby increasing his own anxiety about the translation of the word for border, precisely. He explains what he translates by the end:
Sends enim, credo, me iam diu, quod tetos
Graeci dicunt, id dicere tum extremum, tum ultimum, tum summum; licebit edam finem
pro extremo aut ultimo dicere: You see, I believe, what the Greeks call telos;
for a long time already I have called it at times the extreme, at times the
ultimate, and at other times the supreme; instead of extreme or ultimate, one
can even call it end (3:26; my emphasis).
In
order to begin, again, even before an introduction, by the end---since
we are convoked to the crossing of borders by the end, that is,
by the ends or confines (finis is therefore the term, the edge, the
limit, the border, most often that of a territory and of a country)---let us
suppose that I now have a few sentences at my disposal. They can be negative,
affirmative, or interrogative. Let us suppose that,
while having these sentences at my disposal, I dispose them among us.
Among us so as to share them. To share them with you, as a common
good or a number shared in confidence, in sum, a password. Or else to share and
unshare them among themselves; or; finally, in order that they, in turn, share
us and perhaps separate us.
Let
us consider, for example, this negative sentence: "death has no
border”. Or else, let us consider one of these affirmations, which all imply
something completely different: "death is a border”, "according
to an almost universal figure, death is represented as the crossing of a
border, a voyage between the here and the beyond, with or without a ferryman,
with or without a barge, with or without elevation, toward this or that place
beyond the grave”. Here, now, is an interrogation: "Can death be reduced
to some line crossing, to a departure, to a separation, to a step, and
therefore to a decease?" And, finally, here is a proposition
that could be called interro-denegative: "Is not death, like decease, the
crossing of a border, that is, a trespassing on death [un trepas], an
overstepping or a transgression (transire, "sic transit”,
etc.)?"
You
have noticed that all these propositions, whatever their modality, involve a
certain pas [step, not].
II y va d'un certain pas. [It involves a certain step/not; he goes along at
a certain pace.]
Does
not this very sentence itself, ily va dun certain pas, belong to the
French language? Both effectively and legitimately? Belonging to the French
language, it would also testify to that language. It y va d'un certain pas: indeed,
this speaks for itself. What can it mean?
First, perhaps, that this incipit, il y va d'un certain pas---which could just as well immobilize itself like a monument and fix the "here lies" of a word, the pas of a recumbent corpse---is not only a part of the body of the French language, a member, an object or a subject, something or someone that would belong to the French language as a part belongs to a whole, an element in a class or in an ensemble. Insofar as it speaks, this sentence---it y va d'un certain pas---would also testify to its belonging. The event of this attestation
would testify not only to the enigma of what testifying means, that is, to the fact that the testimony of belonging does not simply belong to the ensemble of which it testifies, but also, consequently, that belonging to a language is undoubtedly not comparable to any other mode of inclusion: for example, to limit ourselves to a few elements, belonging to a language does not compare, at first sight, with inclusion in the space of citizenship or nationality; natural, historical, or political borders; geography or geo-politics; soil, blood, or social class. As soon as these totalities are over determined, or rather contaminated, by the events of language (let us say instead, by the events of the mark), which they all just as necessarily imply, they, in turn, are no longer thoroughly what they are or what one thinks they are, that is, they are no longer identical to themselves, hence no longer simply identifiable and to that extent no longer determinable. Such totalities therefore no longer authorize simple inclusions of a part in the whole. For this pas involves the line that terminates all determination, the final or definitional line---peras this time rather than telos. And peras is precisely what Cicero could also have translated by finis. The Greek word perasterm (here, a synonym of the Greek word terma), end or limit, extremity---puts us also on the path of peran, which means "beyond”, on the other side, and even vis-a-vis. It also puts us on the path of perao: I penetrate (Aeschylus, for example, says: perao a place or a country, eis khoran), I traverse by penetrating, I cross through, I cross over life's term, terma tou biou, for example. Recall the very last words, indeed the ending, of Sophocles' Oedipus the King. At that point the chorus addresses the people, the inhabitants of the country, the enoikoi, those who live at the heart of the fatherland (O patras Thebes enoikoi). Speaking of Oedipus' last day, before his death [trepas], the chorus tells them at the end of the story: "Look upon that last day always [ten teteutaian emeran]. Count no mortal happy [olbizein] till he has passed the final limit of his life [prin an terma tou biou perasei] secure from pain [meden algeinon pathon]”. I cannot consider myself happy, or even believe myself to have been happy, before having crossed, passed, and surpassed the last instant of my own life, even if up to that point I have been happy in a life that will have been, in any case, so short. What, then, is it to cross the ultimate border? What is it to pass the term of one's life (terma tou biou)? Is it possible? Who has ever done it and who can testify to it? The "I enter”, crossing the threshold, this "I pass" (perao) puts us on the path, if I may say, of the aporos or of the aporia: the difficult or the impracticable, here the impossible, passage, the refused, denied, or prohibited passage, indeed the non-passage, which can in fact be something else, the event of a coming or of a future advent [evenement de venue ou d'avenir], which no longer has the form of the movement that consists in passing, traversing, or transiting. It would be the "coming to pass" of an event that would no longer have the form or the appearance of a pas: in sum, a coming without pas.
II y va d'un certain pas: all these words and each
of these enunciations would therefore belong, hypothetically and on account of this
clause of non belonging that we have just noted, to the French language. Legitimately
and effectively, such a sentence testifies to this belonging; it says in that's
French. Just as it should be.
At
Cerisy-Ia-Salle what is said just as it should be belongs
to the French language. Here it is necessary to speak French. French makes the
law. And since this law should also be a law of hospitality---the first
and simple, but in truth multiple, reason for this
is that our hosts at Cerisy are artists in hospitality, but it is also that the
theme of this conference is fundamentally the very secret of the duty of hospitality
or of hospitality as the essence of culture, and finally it is also that the
first duty of the host (in the double sense that the French hote
has of guest and host [in English
in the original]) is to pay attention [payer quelque attention], as
some here would say, and to pay homage or tribute to linguistic difference---I therefore
thought I had to begin with an untranslatable sentence, getting myself all tied
up already in Greek and in Latin. Others would say I had to begin with one of
those passwords that one should not overuse. One would gain time-for life will
have been so short-if one stopped speaking enigmatically or in shibboleths. Unless,
of course, the password also allows one to gain time.
We
can receive this already untranslatable sentence, ily
va dun certain pas, in more than one way. From the very first
moment, the body of its statement, pollakos legomenon, becomes
plural. At least, it trembles in an unstable multiplicity as long as there is
no context to stop us. In our starting point, however, we will dogmatically begin
with the axiom according to which no context is absolutely saturable or
saturating. No context can determine meaning to the point of exhaustiveness.
Therefore the context neither produces nor guarantees impassable borders,
thresholds that no step could pass [trespasser], trespass [in
English in the original], as our anglophone friends would say. By recalling
that this sentence, il y va d'un certain pas, is untranslatable, I am
thinking not only of translatability into another language or into the other's
language. For any translation into a non-French language would lose something of
its potential multiplicity. And if one measures untranslatability, or rather
the essential incompleteness of translating, against this remainder, well, then
a similar border already passes between the several
versions or interpretations of the same sentence in French. The shibboleth
effect operates within, if one may still say so, the French
language.
For
example, and to limit myself to just two possibilities, first of all one
can understand it, that is, one can paraphrase it in this way: he is going
there at a certain pace [ily va d'un certain pas], that is to say,
someone, the other, you or me, a man or a walking animal, in the masculine or
the neuter, goes somewhere with a certain gait. Indeed, one will say: look, he
is headed at a certain pace [il y va d’un certain pas], he is going
there (to town, to work, to combat, to bed---that is to say, to dream, to love,
to die) with a certain gait [pas]. Here the third person pronoun
"he" [il] has the grammatical value
of a masculine personal subject.
But,
secondly, one can also understand and paraphrase the same sentence,
il y va d'un certain pas, in another way: what is concerned---neuter and
impersonal subject---what one is talking about here, is the question of the
step, the gait, the pace, the rhythm, the passage, or the traversal (which,
moreover, happens to be the theme of the conference).
Thirdly and finally, this time in inaudible quotation marks or italics,
one can also mention a mark of negation, by citing it: a certain
"not" [pas] (no, not, nicht, kein).
This border of translation does not pass among various languages. It separates translation from itself, it separates translatability within one and the same language. A certain pragmatics thus inscribes this border in the very inside of the so-called French language. Like any pragmatics, it takes into consideration gestural operations and contextual marks that are not all and thoroughly discursive. Such is the shibboleth effect: it always exceeds meaning and the pure discursivity of meaning.
Babelization
does not therefore wait for the multiplicity of languages. The identity of a
language can only affirm itself as identity to itself by opening itself to the
hospitality of a difference from itself or of a difference with itself
Condition of the self, such a difference from and with
itself would then be its very thing, the pragma of its
pragmatics: the stranger at home, the invited or the one who is called. The at
home [chez-soi] as the host's gift recalls a being at
home [chez-soi] (being at home, homely, heimisch, heimlich)
that is given by a hospitality more ancient than the inhabitant himself. As
though the inhabitant himself were always staying in the inhabitant's home, the
one who invites and receives truly begins by receiving hospitality from the
guest to whom he thinks he is giving hospitality. It is as if in truth he were
received by the one he thinks he is receiving. Wouldn't the consequences of this
be infinite? What does receiving amount to? Such an infinity would then be lost
in the abyss of receiving, of reception, or of the receptacle, the abyss of that
endekhomenon whose enigma cuts into the entire meditation
of Timaeus concerning the address of the Khora (eis khoran). Endekhomai
means to take upon oneself, in oneself, at home, with oneself, to receive,
welcome, accept, and admit something other than oneself, the other than oneself.
One can take it as a certain experience of hospitality, as the crossing of the
threshold by the guest who must be at once called, desired, and expected, but
also always free to come or not to come. It is indeed a question of admitting,
accepting, and inviting. But let us not forget that in the passive or
impersonal sense (endekhetai), the same verb names that which is
acceptable, admissible, permitted, and, more generally, possible, the contrary
of the "it is not permitted”, "it is not necessary to”, "it is
necessary not to”, or "it is not possible" (e.g., to cross the
"limits of truth"). Endekhomenos means: insofar
as it is possible. Indeed, concerning the threshold of death, we are engaged
here toward a certain possibility of the impossible.
The
crossing of borders always announces itself according to the movement of a
certain step [pas]---and of the step that crosses a line. An
indivisible line. And one always assumes the institution of such an
indivisibility. Customs, police, visa or passport, passenger identification---all
of that is established upon this institution of the indivisible, the
institution therefore of the step that is related to it, whether
the step crosses it or not. Consequently, where the figure of the step is
refused to intuition, where the identity or indivisibility of a line (finis or
peras) is compromised, the identity to oneself and therefore the
possible identification of an intangible edge---the crossing of the line---becomes
a problem. There is a problem as soon
as the edge---line is threatened. And it is threatened from its first tracing.
This tracing can only institute the line by dividing it intrinsically into two
sides. There is a problem as soon as this intrinsic
division divides the relation to itself of the border and therefore divides the
being-one-self of anything.
PROBLEM: I choose the word problem deliberately for two
reasons.
1.
First, to sacrifice a little bit more to Greek and to the experience of
translation: in sum, problema can signify projection
or protection, that which one poses or throws in front
of oneself, either as the projection of a project, of a task to accomplish, or
as the protection created by a substitute, a prosthesis that we put forth in order
to represent, replace, shelter, or dissimulate ourselves, or so as to hide
something unavowable---like a shield (problema also means shield,
clothing as barrier or guard-barrier) behind which one guards oneself in
secret or in shelter in case of danger.
Every border is problematic in these two senses.
2.
I keep the word problem for another reason: so as to put this word in
tension with another Greek word, aporia, which I chose a long time ago
as a title for this occasion, without really knowing where I was going, except
that I knew what was going to be at stake in this word was the "not
knowing where to go”. It had to be a matter of [il devait y aller du]
the non-passage, or rather from the experience of the non-passage, the
experience of what happens [se passe] and is fascinating [passionne]
in this non-passage, paralyzing us in this separation in a way that is not
necessarily negative: before a door, a threshold, a border, a line, or simply
the edge or the approach of the other as such. It should be a matter of [devrait
y aller du] what, in sum, appears to block our way or to separate us in the
very place where it would no longer be possible to constitute a problem,
a project, or a projection, that is, at the point where the very project or
the problematic task becomes impossible and where we are exposed, absolutely
without protection, without problem, and without prosthesis, without possible
substitution, singularly exposed in our absolute and absolutely naked
uniqueness, that is to say, disarmed, delivered to the other, incapable even of
sheltering ourselves behind what could still protect the interiority of a
secret. There, in sum, in this place of aporia, there is no longer any problem.Not
that, alas or fortunately, the solutions have been given, but because one could
no longer even find a problem that would constitute itself and that one would
keep in front of oneself, as a presentable object or project, as a protective
representative or a prosthetic substitute, as some kind of border still to
cross or behind which to protect oneself.
I
gave in to the word aporias, in the plural, without really
knowing where I was going and if something would come to pass, allowing me to
pass with it, except that I recalled that, for many years now, the old,
worn-out Greek term aporia, this tired word of philosophy
and of logic, has often imposed itself upon me, and recently it has done so
even more often. Thus, I speak here in memory of this word, as of someone with
whom I would have lived a long time, even though in this case one cannot speak
of a decision or a contract. It happened in a number of different contexts, but
with a formalizable regularity about which I would like to say a few words
before attempting to go---further, closer, or elsewhere. I would certainly not
want to impose upon you a laborious or self indulgent return to certain
trajectories or impasses of the past. Rather, I would like to situate, from
very far away and very high up, in the most abstract way, in a few sentences,
and in the form of an index or a long note at the bottom of the page, the places
of aporia in which I have found myself, let us say, regularly tied up, indeed, paralyzed.
I was then trying to move not against or out of the impasse but, in another
way, according to another thinking of the aporia, one
perhaps more enduring. It is the obscure way of this "according to the
aporia" that I will try to determine today. And I hope that the index I
just mentioned will help situate my discourse better.
The.word
"aporia" appears in person in Aristotle's famous text, Physics
IV (217b), which reconstitutes the aporia of time dia ton exoterikon
logon. Allow me to recall the short text that, twenty-five years
ago, I devoted to a note on time in Being and Time ("Ousia and
Gramme: Note on a Note from Beingand Time”, in Margins of Philosophy):
already dealing with Heidegger, as I shall also do today, but in a
different way, this short text treated the question of the present, of presence
and of the presentation of the present, of time, of being, and above all of
non-being, more precisely of a certain impossibility as nonviability, as
non-track or barred path. It concerns the impossible or the impracticable. (Diaporeo
is Aristotle's term here; it means ''I'm stuck [dans l'embarras],
I cannot get out, I'm helpless”.) Therefore, for example---and it is more
than just one example among others---it is impossible to determine time both as
entity and as nonentity. And with the
motif of the nonentity, or of nothingness, the motif of death is never very far
away. (Even though Levinas, in a fundamental debate, reproaches Heidegger, as well
as an entire tradition, for wrongly thinking death, in its very essence and in
the first place, as annihilation.) The now is and is not what it is. More
precisely, it only "scarcely" (amudros) is what it is.
Insofar as it has been, it no longer is. But insofar as it will be, as future
to come or as death---which will be my themes today---it is not yet. By
insisting upon the fact that "the aporetic is an exoteric" and that
Aristotle, "while acknowledging that this argument clarifies nothing
(2I8a)," "repeats its aporia without deconstructing it" (p. 50),
I was then trying to demonstrate, thereby going in the direction of Heidegger,
that the philosophical tradition, in particular from Kant to Hegel, only inherited
this aporetic: "the Aristotelian aporia is understood, thought, and
assimilated into that which is properly dialectical. It
suffices--and it is necessary---to take things in the other sense and from the
other side in order to conclude that the Hegelian dialectic is but the
repetition, the paraphrastic reedition of an exoteric aporia, the brilliant
formulation of a vulgar paradox" (p. 43). But instead of stopping with a mere
confirmation of the Heideggerian diagnosis, which indeed sees in the whole
tradition, from Aristotle to Hegel, a hegemony of the vulgar concept of time
insofar as it privileges the now (nun, Jetzt) , I oriented this
very confirmation toward another suggestion, even while supporting it. Allow me
to recall it because I may make a similar, albeit different, gesture today on
the subject of death according to Heidegger. The simple question from which I
was trying to draw the consequences (and from which one may never finish
drawing them) would be this: What if there was no other concept of time than
the one that Heidegger calls "vulgar"? What if, consequently,
opposing another concept to the "vulgar" concept were itself impracticable,
nonviable, and impossible? What if it was the same for death, for a vulgar
concept of death? What if the exoteric aporia therefore remained in a certain
way irreducible, calling for an endurance, or shall we rather say an experience.
Other than that consisting in opposing, rom both sides of an indivisible line, an
other concept, a non-vulgar concept, to the so-called vulgar concept?
What
would such an experience be? The word also means passage,
traversal, endurance, and rite of passage, but can be a traversal without line
and without indivisible border. Can it ever concern, precisely (in all the
domains where the questions of decision and of responsibility that concern the
border---ethics, law, politics, etc.---are posed), surpassing an aporia,
crossing an oppositional line or else apprehending,
enduring, and putting, in a different way, the experience of the aporia to a
test? And is it an issue here of an either/or? Can
one speak---and if so, in what sense---of an experience of the aporia?
An experience of the aporia as such? Or vice versa: Is
an experience possible that would not be an experience of the aporia?
If
it was necessary to recall at some length this analysis of the Aristotelian-Hegelian
aporetic of time, carried out with Heidegger, it is because the theme of our
conference was already noted there insistently: the border as limit (oros,
Grenze: these determinations of the present now, of the nun or of
the Jetzt that Heidegger underlines) or the border as tracing (gramme,
Linie, etc.). However, I will not elaborate the numerous instances where
this theme has recurred since then: the aporetology or aporetography in which I
have not ceased to struggle ever since; the paradoxical limitrophy of "Tympan"
and of the margins [marges], the levels [marches], or the marks
[marques] of undecidability---and the interminable list of all the
so-called undecidable quasi-concepts that are so many aporetic places or
dislocations; the double bind [in English in the
original] and all the double bands and columns in Glas, the work of impossible
mourning, the impracticable opposition between incorporation and introjection
in "Fors”, in Memoires for Paul de Man (particularly pp. 132 and
147), and in Psyche: Inventions de l'autre (where deconstruction is
explicitly defined as a certain aporetic experience of the impossible, p. 27);
the step [pas] and paralysis in Parages, the
"nondialectizable contradiction" (p. 72), the birth date that
"only happens by effacing itself" in Schibboleth (p. 89 and following),
iterability, that is, the conditions of possibility as conditions of impossibility,
which recurs almost everywhere, in particular in "Signature Event
Context" (Margins) and in Limited Inc., the invention
of the other as the impossible in Psyche, the seven antinomies of the
philosophical discipline in Du droit a La philosophie (pp 55, 51 5, 521
), the gift as the impossible (Donner Ie temps, p. 19 and following);
and above all, in the places where questions of juridical, ethical, or
political responsibility also concern geographical, national, ethnic, or
linguistic borders, I would have been tempted to insist upon the most recent
formalization of this aporetic in The Other Heading (written at the time
of the Gulf War). There, at a precise moment, without giving in to any
dialectic, I used the term "aporia" (p. 116) for a single duty
that recurrently duplicates itself interminably, fissures itself, and
contradicts itself without remaining the same, that is, concerning the only and
single "double, contradictory imperative" (p. 77). I suggested that a
sort of non-passive endurance of the aporia was the condition of responsibility
and of decision. Aporia, rather than antinomy: the word antinomy imposed
itself up to a certain point since, in terms of the law (nomos),
contradictions or antagonisms among equally imperative laws were at stake.
However, the antinomy here better deserves the name of aporia insofar as it is
neither an "apparent or illusory" antinomy, nor a dialectizable
contradiction in the Hegelian or Marxist sense, nor even a "transcendental
illusion in a dialectic of the Kantian type”, but instead an interminable
experience. Such an experience must remain such if one wants to think, to make
come or to let come any event of decision or of responsibility. The most general
and therefore most indeterminate form of this double and single duty is that a
responsible decision must obey an "it is necessary" that owes
nothing, it must obey a duty that owes nothing, that must
owe nothingin order to be a duty, a duty that has no debt to pay back,
a duty without debt and therefore without duty.
In
more recent texts ("Passions" and "Donner la mort"), I have
pursued the necessarily aporetic analysis of a duty as over-duty
whose hubris and essential excess dictate
transgressing not only the action that conforms to duty (Pflichtmassig)
but also the action undertaken out of the sense of duty (aus
Pflicht), that is, what Kant defines as the very condition of morality.
Duty must be such an over-duty, which demands acting without duty, without rule
or norm (therefore without law) under the risk of seeing the so-called responsible
decision become again the merely technical application of a concept and
therefore of a presentable knowledge. In order to be responsible and truly
decisive, a decision should not limit itself to putting into operation a
determinable or determining knowledge, the consequence of some preestablished
order. But, conversely, who would call a decision that is without rule, without
norm, without determinable or determined law, a decision? Who will answer for
it as if for a responsible decision, and before whom? Who will dare call duty a
duty that owes nothing, or, better (or, worse), that must owe nothing?
It is necessary, therefore, that the decision and responsibility for it be
taken, interrupting the relation to any presentable determination but
still maintaining a presentable relation to the interruption and to what it
interrupts. Is that possible? Is it possible once the interruption always
resembles the mark of a borderly edge, the mark of a threshold not to be trespassed?
This
formulation of the paradox and of the impossible therefore calls upon a figure
that resembles a structure of temporality, an instantaneous dissociation from
the present, a diJfirance in being-with-itself of the
present, of which I gave then some examples. These examples were not
fortuitously political. It was not by accident that they concerned the question
of Europe, of European borders and of the border of the political, of politeia
and of the State as European concepts. Nine or eleven times, they involved
the same aporetic duty; they involved ten---plus or minus one---commandments
considered as examples in an infinite series
in which the ten could only count a series of examples. In the end, the entire analysis
concerned the very logic of exemplarism in any national or nationalist
affirmation, particularly in Europe's relation to itself. In order to gain
time, and before closing this backtracking that has the form of premises---forgive
me, I needed to do so-I will rapidly mention the first seven aporias that
concern the theme of this conference. Each of them puts to test a passage,
both an impossible and a necessary passage, and two apparently
heterogeneous borders. The first type of border passes among contents
(things, objects, referents: territories, countries, states, nations,
cultures, languages, etc.), or between Europe and some non-Europe, for example.
The other type of borderly limit would pass between a concept (singularly
that of duty) and an other, according to the bar of an oppositional logic. Each
time the decision concerns the choice between the relation to an other who is its
other (that is to say, an other that can be opposed in a couple) and the
relation to a wholly, non-opposable, other, that is, an other that is no longer
its other. What is at stake in the first place is
therefore not the crossing of a given border. Rather, at stake is the double
concept of the border, from which this aporia comes to be
determined:
The duty to respond to the
call of European memory, to recall what has been promised under the name
Europe, to re-identify Europe-this duty is without common
measure with all that is generally understood by the name duty, though it could
be shown that all other duties presuppose it in silence. [To put it otherwise,
Europe would not only be the object or theme of a duty-to-remember and
duty-to-keep-a-promise; Europe would be the singular place of the formation of the
concept of duty and the origin, the possibility itself of an infinite promise.]
This duty also dictates opening Europe, from the heading that is divided because it is also a shoreline: opening it into that which is not, never was, and never will be Europe.
The same duty also dictates welcoming foreigners in order not only to integrate them but to recognize and accept their alterity: two concepts of hospitality that today divide our European and national consciousness.
The same duty dictates criticizing
("in-both-theory-and-in-practice”, and relentlessly) a totalitarian
dogmatism that, under the pretense of putting an end to capital, destroyed
democracy and the European heritage. But it also dictates criticizing a
religion of capital that institutes its dogmatism under new guises, which we
must also learn to identify---for this is the future itself, and there will be
none otherwise.
The same duty dictates cultivating the virtue of such critique, of the critical idea, the critical tradition, but also submitting it, beyond critique and questioning, to a deconstructive genealogy that thinks and exceeds it without yet compromising it.
The same duty dictates assuming the European, and uniquely European, heritage of an idea of democracy, while also recognizing that this idea, like that of international law, is never simply given, that its status is not even that of a regulative idea in the Kantian sense, but rather something that remains to be thought and to come [a venir]: not something that is certain to happen tomorrow, not the democracy (national or international, state or trans-state) of the future, but a democracy that must have the structure of a promise---and thus the memory of that which carries the future, the to come, here and now.
The same duty dictates respecting differences, idioms, minorities, singularities, but also the universality of formal law, the desire for translation, agreement, and univocity, the law of the majority, opposition to racism, nationalism, and xenophobia.
Why
this language, which does not fortuitously resemble that of negative theology?
How to justify the choice of negative form (aporia)
to designate a duty that, through the impossible or the impracticable,
nonetheless announces itself in an affirmative fashion? Because one must avoid
good conscience at all costs. Not only good conscience as the grimace of an
indulgent vulgarity, but quite simply the assured form of self-consciousness:
good conscience as subjective certainty is incompatible with the absolute risk
that every promise, every engagement, and every responsible decision---if there
are such---must run. To protect the decision or the responsibility by
knowledge, by some theoretical assurance, or by the certainty of being right,
of being on the side of science, of consciousness or of reason, is to transform
this experience into the deployment of a program, into a technical application
of a rule or a norm, or into the subsumption of a determined "case”. All
these are conditions that must never be abandoned, of course, but that, as such,
are only the guardrail of a responsibility to whose calling they remain
radically heterogeneous. The affirmation that announced itself through a
negative form was therefore the necessity of experience itself,
the experience of the aporia (and these two words that tell of the passage and
the non-passage are thereby coupled in an aporetic fashion) as endurance or as
passion, as interminable resistance or remainder. I'll give a final quote
regarding this formal negativity:
One could multiply the examples of this double
duty. It would be necessary above all to discern the unprecedented forms that
it is taking today in Europe. And not only to accept but to claim this putting
to the test of the antinomy (in the forms, for example, of the double constraint,
the undecidable, the performative contradiction, It would be necessary to
recognize both the typical or recurring from and the inexhaustible
singularization--without which there will never be any event, decision,
responsibility, ethics, or politics. These conditions can only take a negative form
(without X there would not be Y). One can be certain only of this negative
form. As soon as it is converted into positive certainty ("on this
condition, there will surely have been event, decision, responsibility, ethics,
or politics"), one can be sure that one is beginning to be deceived,
indeed beginning to deceive the other.
We are speaking here with names (event, decision,
responsibility, ethics, politics-Europe) of "things" that can only
exceed (and must exceed) the order of theoretical
determination, of knowledge, certainty, judgment, and of statements in the form
of "this is that”, in other words, more generally and essentially, the
order of the present or of presentation. Each
time they are reduced to what they must exceed, error, recklessness, the
unthought, and irresponsibility are given the so very presentable face of good
conscience. (And it is also necessary to say that the serious, unsmiling mask
of a declared bad conscience of ten exhibits only a supplementary ruse; for
good conscience has, by definition, inexhaustible resources.)
A
plural logic of the aporia thus takes shape. It appears to be paradoxical
enough so that the partitioning [partage] among multiple figures
of aporia does not oppose figures to each other, but instead installs the
haunting of the one in the other. In one case, the non-passage resembles an
impermeability; it would stem from the opaque existence of an uncrossable
border: a door that does not open or that only opens according to an
unlocatable condition, according to the inaccessible secret of some shibboleth.
Such is the case for all closed borders (exemplarily during war). In another case,
the non-passage, the impasse or aporia, stems from the fact that there is no
limit. There is not yet or there is no longer a border to cross, no opposition
between two sides: the limit is too porous, permeable, and indeterminate. There
is no longer a home [chez-soi] and a not-home [chez l’autre] whether
in peacetime (exemplarily according to the rule of universal peace, even beyond
the Kantian sense that presupposes a public, interstate system of rights) or in
wartime---war and peace both appreciate, but appreciate very little,
the borders. By definition, one always makes very little [peu
de cas] of a border. And this "very little" would have to
be formalized. Finally, the third type of aporia, the impossible, the antinomy,
or the contradiction, is a non-passage because its elementary milieu does not
allow for something that could be called passage, step, walk, gait,
displacement, or replacement, a kinesis in general. There is no more path (odos,
methodos, weg, or Holzweg). The impasse itself would be
impossible. The coming or the future advent of the event would have no relation
to the passage of what happens or comes to pass. In this case, there would be
an aporia because there is not even any space for an aporia determined as experience
of the step or of the edge, crossing or not of some line, relation to some
spatial figure of the limit. No more movement or trajectory, no more trans-
(transport, transposition, transgression, translation, and even
transcendence). There would not even be any space for the aporia because of a
lack of topographical conditions or, more radically, because of a lack of the
topological condition itself. A subquestion to this limitless question would
concern what affects these topographical or topological conditions when the
speed of the panopticization of the earth---seen, inspected, surveyed, and
transported by satellite images---even affects time, nearly annuls it, and
indeed affects the space of passage between certain borders (this is one
example among others of various so called technical mutations that raise the
same type of question).
In
another conference it would have been necessary to explore these experiences of
the edge or of the borderline under the names of what one calls the body proper
and sexual difference. Today, in choosing the theme of death, of the syntagm
"my death" and of the "limits of truth”, to explore this
subject, I will perhaps not speak of anything else under different names, but
names matter.
Is
my death possible?
Can we understand this question? Can I, myself, pose it? Am I allowed to talk about my death? What does the syntagm "my death” mean? And why this expression "the syntagm 'my death' "? You will agree that it is better, in this case, to name words or names, that is, to stick with quotation marks. On the one hand, that neutralizes an improper pathos. "My death" in quotation marks is not necessarily mine; it is an expression that anybody can appropriate; it can circulate from one example to another. Regarding what Seneca said about the brevity of life, Diderot tells us: "it is the story of my life”, it is my story. But it is not only his. Of course, say it is not mine, then I seem to be assuming that I could know when to say "my death" while speaking of mine. But this is more than problematic, in the sense of this word that we analyzed above. If death (we will return to this point later) names the very irreplaceability of absolute singularity (no one can die in my place or in the place of the other), then all the examples in the world can precisely illustrate this singularity. Everyone's death, the death of all those who can say "my death”, is irreplaceable. So is "my life”. Every other is completely other. [Tout autre est tout autre.] Whence comes a exemplary complication of exemplarity: nothing is more substitutable and yet nothing is less so than the syntagm "my death”. It is always a matter of a hapax, ofa hapax legomenon, but of what is only said one time each time, indefinitely only one time. This is also true for everything that entails a first-person grammatical form. On the other hand, the quotation marks not only affect this strange possessive (the uniqueness of the hapax "my"), but they also signal the indeterminacy of the word "death”. Fundamentally, one knows perhaps neither the meaning nor the referent of this world. It is well known that if there is one word that remains absolutely unassignable or unassigning with respect to its concept and to its thingness, it is the word "death”. Less than for any other noun, save "God"---and for good reason, since their association here is probably not fortuitous---is it possible to attribute to the noun "death”, and above all to the expression "my death”, a concept or a reality that would constirute the object of an indisputably determining experience.
In
order not to lose myself any longer in these preambulatory detours, I will say
very quickly now why “my death” will be the subject of this small aporetic
oration. First, I'll address the aporia, that is, the impossible, the
impossibility, as what cannot pass [passer] or come to pass [se
passer]: it is not even the non-pas, the not-step, but
rather the deprivation of the pas (the privative form would
be a kind of a-pas). I'll explain myself with some help
from Heidegger's famous definition of death in Being and Time: "the
possibility of the pure and simple impossibility for Dasein" (Der Tod
ist die Moglichkeit der schlechthinnigen Daseinsunmoglichkeit) (§50, p.
250). Second, I want to carry out such an explanation together with what
is our common concern here, at Cerisy-Ia-Salle, during the time of this
conference, namely, "the crossing [passage] of borders”.
Up
to this point, we have rightly privileged at least three types
of border limits: first, those that separate
territories, countries, nations, States, languages, and cultures (and the
politico-anthropological disciplines that correspond to them); second,
the separations and sharings [partages] between domains of
discourse, for example, philosophy, anthropological sciences, and even
theology, domains that have been represented, in an encyclopedia or in an ideal
university, sometimes as ontological or onto-theological regions or territories,
sometimes as knowledges or as disciplines of research; third, to
these two kinds of border limits we have just added the lines of separation,
demarcation, or opposition between conceptual determinations, the forms of the
border that separates what are called concepts or terms---these are
lines that necessarily intersect and over determine the two kinds of terminality.
Later I will suggest some terms in order to formalize somewhat these three kinds
of limit---to be crossed or not to be transgressed.
Now
where do we situate the syntagm "my death" as possibility and/or
impossibility of passage? (As we shall see, the mobile slash between and/or,
and/and, or/and, or/or, is a singular border, simultaneously conjunctive,
disjunctive, and undecidable.) "My death”, this syntagm that relates the
possible to the impossible, can be figured flashing like a sort of indicator-light
(a light at a border) installed at a customs booth, between all the borders
that I have just named: between cultures, countries, languages, but also
between the areas of knowledge or the disciplines, and, finally, between
conceptual determinations. A light flashes at every border, where it is awake
and watches [ca veille]. One can always see there a nightwatchman [du veilleur] or a nightlight [de la veilleuse].
Let
us start with a fuck that is overwhelming, well-known, and immensely
documented: there are cultures of death. In crossing a border, one changes
death [on change la mort]. One exchanges death [on change de
mort]; one no longer speaks the same death where one no longer speaks the
same language. The relation to death is not the same on this side of the
Pyrenees as it is on the other side. Often, moreover, in crossing a culture's
border, one passes from a figure of death as trespass---passage of a line,
transgression of a border, or step beyond [pas au-dela] life---to
another figure of the border between life and death. Every culture is
characterized by its way of apprehending, dealing with, and, one could say,
"living" death as trespass. Every culture has its own funerary rites,
its representations of the dying, its ways of mourning or burying, and its own
evaluation of the price of existence, of collective as well as individual life.
Furthermore, this culture of death can be transformed even within what we
believe we can identify as a single culture, sometimes as a single nation, a
single language, or a single religion (but I explained above how the principle
of such an identification appears to be threatened in its very principle or to
be exposed to ruin right from the outset, that is, to be exposed to death). One
can speak of a history of death, and, as you know, it has been done, for the
West at least. The fact that, to my knowledge, it has only been done in the
West (even though a Westerner, Maurice Pinguet, devoted to this question a
study that was both genealogical and sociological, in La Mort volontaire au
Japon [Paris: Gallimard, 1984]), that is to say, the fact that it has only
been done "here at home”, where we are, does not mean that there is no history
of death elsewhere or that no one base written any---unless the idea of a
history and of a history of death is itself a Western idea in a sense that will
be clarified later. For the record, I will only cite one or two tides from the
immense library of work devoted to the history of death. They are French works,
which is the first restriction, and they are recent, which is another unjustifiabily
arbitrary choice. First, the Essais sur l’histoire de la morten
Occidentdu Moyen Age a nos jours and L’Homme devant la mort, by
Philippe Aries. Like his Western Attitudes Towards Death (Johns Hopkins
University Press, I974), these studies, which date from I975 and I977
respectively, clearly show the limits within which such a history is framed. The
author, who calls himself a "historian of death" (L’Homme devant
La mort, p. 9), focuses on what is, in sum, a very short and dense sequence
in the time span of the Christian West. With all due respect for the richness,
the necessity, and at times the beauty of works such as these, which are also
masterpieces of their I must nevertheless recall the strict limits of
these anthropological histories. This word ("limit") not only
designates the external limits that the historian gives himself for
methodological purposes (death in the West from the Middle Ages to the present,
for example), but also certain non-thematized closures, edges [bordures]
whose concept is never formulated in these works. First, there is
the semantic or onto-phenomenological type of limit: the historian knows,
thinks he knows, or grants to himself the unquestioned knowledge of what death
is, of what being-dead means; consequently, he grants to himself all the
criteriology that will allow him to identify, recognize, select, or delimit the
objects of his inquiry or the thematic field of his anthropologico-historical
knowledge. The question of the meaning of death and of the word
"death”, the question "What is death in general?" or "What
is the experience of death?". and the question of knowing if
death "is"---and what death "is"---all
remain radically absent as questions. From the outset
these questions are assumed to be answered by this anthropologico-historical
knowledge as such, at the moment when it institutes itself and gives itself its
limits. This assumption takes the form of an "it is
self-explanatory": everybody knows what one is talking about when one
names death.
In
these texts foaming with knowledge, one never finds any precaution like the one
Heidegger takes, for example, when, intending to recall that it is impossible
to die for the other in the sense of “to die in his place”,
even if one dies for the other by offering his own death to the other, he
leaves the small word "is" in quotation marks in the following
sentence: "By its very essence, death is in every case mine, insofar as it
'is' at all" ("Der Tod ist, sofern es 'ist,' wesensm a Big je der
meine") (Being and Time, p. 240). Citing Heidegger here or there is
not sufficient to put such treasures of anthropological or cultural knowledge
to the test of these semantic, phenomenological, or ontological questions, and
it is especially not enough to cite Heidegger as an illustration or as an
authoritative argument (which often amounts to the same thing). This is what Louis-Vincent
Thomas does, in the second book that I want to mention, his rich Anthropologie
de fa mort (Payot, 1975). One could multiply the examples, but there is no
time for that. At the beginning of a chapter entitled "The Experience of Death:
Reality, Limit" (p. 223), Thomas writes: "'No sooner is the human
being born,' writes M. Heidegger, 'than he is already old enough to die.' Does
this incontestable (metaphysical) truth, verified by all the givens of
biological sciences and attested to by demography, mean anything at the level
of lived experience?" The sentence that Thomas quotes is incorrectly
attributed to Heidegger. It recalls Seneca's remark about the permanent
imminence of death, right from birth, and the essential immaturity of the human
who is dying. In the opening of his existential analysis of death, Heidegger also
distinguishes the death of Dasein from its end (Ende)
and above all from its maturation or ripeness (Reift). Dasein
does not need to mature when death occurs. That is why life will always have
been so short. Whether one understands it as achievement or as accomplishment,
the final maturity of a fruit or of a biological organism is a limit, an end (Ende;
one could also say a telos or terma), hence a
border, which Dasein is always in a position of surpassing.
Dasein is the very transgression of this borderline. It may
well have passed its maturity before the end (vor dem Ende schon
uberschritten haben kann), Heidegger says. For the most part, Dasein
ends in unfulfillment, or else by having disintegrated and been used up
("Zumeist endet es in der Unvollendung oder aber zerfallen und
verbraucht"; Being and Time, p. 244). Thomas should have avoided
attributing to Heidegger a line that the latter quotes (p. 245), taking it from
Der Ackermann aus Bohmen ("sobaId ein Mensch zum Leben kommt,
sogleich ist er alt genug zu sterben"). Heidegger uses this quote at the
very moment when he distinguishes the death of Dasein from
any other end, from any other limit. This crucial distinction, which Heidegger
considers indispensable, allows him to situate his existential analysis of
death before any "metaphysics of death" and before
all biology. Thomas, however, thinks that he is citing Heidegger and that
he can speak of an "incontestable (metaphysical) truth" that has been
verified "by all the givens of biological sciences" as well as by
"demography”.
Yet Heidegger recalls that the existential analysis of death can and must precede, on the one hand, any metaphysics of death and, on the other, all biology, psychology, theodicy, or theology of death (p. 248). Saying exactly the opposite of what Thomas makes him say, Heidegger puts into operation a logic of presupposition. All the disciplines thus named, and thereby identified within their regional borders, notably "metaphysics" and "biology”, not to mention "demography”, necessarily presuppose a meaning of death, a pre-understanding of what death is or of what the word "death" means. The theme of the existential analysis is to explain and make explicit this ontological pre-understanding. If one wants to translate this situation in terms of disciplinary or regional borders, of domains of knowledge, then one will say that the delimitation of the fields of anthropological, historical, biological, demographic, and even theological knowledge presupposes a non-regional onto-phenomenology that not only does not let itself be enclosed within the borders of these domains, but furthermore does not let itself be enclosed within cultural, linguistic, national, or religious borders either, and not even within sexual borders, which crisscross all the others.
To
put it quickly---in passing, and in an anticipatory way---the logic of this
Heideggerian gesture interests me here. It does so in its exemplarity. However,
I only want to assert the force of its necessity and go with it as far as
possible, apparently against anthropological confusions and presumptions, so as
to try to bring to light several aporias that are internal to the Heideggerian
discourse. At stake for me would be approaching the place where such aporias
risk paralyzing the ontological, hierarchical, and territorial apparatus to which
Heidegger lends credit. These aporias risk interrupting the very possibility of
its functioning and leading it to ruin. Death would be the name, one of the
names, of this threat, which no doubt takes over from what Heidegger himself very
early on called "ruination”.
But
we are not there yet; this will come only near the end. For the moment, let us
remain close to this border dispute. It arises here between, on the one hand, a
comparative anthropo-thanatology ("anthropothanatology" is the title
proposed by Thomas, who insists on its essentially "comparative" aim,
pp. 530-531) and, on the other hand, an existential analysis.
When
Heidegger suggests a delimitation of the borders (Abgrenzung) of existential
analysis (Being and Time, §49), he relies on a classical argument within
the philosophical tradition. In turn dialectical, transcendental, and ontological,
it is always the argument of presupposition (Voratissetzung). Whether
it concerns plants, animals, or humans, the ontico-biological knowledge about
the span of life and about the mechanisms of death presupposes
an ontological problematic. This ontological problematic underlies (zugrundeliegt)
all biological research. What always remains to be asked (zu ftagen
bleibt), says Heidegger, is how the essence of death is defined in
terms of that of life. Insofar as they are ontical research, biology and
anthropology have already and always decided (immer schon entschieden).
They have decided without even asking the question, hence by precipitating the
answer and by presupposing an ontological elucidation that had not taken place.
The precipitation does not simply stem from a speculative failure or from the
betrayal of a principle of philosophical legitimacy [droit] concerning
what must come first, whether de jure or methodologically.
It also leads to apparently empirical or techno-juridical confusions about what
the state of death is, confusions that are increasingly serious today. These
questions of legitimacy [questions de droit] are no longer only
questions concerning the philosophical order of de jure and
de focto. They impinge upon legal medicine, the politics
of gerontology, the norms concerning the surgical prolongation of life and
euthanasia, and upon several other questions that will be addressed later.
Heidegger
multiplies the programmatical propositions concerning the order---that
is, the subordination of questions—of what is prior and superordinate
(vorgeordnet) or, on the contrary, ulterior and subordinate (nachgeordnet).
Such propositions appear to be firm. Ontical knowledge (anthropological or
biological) naively puts into operation more or less clear conceptual
presuppositions (Vorbegriffe) about life and death. It therefore
requires a preparatory sketch, a new Vorzeichnung in terms
of an ontology of Dasein, an ontology that is itself preliminary,
"superordinate”, prior to an ontology of life: "Within the ontology
of Dasein, which is superordinate to an
ontology of life [lnnerhalb der einer Ontologie des Lebensvorgeordneten Ontologie
des Daseins; Heidegger emphasizes superordinate: the
ontology of Dasein is legitimately and logically prior to
an ontology of life], the existential analysis of death is, in turn, subordinate
to a characterization of Dasein's basic state (Grundveifassung)"
(p. 247). This characteristic, that is, the existential analysis of Dasein,
is thus an absolute priority, and then an existential
analysis of death, which is itself a part of this ontology of Dasein,
comes to be subordinate to it. In turn, this ontology of Dasein
is presupposed by an ontology of life that it thus legitimately precedes.
If Heidegger uses the expressions Dasein and analysis of Dasein,
it is because he does not yet allow himself any philosophical knowledge
concerning what man is as animal rationale, or concerning
the ego, consciousness, the soul, the subject, the person, and so forth"
which are all presuppositions of metaphysics or of ontical knowledge, such as
anthropo-hanatology or biology. A hierarchical order thus delimits the field;
it rigorously superordinates or subordinates the questions, themes, and, in
fact, the ontological regions. According to Heidegger, these regions are legitimately
separated by pure, rigorous, and indivisible borders. An order is thus
structured by uncrossable edges. Such edges can be crossed,
and they are in fact crossed all the time, but they should
not be. The hierarchy of this order is governed by the concern to think what
the death proper to Dasein is, that is, Dasein's
"properly dying” (eigentlich sterben). This
"properly dying" belongs to the proper and authentic being-able of Dasein,
that is, to that to which one must testify and attest (Bezeugung, §54).
At
stake for me here is approaching a certain enigmatic relation among dying,
testifying, and surviving. We can already foresee it: if the attestation of
this "properly dying" or if the property of this death proper to Dasein
was compromised in its rigorous limits, then the entire apparatus of these
edges would become problematic, and along with it the very project of an
analysis of Dasein, as well as everything that, with its
professed methodology, the analysis legitimately [en droit] conditions.
All these conditions of legitimacy [conditions de droit] concern
border crossings: what authorizes them here, what prohibits them there, what
ordinates, subordinates, or superordinates the ones over the others.
Heidegger
thus suggests an ontological delimitation among the fields of inquiry concerning
death. This delimitation seems all the more abyssal because it concerns limits
about questions of the limit, more precisely, questions of the ends, of the
modes of ending (enden, verenden), and of the limit that
separates the simple ending (enden) from properly
dying (eigentlich sterben). But as we shall see, there
is more than one limit. That is why we began, from our very first words, by
speaking about the ends, de finibus. That was not a round about
way of recalling the ends of man, as if after a long decade, the present
conference was not able to rid itself of the same subject, of an indestructable
[increvable] subject. If one takes it literally, the death of Dasein
is not an end of man. Between the two there is a singular, improbable, and
perhaps divisible limit that passes, and it is the limit of the ending,
the place where, in a way, the ending ends. What comes to pass, what
happens and what am I saying when I say end [finis],
for example when I say, addressing someone or sending him a note, "end
it”, "end this now”, or "that's the end of you"?
Heidegger
says that he has called the end of the living, the ending of the living (das
Enden von Lebendem), "perishing”, Verenden (Das Enden von
Lebendem nannten wir Verenden, p. 247). This Verenden is the ending,
the way of ending or of coming to the end that all living things share. all
eventually kick the bucket ilscrevent].
In everyday German, verenden also means to die, to succumb,
to kick the bucket, but since that is clearly not what Heidegger means by
properly dying (eigentlich sterben), by the dying proper to Dasein,
verenden must therefore not be translated by "dying" in
order to respect what Heidegger intends to convey. That is why the translators
hesitate between translating verenden by "arret de
vie" (Vezin, stoppage of life), by "perir"
(Martineau, to perish), or by "perishing" in English
(Macquarrie-Robinson).
I
prefer "perishing”. Why? Just because it turns up twice instead of once
among these translations? No, rather because the verb "to perish"
retains something of per, of the passage of the limit, of the
traversal marked in Latin by the pereo, perire (which
means exactly: to leave, disappear, pass---on the other side of life, transire).
To perish crosses the line and passes near the lines of our
conference, even if it loses a little of this sense of ending and of corruption
perhaps marked by the ver of verenden.
Before noting a further complication in the modalities of ending (Enden), one should consider that the distinction between perishing and dying has been established, as far as Heidegger is concerned, as he will never call it into question again, not even in order to complicate it.
As
is self-evident, this distinction between, on the one hand, death (der Tod)
or properly dying (eigentlich sterben) and, on the other hand,
perishing (verenden) cannot be reduced to a terminological decision. It
involves decisive conceptual questions for whoever wants to approach what it
is, properly, to die or what properly dying is. Above all, and precisely for
that reason, it involves the very condition of an existential analysis of Dasein,
of a Dasein that, as we shall see, reaches its most
proper possibility and becomes most properly what it is at the very point where
it can claim to testify to it, in its anticipation of
death. If, in its very principle, the rigor of this distinction were
compromised, weakened, or parasitted on both sides of what it is supposed to
dissociate (verendenl eigentlich sterben), then (and you can guess that
I am heading toward such a possibility) the entire project of the analysis of Dasein,
in its essential conceptuality, would be, if not discredited, granted another
status than the one generally attributed to it. I am thus increasingly inclined
to read ultimately this great, inexhaustible book in the following way: as an
event that, at least in the final analysis, would no longer simply stem from
ontological necessity or demonstration. It would never submit to logic,
phenomenology, or ontology, which it nonetheless invokes. Nor would it ever
submit to a "rigorous science" (in the sense that Husserl intended
it), not even to thought (Denken) as that which parallels the
path of the poem (Dichten), and finally, not even to an
incredible poem---which I would be nevertheless inclined to believe, without,
however, stopping on this point for obvious reasons. The event of this
interrupted book would be irreducible to these categories, indeed to the
categories that Heidegger himself never stopped articulating. In order to
welcome into thought and into history such a "work”, the event has to be
thought otherwise. Being and Time would belong neither to science, nor
to philosophy, nor to poetics. Such is perhaps the case for every work worthy
of its name: there, what puts thinking into operation exceeds its own borders
or what thinking itself intends to present of these borders. The work exceeds
itself, it surpasses the limits of the concept of itself that it claims to have
properly while presenting itself. But if the event of this work thus exceeds
its own borders, the borders that its discourse seems to give to itself (for
example, "those of an existential analysis of Dasein in
the transcendental horizon of time"), then it would do so precisely at
this locus where it experiences the aporia---and perhaps its
premature interruption, its very prematurity.
It
is with regard to death that we shall approach this aporetic structure in Being
and Time. But the question of knowing what it means "to experience the
aporia”, indeed to put into operation the aporia, remains. It is
not necessarily a failure or a simple paralysis, the sterile negativity of the
impasse. It is neither stopping at it nor overcoming it. (When someone suggests
to you a solution for escaping an impasse, you can be almost sure that he is
ceasing to understand, assuming that he had understood anything up to that point.)
Let
us ask: what takes place, what comes to pass with the aporia?
Is it possible to undergo or to experience the aporia, the aporia
as such? Is it then a question of the aporia as
such? Of a scandal arising to suspend a certain viability? Does
one then pass through this aporia? Or is one immobilized before the
threshold, to the point of having to turn around and seek out another way, the
way without method or outlet of a Holzwegor a turning (Kehre)
that could turn the aporia---all such possibilities of wandering? What
takes place with the aporia? What we are apprehending here concerning
what takes place also touches upon the event as that which arrives at the river's
shore [arrive a la rive], approaches the shore [aborde la rive],
or passes the edge [passe Ie bord]---another way of happening
and coming to pass by surpassing [outrepassant]. All of these are
possibilities of the "coming to pass" when it meets a limit. Perhaps nothing
ever comes to pass except on the line of a transgression, the death [trepas]
of some "trespassing" [in English in the original].
What
is the event that most arrives [l'evenement Ieplus arrivant]? What
is the arrivant that makes the event arrive? I was
recently taken by this word, arrivant, as if its
uncanniness had just arrived to me in a language in which it has nonetheless
sounded very familiar to me for a long time.
The new arrivant, this word can, indeed, mean the
neutrality of that which arrives, but also the singularity
of who arrives, he or she who comes, coming to be where s/he was not expected,
where one was awaiting him or her without waiting for him or her, without
expecting it [s’y attendre], without knowing what or whom
to expect, what or whom I am waiting for---and such is hospitality itself,
hospitality toward the event. One does not expect the event of whatever, of whoever
comes, arrives, and crosses the threshold---the immigrant, the emigrant, the
guest, or the stranger. But if the new arrivant who
arrives is new, one must expect---without waiting for him or her, without
expecting it---that he does not simply cross a given threshold. Such an arrivant
affects the very experience of the threshold, whose possibility he
thus brings to light before one even knows whether there has been an invitation,
a call, a nomination, or a promise (Verheissung, Heissen, etc.). What we
could here call the arrivant, the most arrivant
among all arrivants, the arrivant par
excellence, is whatever, who ever, in arriving, does not cross a threshold
separating two identifiable places, the proper and the foreign, the proper of the
one and the proper of the other, as one would say that the of a given identifiable
country crosses the border of another country as a traveler, an emigre or a
political exile, a refugee or someone who has been deported, an immigrant worker,
a student or a researcher, a diplomat or a tourist. Those are all, of course, arrivants,
but in a country that is already defined and in which the inhabitants know or
think they are at home (as we saw above, this is what, according to Kant,
should govern public rights, concerning both universal hospitality and visiting
rights). No, I am talking about the absolute arrivant, who
is not even a guest. He surprises the host---who is not yet a host or an
inviting power---enough to call into question, to the point of annihilating or
rendering indeterminate, all the distinctive signs of a prior identity,
beginning with the very border that delineated a legitimate home and assured
lineage, names and language, nations, families and genealogies. The absolute arrivant
does not yet have a name or an identity. It is not an invader or an occupier,
nor is it a colonizer, even if it can also become one. This is why I call it
simply the arrivant, and not someone or something that
arrives, a subject, a person, an individual, or a living thing, even less one
of the migrants I just mentioned. It is not even a foreigner identified as a
member of a foreign, determined community. Since the arrivant does
not have any identity yet, its place of arrival is also de-identified: one does
not yet know or one no longer knows which is the country, the place, the
nation, the family, the language, and the home in general that welcomes the
absolute arrivant. This absolute arrivant
as such is, however, not an intruder, an invader, or a colonizer, because
invasion presupposes some self-identity for the aggressor and for the victim.
Nor is the arrivant a legislator or the discoverer of a promised land.
As disarmed as a newly born child, it no more commands than is commanded by the
memory of some originary event where the archaic is bound with the final
extremity, with the finality par excellence of the telosor
of the eskhaton. It even exceeds the order of any determinable
promise. Now the border that is ultimately most difficult to delineate,
because it is always already crossed, lies in the fact that the absolute arrivant
makes possible everything to which I have just said it cannot be reduced,
starting with the humanity of man, which some would be inclined to recognize in
all that erases, in the arrivant, the characteristic of
(cultural, social, or national) belonging and even metaphysical determination
(ego, person, subject, consciousness, etc.). It is n this border that I am tempted to read
Heidegger. Yet this border will always keep one from discriminating among the
figures of the arrivant, the dead, and the revenant
(the ghost, he, she, or that which returns).
If
the distinction between (properly) dying and perishing
cannot be reduced to a question of terminology, if it is not a linguistic distinction,
for Heidegger (extending well beyond Being and Time) it nevertheless
marks the difference of language, the impassable difference between the
speaking being that Dasein is and any other living thing. Dasein
or the mortal is not man, the human subject, but it is that in terms of
which the humanity of man must be rethought. And man remains the only example
of Dasein, as man was for. Kant the only example of finite
reasonable being or of intuitus derivativus. Heidegger
never stopped modulating this affirmation according to which the mortal is
whoever experiences death as such, as death. Since he
links this possibility of the "as such" (as well as the possibility
of death as such) to the possibility of speech, he thereby concludes that the
animal, the living thing as such, is not properly a mortal: the animal does not
relate to death as such. The animal can come to an end, that is, perish (verenden),
it always ends up kicking the bucket [crever]. But it can never
properly die.
Much
later, in On the Why to Language, Heidegger wrote:
Mortals are they who can experience death as
death [den Tod als Tod erfahren konnen]. Animals cannot do this.
[Das Tier vermag dies nicht.] But animals cannot speak either. The
essential relation between death and language flashes up before us, but remains
still unthought [ist aber noch ungedacht].
It
is this unthought that holds us in suspense here. For if one must assume that
the difference between a mortal (whoever dies in the sense of "properly
dying") and an animal incapable of dying is a certain access to death as
death, to death as such, then this access will condition
every distinction between these two ends, perishing and dying.
By the same token, it will condition the very possibility of an analysis of Dasein,
that is, of a distinction between Dasein and another
mode of being, and of a distinction to which Dasein may testify
by attesting to its proper being-able. It is therefore
on the possibility of the as such of death that the interrogation
would have to bear. But it would also have to bear on what links the
possibility of this as such (assuming that it can ever be
assured as such) to the possibility or to the power of what
is so obscurely called language. Indeed, Heidegger's formulation, although in
some respects trenchant: ("the animal is not capable of this")
nevertheless retains a certain. prudence. It does not say that the experience
of death as such, the experience granted to the mortal, of
which the animal is incapable, depends upon language. Heidegger says: ''Animals
cannot do this [experience death as death]. But animals cannot speak either. [Das
Tier kann aber auch nicht sprechen.]" These two remarks are
deliberately juxtaposed, without, however, Heidegger feeling authorized to go
any further than indicating something like a flash in the sky concerning a link
between the as such of death and language.
Therefore, several possibilities remain open:
1.
There would not be any essential and irreducible link between the two, between
the "as such" and language, and someone could relate to death as such
without language, precisely where the word breaks of for defaults (wo
das Wort gebricht or zerbricht, etc.). But Heidegger does not fail
to recall then, as he always does, that this collapse or suspense still belongs
to the possibility of language.
2. The belief in an experience of death as such, as well as the discourse crediting this belief to an experience of death itself and as such, would depend, on the contrary, upon an ability to speak and to name. But instead of giving us added assurance about the experience of death as death, this discourse would lose the as such in and through the language that would create an illusion, as if to say death were enough to have access to dying as such---and would be the illusion or the fantasy.
3. Consequently, since death refuses itself as such to testimony and thereby marks even what refuses its as such both to language and to what exceeds language, it is there that any border between the animal and the Dasein of speaking man would become unassignable.
4. Finally, if the living thing as such (the beast, the animal beast or human life, the human as living thing) is incapable of an experience of death as such, if, in sum, life as such does not know death as such, then this axiom will allow for a reconciliation of apparently contradictory statements, best exemplified, in my view, by the example of Heidegger, of course, but also by those of Freud and Levinas.
Once
one has distinguished between these two ways of ending, dying
and perishing, one must take into consideration what
Heidegger calls an intermediate phenomenon (Zwischenphenomenon): the
demise, the Ableben, which all the French
translators agree to translate as deces. Ab-eben, to leave life, to go
away from life, to walk out of life, to take a step away from life, to pass
life, to trespass upon death [trepasser], to cross the threshold of death,
thus means de-cedere. Already in Cicero's Latin, this figure
of straying while walking signified dying. This reminds us
that the moment of the ultimate separation, the partition that separates from
life, involves a certain step/not [il y va d'un
certain pas]. The French word deces was introduced
for other reasons. Its medico-legal usage corresponds to the dominant sense of
the German term Ableben. For the same reasons, the English
translators chose to translate Ableben by "demise”.
Their footnote explains that the legalistic connotations do not, however, exhaust
the meaning that Heidegger gave, in this context, to Ableben. What
does Ableben (to demise) mean? It is neither dying (Sterben)
nor perishing (Verenden). How does one discriminate among
these three figures of ending (enden)? Dasein alone can
demise (in the medico-legal sense), when it is declared dead after its
so-called biological or physiological death has been certified according to
conventionally accredited criteria. One does not speak of the demise of a
hedgehog, of a squirrel, or of an elephant (even if, and especially if, one
likes them). Demise (Ableben) is thus proper to Dasein,
in any case, to what can properly die, but it is not dying (Sterben).
Dasein presupposes dying, but it is not death, properly speaking: "Dasein
never perishes [verendet nie]. Dasein, however, can
demise [ableben] only as long as it is dying [solange, als es
stirbt]" (p. 247).
These
two sentences very economically formalize the three modes of ending (enden):
perishing, demising, and dying.
But they also bring together all of the paradoxes and chiasmi that could relate
this existential analysis to what I would be tempted to locate as the two major
types of concurrent discourses on death in this century, which could be
identified by the names or metonymies of Freud and Levinas. In order to set up
a serious discussion among these discourses, one would have to explain oneself
constantly, patiently, and meticulously as to the meaning that one gives to death,
and also specify which mode of ending one is referring to.
For lack of time, let us focus on just one example.
When
one keeps in mind the distinction between verenden and sterben,
Heidegger's statements are not irreconcilable with the double Freudian
postulate according to which there is an irreducible death drive, although
neither biological science, nor our belief, nor
our unconscious testifies to our mortality, an essential, necessary, or intrinsic
mortality. Indeed, Heidegger says: "Dasein nicht einfoch verendet”,
"Dasein verendet nie”. Similarly, it may be enough to distinguish
between demise and dying in order to
avoid Levinas's objection to Heidegger regarding the originary and underivable mineness
of dying. When Levinas accuses Heidegger of privileging, in the existence of Dasein,
its proper death, what is at stake is Sterben. Indeed,
it is in dying proper and properly speaking that "mineness" is
irreplaceable, that no one can die for the other, in the experience of the
hostage or of the sacrifice, in the sense of "in the place of the other”, and
that no testimony can testify to the contrary. But, conversely, when Levinas
says and thinks that, against Heidegger, he is saying "the death of the
other is the first death" and "it is for the death of the other that
I am responsible, to the point of including myself in death. This may be
phrased in a more acceptable proposition: 'I am responsible for the other
insofar as he is mortal’”, these statements either designate the experience
that I have of the death of the other in demise or they presuppose, as Heidegger
does, the co-originarity of Mitsein and of Sein zum Tode. This
co-originarity does not contradict, but, on the contrary, presupposes a
mineness of dying or of being-toward-death, a mineness not that of an ego or of
an egological sameness. One can also, and we will return to this later, take
into consideration a sort of originary mourning, something that it seems to me
neither Heidegger, Freud, nor Levinas does.
Only
at the end of a discussion that would seriously taken into account this entire
system of delimitations should one raise the question of how much one can trust
the powerful apparatus of conceptual distinctions put forth by Heidegger. For
another limit runs here. Given the theme of this conference, this limit should
be of utmost importance to us. In Heidegger's view, this supplementary limit
not only allows one to distinguish between biological end and death properly
speaking, to which the being-toward-death of Dasein is
destined or referred. It also allows one to distinguish between all the legal,
cultural, and medico-anthropological phenomena of demise and being-toward-death
properly speaking. The distinction between demising (Ableben) and
dying (Sterben) is, so to speak, interior
to the being-toward-death of Dasein. Demising is not
dying but, as we have seen, only a being-toward-death (Dasein), that is,
a being- destined-to-death, a being-to-death or tending-toward-(or up-to)-death
(zum Tode), can also demise. If it never perishes (verendet
nie) as such, as Dasein (it can perish as living
thing, animal, or man as animal rationale, but not as Dasein),
if it never simply perishes (nicht einfoch verendet), Dasein
can nevertheless end, but therefore end without perishing (verenden)
and without properly dying (das Dasein aber auch enden kann, ohne daB es
eigentlich stirbt). But it cannot demise without dying. Thus, there
is no scandal whatsoever in saying that Dasein remains
immortal in its originary being-to-death, if by "immortal" one
understands "without end" in the sense verenden. Even
if it dies (stirbt) and even if it (endet), it never
"kicks the bucket" (verendet nie). Dasein, Dasein
as such, does not know any end in the sense of verenden. At
least from this angle and as Dasein, I am, if not immortal,
then at least imperishable: I do not end, I never end, I know that I will not
come to an end. And with a certain knowledge I know, Dasein says,
that I can never perish [je ne saurais perir]. One should not be
able to say to the other: "Kick the bucket! [Creve!]" (in
the sense of "End!", "Perish!"), If one says it, then it
takes the form of a curse and it assimilates the other into the category of animals,
thereby testifying that one does not consider him an animal at the precise
moment when one claims to say it to him.
This articulated set of distinctions (between perishing and dying,
but also, within the existential field of Dasein, between
death properly speaking and demise) thus presupposes Dasein. These
delimitations also institute a hierarchy of inquiry. This hierarchy is organized
around the particular kind of limit that could be called, in order to introduce
a certain formalization, the problematic closure. The problematic
closure assigns a domain, a territory, or a field to an inquiry, a research, or
a knowledge. All of this is ordered in relation to a thematic object, more
precisely to an entity, to a modality of the entity whose identification is
presupposed by the unity of this space, which in principle can be closed. (We
have been interchangeably calling such a space fields, territories,
or domains, without taking into consideration, for the
moment, the Kantian distinctions and the whole lexical history of the concepts
of limits; this rhetoric of the space of appropriation and this space of rhetorical
appropriation naturally crisscross all the themes of this conference.) We must
distinguish another kind of limit from this problematic closure (and problema,
recall, denotes as much the task of projection as the edge of protection,
the program and the shield). Let us call it the border [frontiere],
in what appears to be the strictest sense, that is, the sense that is
statistically most common. In a way that is almost strict, if not proper, this
border designates the spacing edge that, in history, and in a way that is not
natural, but artificial and conventional, nomic, separates two
national, state-controlled, linguistic, and cultural spaces. If we say that
this border---in the strict or common sense---is an anthropological border,
it is a concession to the dominant dogma according to which only man has such
borders, and animals do not. One usually thinks that even if animals have
territories, their territorialization (in predatory, sexual, or regular
migratory drives, could not be encompassed by what man calls borders. There is
nothing fortuitous about this way of thinking; this gesture denies the animal what
it gives to man: death, speech, the world as such, the
law, and the border. All of that would correspond to the
same indissociable possibility. To these two forms of limit—the problematic
closure and the anthropological border---we must
also add the conceptual demarcation or rather the logical de-finition,
that is, that which, if it were possible, would tend to oppose rigorously two
concepts or the concepts of two essences, and to purify such a demarcating
opposition of all contamination, of all participatory sharing, of all parasitism,
and of all infection.
In
a modest and preliminary way, my purpose is to investigate more closely what
makes one single braid of these three forms of limits, to
which I have given the somewhat arbitrary names of problematic closure,
anthropological border, and conceptual demarcation.
The aporia of death would be one of the place-names for what forms the
braid and keeps it from coming undone. The analysis of a passage in Heidegger
will serve here as a provisionally privileged example in order to name and draw
such a braid. Let us therefore come back to §49 of Being and Time, which
does not refer fortuitously to de-limitation; indeed, it is entitled "The
Delimitation [die Abgrenzung] of the Existential Analysis of Death
with Respect to Possible Other Interpretations of the Phenomenon”. There is
thus another edge between properly dying and the pas
of demise, which already marks a double distance (with
respect to death, which is left behind, but also with respect to the living
thing in general, because animals, according to this hypothesis, do not demise).
If it holds, this other edge would be the only one capable of separating,
ordinating, superordinating, and subordinating the problematics---and that is
what matters here. This edge would itself be the place of a first problematic
closure, of a domain of questioning or of absolutely preliminary research. On
the one hand, there would be anthropological problematics. They would take into
consideration ethnologico-cultural differences affecting demise, sickness, and
death; however, on the other hand, and first of all, there
would be the ontologico-existential problematic that anthropology must
presuppose and that concerns the being-until-death of Dasein, beyond
any border, and indeed beyond any cultural, religious, linguistic,
ethnological, historical, and sexual determination. In other words, there can
be an anthropology or a history of death, there can be culturologies of demise,
ethnologies of mortuary rites, of ritual sacrifice, of the work of mourning, of
burials, of preparations for death, of the cleansing of the dead, of the
languages of death in general, of medicine, and so on. Bur there is no culture
of death itself or of properly dying. Dying
is neither entirely natural (biological) nor cultural. And the question of limits
articulated here is also the question of the border between cultures, languages,
countries, nations, and religions, as well as that of the limit between a
universal (although non-natural) structure and a differential (non-natural but
cultural) structure.[]
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