the real derrida death paper

REAL DERRIDA DEATH PAPER Saturday, October 19, 2013

DEATH AND THE POSTMODERN

If American popular culture seems obsessed with proving that there is life after death,

and if American philosophers seem content to argue about that and about how death is to

be defined, as well as about the claim that death is or is not a bad thing, -- in essence, to

discuss the metaphysics of death, then filmmakers and philosophers working in France

and Italy seem equally obsessed with discussing mourning, spectres, crypts and

revenants, without literally believing in any of them. One only need watch equally

infuriating YouTube clips of Eben Alexander and Derrida. In the Derrida clip, part of a

larger film project, an American interlocutor asks the philosopher whether he believes in

ghosts. Four and a half minutes later, we know that Derrida believes that a ghost is

speaking in him and through him but he also seems to be saying that he does not believe,

literally, in ghosts. Derrida’s claims that he is possessed by specters, that he is haunted,

and his denial of the reality of the ghosts that haunt him, represent the poles around

which this talk must navigate. If, by the time I have finished talking, you have at least a

dawning sense that you understand Derrida, then my work here is done.

THE FRAME: HEIDEGGER AND THE SHOAH

I talked yesterday about the fact that even though American spiritualism and consolation

literature were both fully formed by the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, their hold on

the culture was intensified by the losses that war caused. But my presentation made clear

that both then and in the 21st century Americans had what they considered ontological

answers to questions about death. I mean that American philosophers and American

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writers both labored with the question of whether there really was an afterlife, as if that

were an answerable, even an askable, question. This does not appear to be a question that

European philosophers choose to ask, because, at least since Heidegger, it has been a

question that falls outside the purview of existential analysis. Freud, of course, writing

some years before Heidegger, dismissed the question, not because it fell outside the

purview of his work but because he could not assign it any value as a question. The issue

was moot. Not only wasn’t there an afterlife but the question itself made no practical

sense, even if belief could play a psychological role.

The afterlife was not so much denied as neglected. It was not an issue. The reason it was

not an issue was twofold: Heidegger’s existential analyses said it was not, and Derrida’s

aporetic reading of Heidegger argued that Heidegger was in no position to make such a

claim. This neither proved nor disproved the afterlife claim but relocated it in a region of

unresolvable aporias, or holes in thought, logical spaces in which answers cannot ever be

given, and experiences that are interminable, that literally have no clear boundaries and

that have no temporal closure.

But this inability to decide what death is, and/or where it leads, leaves Derrida haunted.

American thinkers address the question of what death means and of the afterlife, as if

they knew a way to the answer. Thus they are not haunted. In our popular culture there

are plenty of ghosts, but we always know exactly what they want and, as in the successful

television series, such as Ghost Whisperer or Medium, we also know how to help them

get what they want. Living Americans regularly solve ghost’s problems. Occasionally, as

in Ghost, the process is reversed and ghosts help living people. In any event, in America,

being a ghost is a zero sum game in the sense that there is very little mystery about what

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the presence of ghosts means. We also allow revenants of two other kinds – vampires and

zombies. Neither haunts us. The zombies have acquired a purpose – to eat the brains of

the living and thus turn them into zombies – and the vampires, with their werewolf

sidekicks, have created a romantic counter-universe of sexy revenants who vie for the

affections of beautiful adolescent and young adult girls and women. Where Romero’s

zombies – the ‘dead’ – had unclear purposes and were thus somewhat haunting, and

Stoker’s Dracula was a disturbing erotic Other, our revenants fit nicely into genre

literature and film without leaving any disturbing penumbra. They provide fodder for

high grossing apocalyptic films and equally profitable scripted television series

I could make the case that American interest in proving the afterlife and in nailing down

the meaning and value of death suggest more metaphysical anxiety than they might at

first appear to. If we do not allow ourselves to be haunted by spectres whose intentions

and demands we do not understand – and much of American grief theory and therapy

works against such ambiguous hauntings – this means that there might be something

about the manageable ghosts and vampires and zombies that we are not admitting, that is,

letting in. As soon as we begin to admit that ghosts and vampires and zombies are not

‘innocent’, that they are not natural kinds but arrivants, revenants, things that either arrive

or return, and whose meaning is not clear, we have to start worrying about what they

mean. What exactly is haunting us? What do these specters want?

This is roughly where the postmodern reflection on death begins. You will have to

forgive me because what comes next will include a comic book primer on what I

understand by postmodernism and deconstruction. ‘Postmodernism’ is one of those terms

one hears a lot, in the intellectual vicinity of ‘postcolonialism’, ‘anatomo-politics” and

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“deconstruction”, especially when people are talking ‘theory’. But philosophers often

have an antipathy to these terms, or embrace them with an ideological fervor. In both

cases reasonable definitions are not forthcoming.

The term ’postmodernism’ refers first to architecture although its primary use is in

literary theory. Modernism in architecture refers to the stripped-down, functionalist style

represented by the Bauhaus school, such as Gropius or Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Postmodern thinking was encapsulated, famously, by Lyotard in his The

Postmodern Condition, where he argued that in the 20th century intellectuals, and to some

extent the general public, have lost faith in what he calls ‘grand narratives’, overarching

structures of belief that tell us that is real and valuable. Postmoderns are people who, in

the absence of belief in such narratives, have developed a self-reflectively ironic stance

toward all straightforward beliefs , and mash together bits and pieces of many belief

systems into their own pastiche, which they know they have constructed.

I think this self-reflectively ironic attitude, and the sense that each of us welds

together various beliefs as we see fit, changing the composition of the mix as mood,

experience and exigency require, is widespread, especially among academics. We are

trained to be questioners and have a natural tendency thereby to adopt a skeptical attitude

to certainties.

And I think this attitude has developed its characteristically American iterations.

Since 9/11 we have experienced what is called the “New Sincerity” and, as our attitudes

to the afterlife indicate, we are culture of belief. But we are also a culture that wears

ideology lightly, for the most part. There is of course a core of ideologues among us and

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they are intransigent, but one finds that the most public and vocal of these people often

have complex cultural and social backgrounds , such that even their ideological rigidity

seems to be a postmodern construct, tightened to rigidity because that is the only way it

will work to serve their purposes.

But postmodernism comes in many forms and derives from many cultural and

historical backgrounds. We have to be careful to note that Lyotard, the spokesman for

postmodernism as a philosophical-existential position rather than as a playful form of

architecture (reference Learning from Las Vegas), emerged from a distinctive historical

background. If postmodernism rejects claims to acontextual truth and ahistorical

certainty, it implicitly urges us to respect the contexts in which intellectual movements

emerge.

As Derrida writes in Aporias, people die in many ways. And in Europe, from 1914

to 1945, years that shaped Derrida, Snyder’s description of central and eastern Europe as

“bloodlands” is not a misdescription.

In every country that the Nazis conquered in WWII and that Stalin occupied before,

during or after that war, tens of millions of non-combatants, and tens of millions of

civilians who were nowhere near combat zones, were systematically murdered for

ideological reasons. We are most familiar with the nearly six million Jews who were

murdered. We tend to know less about the Gypsies, the Russian prisoners of war, the

German prisoners of war, and the millions who died in various Stalinist purges, which

were often initiated and carried out for the most arcane of reasons.

Central and Eastern Europe, and to a lesser but real extent countries such as France,

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the Netherlands and Denmark, are all effectively haunted. One can see it in Paris, where,

finally, sixty years after the event, memorials to France’s murdered Jews finally began to

appear. Nations such as Hungary and Poland live in the shadow of lost cultures that

disappeared under both Nazi and Soviet pressure.

At the same time, the Europe that is ‘missing’ all these people has also given up, for

all practical purposes, on its religious heritage. Although Derrida makes a case,

somewhat under-developed, that Heidegger’s existential analysis lf death recapitulates

the logical and emotional structure of Judeo-Christian

theology, this recapitulation is unconscious, unseen and unadmitted, and 21st century

Europe retains its burial practices as vestigial organs. To put this too simply, but with

some justice, Europe has too many unmourned dead and no way to mourn them.

It is in this historical context, under the pressure of immense, unassimilated losses,

that the project of postmodernism emerged. And it is in the double context of postmodern

loss of belief and the historical loss of people that Derrida takes up his work. Part of the

rejection of grand narratives had to do with the fact that they had not worked to save all

those who had died; part had to do with the fact that some versions of these narratives

had been used as ideological props to justify the mass killings; part had to do with simple

moral and epistemological exhaustion. In a world filled with such destruction belief was

just too much trouble.

There is no question that Derrida is a ‘postmodern’ thinker. But what interests me is

the fact that he is also, without question, a deconstructive thinker. His postmodernity

might lead him to be skeptical of grand narratives but it is his deconstruction leads him to

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places, as we will see, that most postmoderns might not go.

I presume to understand deconstruction, and think its idea is relatively simple.

Derrida has a metaphysical hunch. He believes that most Western philosophy is written in

what he calls the ‘ontotheological’ register. This term has had a complex history since

Kant coined it. [Get the Kant Preface quote]It was appropriated by Heidegger and used as

a term of invidious critique of other Western philosophers. Heidegger meant that Western

philosophers had all, or almost all, presumed that they could know Being utterly, that

they could know its source, God. Used metaphorically the term means that philosophers

turned ontology into a form of theology; read one way they claimed to know exactly

what Being was because they knew exactly who the origin of Being is. Read more

elliptically, ‘ontotheology’ could describe the arrogant attitude of philosophers who

assume, using Nagel’s term, that they had a God’s-eye view of reality and therefore of

Being.

Derrida in his turn appropriated the term from Heidegger and used it against him,

arguing in several works, including the Aporias (which we will examine more carefully

in a moment), that Heidegger himself, in his putatively anti-metaphysical ‘existential

analyses’ of experience ‘as such’, had committed the very totalizing sin of which he had

accused his predecessors.

This leads us into deconstruction. To say that Heidegger or any other philosopher had

taken an illegitimate God’s-eye view of Being was one thing; to describe in detail how

taking such a view worked, and why it was a wrong move, was another. Derrida was a

French philosopher and lived and worked in an intellectual environment deeply marked

by the work of the Structuralists and post-Structuralists. Both of these schools of thought

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were ultimately grounded in the work of the francophone Swiss linguist, Fernand de

Saussure.

De Saussure wrote about the formal structure of living languages, and he defined

them, in contrast with Frege’s view, as systems of horizontal or lateral difference. That is,

for Saussure what a word meant was more a function of its lateral connection to other

words, its occurrence in the context of grammatical utterances, than its simple denoting

or pointing function. As a corollary to this (which in many ways reminds one of the later

Wittgenstein), the meaning of an individual word was not only constituted by its relations

to other words in its sentence, for example. The meaning was also always already

‘deferred’, in the sense that every word was inherently connected to synonyms,

homonyms and antonyms. In its linguistic travels, any nominating, or naming, word,

acquired a ‘tribe’ or ‘family’ of meanings and, as Wittgenstein pointed out, brilliantly, in

his discussion of family resemblance, in a family photo, if every family member shares at

least one feaure with another member, and if that second member shares another feature

with a third member, and so on, there will be people at opposite ends of the portrait

would share no common traits and who might look very unlike each other. If we extend

the analogy to linguistic meaning, we would predict that any nominating term will

accumulate other meanings that could run directly counter to the meaning we want to

assign to it.

Derrida made a famous trial run of this idea in his essay on the uses of the term

‘pharmakos’ in Plato’s Phaedo, noting that in Greek usage the term could mean either

the dispenser of healing drugs or a poisoner.

With this linguistic background Derrida had something Heidegger lacked: a tool for

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unmasking the pretensions of ontotheology, including Heidegger’s. But to understand

how the tool worked we need to understand how Derrida conceived the ontotheological

enterprise. I am convinced that Derrida sees classical metaphysical philosophy under a

linguistic description. Such philosophers set themselves what can only be called a

‘magical’ task: they mean to name Being, and all beings, with their univocally proper

ontological names. Their ambition mimics what Adam did in Genesis: as God led each

species of animal before him, Adam gave it its true, ontotheologically right name.

But for Derrida, the secret is this: if Saussure was right about how language means,

there are not, there cannot be, such univocally right descriptors. Every word we choose

as the word not only has other, different, even contradictory meanings, but each is always

already imbedded in a syntactic context that modifies its meaning. Thus it is impossible,

given the inherent structure of language, to do what reason might be demanding that one

do - viz., to name Being and beings, once and for all.

This does not mean that trying to do this is ignoble pr even particularly wrong-

headed. If Kant is right this is exactly what any rational being is designed and called upon

to do, We cannot not do this. And yet we cannot do it because we write and speak. Yet

we cannot stop ourselves from writing and speaking in ways that must self-destruct as the

words we designate as having a single unchangeable meaning differ themselves, by their

very nature as counters in a linguistic system, from that designated but inherently

unstable meaning. Thus metaphysics is inevitable and undoable.

But there is also an experiential aspect to deconstruction. In Psyche, he writes that

deconstruction is the “aporetic experience of impossibility” and that the aporia is “an

interminable experience”. Thus deconstruction is an “interminable experience of

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impossibility”. What he means, I think, is that there are experiences that reveal

themselves to lack all spatial and temporal limits. Not only language breaks down; so

does experience itself. If we think of experience as something that is going somewhere,

that has a point, and if in the process of trying to reproduce such an experience, we find

ourselves absolutely stuck, unable to move forward or to make sense of what is going on,

this might be described as a deconstruction of experience. And if Western, logocentric

metaphysics cannot name things in a final, univocal, “right” way, so too experience-

centric phenomenological existential analysis, as practiced by Heidegger, might lead to

experiential impasses as internally contradictory as any linguistic dead end into which

philosophy leads us.

What is Derrida’s role in all this? Here a little cultural understanding cannot hurt.

Jacques (originally ‘Jackie’) Derrida was an Algerian Sephardic Jew. He was not

observant as an adult but he grew up in that environment, as a person always apart. Jews

had lived in North Africa for centuries but they were not Berber or Arab or Muslim and

thus were different from their fellows in those respects. They were People of the Book

but not part of Dar al-Islam, the House of Believers. When the French invaded and made

Algeria an overseas département of metropolitan France, the Algerian Jews learned

French and because they were multilingual and generally more educated and

commercially sophisticated than the Muslims, occupied a social position outside the

colon community but above that of the other locals. Derrida was therefore always an

outsider, neither one of the people nor one of the elite.

He was also raised in a rabbinic religion. Rabbis are not priests, or inspired preachers

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(they can be) but teachers, and experts in the Law, which means being experts in Torah,

and in interpreting Torah. Judaism is a religion of law and interpretation of the law. If we

take the philosophical ‘Torah’ or sacred text that contains the Law, to be every work of

ontotheology, every work that purports to univocally name Being, and designate Derrida

as rabbi, then his entire corpus can be read as midrash, or rabbinic commentary on the

sacred texts, with added twist that as a rabbi-philosopher his interpretative task is to

unmask the otherwise hidden fissures in the Law that make it break apart under close

analysis.

He is also, as he claims in Aporias, a self-styled ‘Marrano’. A Marrano is also

called a converso. Both terms, the first much more invidious, refer to Iberian Jews and

Muslims who converted to Catholicism, often under the pressure of the Inquisition,

during and after the Reconquista of that peninsula by Spanish Catholics. These people

were often converts in name only and remained crypto-Jews, practicing the old religion in

secret. Many of these people, in succeeding generations, had no memory of their

erstwhile Judaism but maintained rituals in their families that they did not understand.

He styles himself a Marrano not because his family converted but because as an

assimilated French intellectual he is also something of a crypto-Jew, someone who

practices a version of his original religion in secret, that is, in his dismantling of the

received dogma of the philosophical ‘church’, which reveals its secret fissures and

inclusions under the pressure of his analyses. He is also a crypto-Jew because he finds

himself in the grip of practices, and in his case of beliefs and preoccupations, that drive

him but that he only comes to understand as he uses these in his deconstructive activities.

In this respect he resembles the Socrates whom Aristophanes likens to Marysas and to

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one of those statues which, when you break it open, reveals small images of gods inside.

Third, he is a Marrano because he is an outsider, a Sephardic Algerian who always

occupied the unstable borders between Africa and France, between colons and Algerian

Muslims, between Jews and Christians, between mainstream intellectuals and pretenders.

We also have to add, in fairness, that Derrida also considers mainstream philosophers

such as Heidegger as Marranos as well, although they do not know that in their practice

of the dominant (philosophical) ‘faith’ they also include elements that they think they

have rejected.

Why is being a Marrano associated with the question of death? If I distill Aporias to

its essence – always a dangerous move with a Derrida text – I can say that in it Derrida is

questioning Heidegger’s strategy, in Being and Time, of trying to develop a completely

ahistorical, asocial, areligious idea of death for Dasein. By extension Derrida is also

questioning the entire project of S/Z, that of providing exactly the same level of

description of Dasein’s life as well as his death. But in what sense does this dismantling

of the Heideggerian project make Dasein a Marrano?

He is a Marrano here because he is practicing crypto-Judeo-Christianity-Islam by

revealing that Heidegger’s carefully modulated, supposedly methodologically ‘pure’

definition of death secretly contains the structure of these religions. This is especially

trenchant because Heidegger was very careful to distance his analysis of Dasein from any

religious ‘pollution’, and also because Derrida, the African Jew, and himself a non-

practicing one at that, reveals the secret burden that the Aryan Heidegger’s supposedly

pure analysis carries.

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But this is too preliminary. To understand what Derrida is doing with respect to death we

have to apply ourselves now, to the text of Aporias itself.

Aporias:

Aporias, to put the matter far too simply, is Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger’s

existential analysis of Dasein as a being-toward-death (Sein-zum-Tode) in Sections 46 −

53 of Being and Time. So, when we begin reading this 81 page paper, delivered in a

single event, we expect to find that Derrida will be looking for fissures in Heidegger’s

language. When he attempts to define death as such, we should see Derrida revealing

how Heidegger’s apparently seamless sentences to break apart and reveal openings and

gaps, logical incoherencies, that their assertive form unsuccessfully tried to mask.

And this is exactly what we will se. But we will also see more. Not only will Derrida

reveal that Heidegger’s definition of death falls apart but that, in thus falling apart, it also

reveals what is hidden inside it, which turns out, surprisingly, to be the whole Western

religious tradition - Judeo-Christian-Islamic, as well as all the anthropological,

psychological, and political meanings of death, as well as a new non-definition of death

that connects/reconnects human death with animal death and that reinserts death back

into history and culture, and, not least, and at last, language. One of the most interesting

things that Derridean deconstructions do — and in Apories we experience a casebook

instance of it — is not only to dissolve metaphysical pretensions but, in doing this, to

reopen our eyes to a world that is more mysterious and richer in (ambiguous) meaning

that the pristine world of ontotheological truth. Derrida is not an A.J. Ayer who leaves us

with nothing but nonsense. And he owes something serious to the Heidegger who

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bemoaned the fact that Western philosophy had silenced Being and covered it up in

trying to name it once for all. The post-deconstruction world is anything but empty, and

one of my intentions today is to introduce you to some features of that world.

Provocatively, we begin this text with what looks like a definition of death, the very

thing Derrida will criticize Heidegger for providing. In the English translation, the

definition appears under the title as an unascribed citation, alone on the page that

immediately precedes the first page of the paper, It is part of the text but outside it as

well.

The puzzle is ‘solved’ on one level, when one examines the French original. There,

the citation appears just under the title, on the title page proper. In any event there is a

definition, perhaps Derrida’s own:

Mourir —

S’attendre aux ‘limites de la verité’

Translated as:

Dying —

Awaiting (one another at) the ‘limits of truth’.

I assure my listeners that we will return to this ‘definition’, which on the surface

makes so little sense, right near the ned of Apories, and at that point we hope it will make

sense. In fact one could read this text as a kind of musical étude in which this motif,

Derrida’s ‘anti-definition’ of death is introduced at the opening, variations are developed,

it disappears, and a second motif, Heidegger’s definition of death is introduced. Varations

on it are then developed. Fianlly the two motifs come together at the end, with the first

overwhelming, even as it incorporates, the second.

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But as with everything Derrida writes/presents, he cannot simply begin by plunging

into his topic directly. Derrida is delivering a keynote address at a conference on borders

held in Cérisy-la-Salle, France, so his discussion of Heidegger, and of death, takes place

in the context of a discussion of borders, even though Heidegger himself did not take up

the question of death in these terms. Thus, Derrida asks us to use the conceptual

templates of borders and boundaries and limits as the proper one for talking about death.

Why we should do this, how it will pay off, is not made clear; thus, as with almost

everything Derrida does, we have to begin with an act of faith.

But for Derrida the concept of borders or boundaries is not yet sufficiently specified.

He chooses a particular passage about passages, a citation from the Enlightenment French

philosopher, Diderot, in his Vie de Seneca, and uses Diderot’s phrase, “at the limits of

truth”,to lead us to Heidegger. But note: in the quote Diderot is referring, in his Essai sur

la vie de Séneque le philosophe, to the text of Seneca’s famous treatise on death, De

brevitate vitae. Diderot is writing admiringly about what Seneca had to say about death

but the citation Derrida uses seems to blame Seneca, and warns him against locating

himself beyond the borders, or at the borders, of truth.

Diderot accuses Seneca (and himself) of the general defect of “letting oneself be

carried by the interest of the cause beyond the limits of truth”. [2] But in the next

paragraph of his Diderot says that the third chapter of Seneca’s book “is the story of my

life.” The story is that Diderot, like Seneca and the people he writes for, have wasted

most of the time of their lives, when they could have been working, and that the

mediocrity of their efforts is a direct result of this lack of time.

We are left to guess whether this is the ‘cause’ that allowed Diderot, and Seneca, to

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go “beyond the limits of truth.” Derrida tells us that when we read , the chapter Diderot

cites “contains … a rhetoric of borders”, by which Derrida means that Seneca writes

about what property, ownership, we have in our own lives. The idea is that in the face of

death we make our lives too short because we do not set up clear enough boundaries

around our lives, as if our lives were property that we had to fence to keep others from

encroaching on it. The property of our life of course is time, not space.

We have now, in the space of less than three pages, touched the borders of truth, of

property, and of death. At this point, with these issues of borders raised, but not defined

or connected, we are asked to join the speaker, Derrida, at these borders — of death, truth

and property — and “wander about in the vicinity of this question.”, As if the three

questions — about property, death and truth, and their boundaries — were the same

question.

This is a dispiriting beginning. Right at the start, rather than boldly crossing any

border, rather than getting anywhere, we are milling about at a confluence of three

different kinds of borders - of truth, death and property — with no wisdom about how

these connect, and no idea why Derrida has assembled them and us in this ambiguous

place.

I want to emphasize something. When Derrida is about to introduce us to questions

about death, he wants to put us in the right philosophical mood — unsure of ourselves,

unclear about boundaries, making no progress. This is exactly the logical space from

which proper deconstructions launch themselves, and where they end up. And can we

ever, in reading Derrida, forget Socrates’ diffidence when the oracle at Delphi called him

the wisest of men, and Socrates retorted that he did not know anything?

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First, as to borders and property, Seneca seems to be asserting that “the border [finis]

of this property would be more essential, more originary and more proper than those of

any other territory in the world.”[3] And Seneca argues that everyone, even centenarians,

feel that they are dying before their time because they gave away their property or

ownership in their lives, over which Seneca thinks we are or should be, masters, to the

needs of other people, and Seneca believes that such gifts are a waste, of one’s life. For

Seneca, because of this wasting of one’s property in one’s life, we feel “the imminence of

death at every instant, … a disappearance that is by essence premature”.

Derrida then writes that this imminence “seals the union of the possible with the

impossible, of fear and desire, and of mortality and immortality, in being-to-death.”[4]

Before we go on I want you to note what Derrida has set up here in the most indirect

and low key way, in a way you could easily, as he intends, miss. Seneca and Diderot are

beyond the limits of truth here in two senses. When we are at the border of death we are

no longer in a territory where something already defined as limited will work because

death is unlimited, inherently outside all boundaries. But we are also beyond the limits of

truth here because Seneca assumes that he knows the answer to whether we have property

in our own lives, and that in consequence our time belongs to us, and any time spend

attending to others is a waste. Knowing this, or thinking we know this, makes death

always imminent and premature because no matter how much we assert ownership over

our lives we will inevitably give some time to other people, and every second we give

them, a waste, will make us feel as if, whenever death comes, it comes too soon.

Further, Derrida also writes that this imminence, which flows directly from claiming

exclusive ownership over one’s own life, “seals the union of the possible(one’s life and

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work) with the impossible(the death that comes because one has wasted parts of one’s

life), fear and desire (fear of having wasted one’s life, desire to live more), of

mortality(the feeling of death’s premature imminence) and immortality (feeling as if one

were going to live forever, as if one’s property in one’s life gave one unlimited time with

which to dispose)”. And all these paradoxical unions are “sealed” in the self-deception

one must undergo in “being-to-death.”

This puzzling set of passages, with the questions to follow, seems to make no sense as

an introduction to a close deconstructive read of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Sections

46-53. But here is the clue: Seneca and Diderot are Heidegger; everything Derrida wants

to say about the problems inherent in Heidegger’s existential analysis of Dasein’s Sein -

zum - Tode is already here in cryptic capsule form, indicating that Heidegger is not

saying much that is new and also that the issue involved, despite the necessary

complexity of Derrida’s critique of Heidegger, given the complexity of Heidegger’s

language, is not itself that complicated.

It is this: to assume that we can know that we have property in our own life, that our

life belongs to us in an originary way, such that our death also belongs to us, and is our

property, in exactly the same way as our life is, and that therefore we must choose our

death as our own, and never give it away to someone else, and live it authentically as

our final project, is precisely what Heidegger is getting wrong and exactly why Derrida

wants to wander around with us at the border. We are not alone; we are not sure what to

do at this border. We do not even know whether death is a border. Contrast these images:

Seneca and Heidegger both knowing what death is and that their deaths properly belong

to them; us, wandering around the ambiguous borderlands, beyond the limits of truth,

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sharing each other’s uncertainty, needing each other’s support because we do not know

what death is and do not believe that it belongs to us. Unlike Heidegger and Seneca we

have to wait at the borders of death and the borders of truth, waiting for, we know not

what.

This wandering occurs in the context of a dialectic between problems and aporias

(Hence the title of the work). I mean that Derrida locates us in the uncomfortable

borderlands where death and truth intersect, and where borders themselves are an issue.

He asks whether death is a border, is not a border, is perhaps a transgression or trespass

across a border, trespassing on itself, and in this context he questions the idea that we

know what either a border or death, are, i.e., that we know the truth about either. Finally,

he associates both borders and death with a provocative sentence that is, he claims, non-

translatable even into French.

That sentence is “Il y Va. un certain pas.” What counts here for my purposes is that

Derrida associates both borders and dying, as well as truth, with “a certain pas”, that is,

with a certain step, (over), and/or with a certain pas (not). The point is that from where

we wander, at the limits of truth, we cannot tell whether there even is a step to take and, if

there is, whether it is punctiliar - a route to annihilation -- or a step on a journey

somewhere else.

Were we ontotheologians or Heidegger’s existential analysts or even, perhaps,

Seneca, this milling about would pose a problem. Derrida does an etymology on this

word, obviously -- and I should have mentioned this earlier -- playing with Heidegger’s

penchant for such etymologies and for endless references to Greek and Latin terms. To

him, “problem” originally means both/either projection/project or protection/shield. This

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is self-consciously different from how we, and Derrida himself, would use ‘problem’, so

there are three meanings in play.

The traditional philosopher would consider this question of what borders, truth and

death mean as problematic, which means that they would represent a project or

undertaking that could and would be completed at some point. We are all familiar with

“problems in philosophy” approaches to teaching introductory philosophy. Seeing these

questions as problems in the second sense, as a protection or shield, might be read,

ironically, as the fact that mainstream philosophers might see such questions as protected

areas in which they could get their work done, rather than as fundamental challenges to

their whole enterprise.

Derrida obviously sees himself , and we with him, in the anoretic end of the dialectic.

He is “wandering”. He is undefended, vulnerable, without a compass, without any

‘problem’, either as shield or as project. And it is in precisely this context, having firmly

located himself in the “interminable experience of the impossible”, rather than in the

logical lie sunny uplands of the problematic, that he blunders into Heidegger’s existential

analysis of death in sections 46 -53 of Being and Time.

We begin the examination of Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s being-toward-death (Sein-

zum-Tode) by assessing his three part pre-definition of death. He wants to distinguish

what he terms Verenden, translated as ‘perishing’, from properly dying, (Sterben).

Properly dying belongs integrally to Dasein’s the essence of Dasein is possibility, his

account of death will also necessarily involve possibility. Thus in distinguishing between

‘perishing’ and properly dying, Heidegger will emphasize that perishing, which is the

biological thing that animals do, entails no degree of possibility, while properly dying,

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which he claims is what Dasein does, must include possibility as a central element.

The third way of dying, Ableben, or leaving life, somewhat captured in the English term

‘decease’, belongs exclusively to Dasein, but is not the same as properly dying. To

decease refers to a the juridical, social death of Dasein, which society and law sees as

something that happens to Dasein, but that is really, in itself, the enacting of one of

Dasein’s possibilities. Animals do not decease because they have no legal or social

standing. Even though there is no agency involved in the decease, it relates to agency in

the indirect sense that only beings recognized as political and social agents can decease.

Animals suffer a purely passive death; they perish because as beings they have no

possibility.

This is a case where the deconstruction of language and the deconstruction of experience

meet. Derrida’s route to this seems indirect because it does not involve a direct revelation

of linguistic fissure. Rather, Derrida begins the second half of Aporias with the assertion

that death has a history. By citing this he does three things. First he uses this as an

introduction to his separate critique of Aries’ history of death, which we will take up in a

moment. Second, he wants to use this reference to the history and social imbeddedness of

death to suggest that in leaving these factors out of his existential analysis of death while

admitting to Dasein’s decease, Heidegger is deconstructing his own analysis of being-

toward-death by denying the importance of these historical and social factors on one hand

and then readmitting them, on what claims to be a lower, ontic level, in his recognition of

Dasein’s decease.

Both Heidegger’s analysis and the historico-social analysis leave out the biological level

of dying, what Heidegger calls ‘perishing’, and both thereby exclude animals from

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anything like properly dying. This feels wrong to Derrida, because any definition, be it

phenomenological or historical, that leaves out a large segment of the total population

that dies has non-necessary borders or limits, and is therefore, in a negative way, beyond

the limits of truth. If dying is something we await at the borders of truth, then who ‘we’

are matters.

Derrida’s reservations about Heidegger’s typology of dying extends to the concept of

Ableben or decease. Juridical dying, and dying in an historical and social setting are, in

Heidegger’s analysis, derivative information that reflect Dasein’s being-in-the-world as

something present-to-hand, another being alongside other beings, and it’s being-with in a

community. But decease is not properly part of Dasein’s being-toward-death because it is

not a possibility that exists inside Dasein’s range of possibilities. For Heidegger, Dasein

is essentially outside of history and society, as Dasein. He says that dying is Dasein’s

ownmost, (Eigentlich), non-relational, possibility, which means that dying is Dasein’s

most characteristically Dasein-ish act, and also an act that disconnects Dasein from every

conceivable social setting. It is not that Dasein dies alone, but that there is nothing about

Dasein’s dying that has anything in it to connect Dasein to other people. Dasein,

ironically, does not choose die alone. Dasein must die alone, even if Dasein does not die

properly and merely deceases, as when Dasein does not face and embrace its dead

directly, but allows itself to take on a social/cultural template as inauthentic self-

protection.

Derrida’s critique of Heidegger’s three part typology is grounded in one of his more

profound insights, a bit of deconstruction that is strictly speaking neither linguistic nor

phenomenological, but in this case quite resembles a purely philosophical and conceptual

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claim. Derrida asserts, and I think rightly, that Heidegger’s Dasein is a replica of Kant’s

rational being.

We recall that Kant’s model of human being is irreconcilably hybrid. I mean that, like

Plato, but somewhat unlike Descartes, who is not nearly as precise in this matter of

dualism, Kant postulates that every human being is also a purely rational being. The key

to understanding the concept is that Kant avers that there can be, and almost certainly are,

other, non-human rational beings.

This means two things: first, that in order to be a fully realized rational being one need

not be a human being with a body. Rational beings do not require bodies to express

themselves. They are, in their rationality, ‘non-relational’. And their ‘ownmost’ ‘job’ is to

be rational, in whatever realm they are operating, be that the factual-scientific, the moral

or the aesthetic.

Second, if there can be rational beings without bodies, then embodied, human rational

beings are both a bit mysterious -- their hybridity goes unexplained -- and inherently

problematic, because bodies pose issues for reason.

I need not go further into the Kantian example but if we take Derrida seriously and read

Dasein as an existential version of the rational being, we are led to see that, if Derrida is

right, then Heidegger is defining Dasein without essential reference to its embodiment

( and by extension to its sociality or historicity). Being Dasein means being-in-the-world

as Dasein, not necessarily as embodied Dasein. And Dasein’s dying, its being-toward-

death, is its own possibility (ownmost, non-relational) and only accidentally and

derivatively something that happens to happen somewhere and somewhen.

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We note the obvious difference between Kant’s rational being and Heidegger’s Dasein.

Dasein is an existing being in time, a being whose essence is to question its own

existence and a being whose other job it is to set itself projects, to see itself and live itself

as pure possibility, in the double senses of being able to do things and then deciding to do

them.

Understood in this light, then, Heidegger’s Dasein does not suffer its death but enacts it

ad its ‘ownmost’ possibility, and it does so by itself because no other Dasein can die for

it. Heidegger makes much of the distinction. I can die in the place of the other, but not as

that other. It is not that such a death would make the death inauthentic. Such a death

simply cannot happen.

What this means, ultimately and for Derrida’s analysis, is that for Heidegger, as for

Seneca, my death, and by extension my time, is my property, and my most originary and

unqualified property. I must not give it away, I must not make gifts of it to others if I

hope to accomplish my own projects (possibilities). And if I do, my death, and my life,

will not properly be mine, and I will always die before my time, prematurely and

immaturely.

If we bring this back exclusively to Heidegger, we see that an ideal existence for Dasein

would be one in which Dasein never ‘fell’ into the world of das Man, but focused instead

and exclusively on its own projects and especially on its most important project, the

possibility of its own impossibility.

What I am working toward is this: for Derrida, Heidegger’s conception of death, as the

possibility of Dasein’s impossibility, is premised on the assumption that Heidegger’s

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existential analysis is a method that can know what, exactly, it is for a human being to

die. He even claims to know what he cannot know, namely, what if anything might

happen to Dasein after it properly dies. Levinas criticized Heidegger for defining death as

annihilation, but he did not really do this. What he did was to argue that, from the point

of view of the existential analysis, that is, when one was writing from inside the analysis,

questions about anything outside that analysis simply could be raised. Heidegger was so

utterly confident that his method would tell everything about Dasein that he reduced all

questions not directly related to this analysis to the level of mere ontic information,

accidental and peripheral, from the point of view of serious existential analysis.

And of course this is precisely what Derrida was working with during his whole long

career.

Heidegger, rejecting Western metaphysics because in his understanding it covered up

Being, and silenced it, under the weight of its abstractions, replaced its ontotheology with

one of his own – the utterly pure, context-free existential analysis that finally offered an

unmediated understanding of Dasein’s existence. No matter what happens after the fact,

then, the pure analysis can reveal only the truth – that Dasein’s deepest, closest

possibility is to become impossible.

Derrida’s more technical deconstruction of this Heideggerian formula, dying as the “not-

to-be-outstripped, possibility of the impossibility of Dasein”, which reveals what dying is

as such, simply carries Derrida’s critique further and completes it. His criticism is

straightforward. If Dasein’s ownmost possibility is its impossibility, then if and when it

enacts that possibility – that is, its own impossibility, and thereby its ceasing to be

Dasein, at that moment it is no longer Dasein. And if it is no longer Dasein, then it is not

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enacting its death as such, nor can it be knowing and experiencing its death as such,

because Heidegger has defined Dasein’s dying as its own impossibility to be the very

Dasein that could experience this impossibility.

Therefore at the very moment of its properly dying, Dasein perishes, becomes like an

animal, is a passive sufferer of death, is utterly defenseless, utterly without possibility and

all of Heidegger’s painstakingly developed and defended hierarchies and distinctions and

prerogatives collapse and disappear. Dasein itself disappears to be replaced by a dead

biological being, an animal, as well as by someone who has deceased, that is, a member

of a certain social and cultural group who died at a certain point in history, not in

Dasein’s non-referential time, but in a time promiscuously shared with all other animals

and humans.

But here we come to the point in the presentation that is most delicate. It is tempting to

read Derrida’s deconstructions as unidirectional, as if, like some latterday French version

of A.J. Ayer or Gilbert Ryle or Richard Dawkins, his animus were simply to dismantle

and leave nothing in place of what had been prised apart. But I think Derrida is far more

interesting than that (as were all the aforementioned thinkers, when read a certain way).

What matters most in Aporias is two moves, one I will call the aporetic move the other of

which I will call the Marrano move.

The Aporetic Move

Derrida writes, as I cited earlier, that deconstruction is an aporetic experience of the

impossible, as he says in Psyche. And death is, as Heidegger claimed, impossible but in a

sense entirely different than that suggested in Being and Time. Once we free ourselves

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from the idea that death belongs only to Dasein and that death separates us from other

people and from animals, we are still left with death, which remains just as much of a

mystery as it was to Diderot and Seneca.

What are we left with, exactly? First, we are left with and in the aporia, the break-

between, which is a kind of border that is not a border. And we are left with waiting.

If, pace Heidegger, we cannot see death as the obliteration of Dasein, we still have death,

and we still have the figure of dying as a kind of border crossing, a possible journey, that

is a process, or as something that knows no border and is always already imminent in our

lives. But the whole point of invoking the aporia in which the successful deconstruction

leaves us is that the aporia, aporia as an experience, is not – and Derrida makes this clear

– an experience in which anything, including death, poses problems. Problems, as

Derrida makes clear, are etymologically either protections/shields, something that guards

me from something, and/or they are projects, things to be worked out. Or they are both.

But Derrida’s analysis of Heidegger has dissolved the putative problem of death. Death is

literally, etymologically, no longer either a project or a shield. It explains nothing and

leads nowhere.

Death is still there but now it is not a problem but something that, in the aporetic space at

or beyond the limits of truth, where Diderot has left us, is impossible, something we do

not know how to do. In our situation, in the midst of life and without Heidegger’s

metaphysical certainty, we have no way of determining whether death is a step to another

world, whether it is a journey, or whether there is even a step there to take. We do not

know what we are up against or whether there even is something up against which we

are.

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Culture and history have stories to tell us about what death means and where it leads but

Heidegger was right when he criticized social scientists for lacking a baseline definition

of death that would allow them to write its canonical history. Aries took years to

complete his history of death because he had nowhere to start and he ended up having to

assume that he and all his readers already knew what he was talking about.

On a first-order level, we cannot give religious and cultural death narratives and rituals

any more than an heuristic significance, because we cannot know whether they are as

misguided as was Heidegger’s existential analysis. And so we are left, waiting, alone or

with each other, at the borders of death, which might not even be borders, and certainly at

the limits of truth, not knowing what next to do.

Derrida also calls the aporia an “interminable experience”, partly because it has no

logical or spatial boundaries but also because, as in some bad dreams, it is a shapeless

experience that goes on and on because it has exactly nowhere to go; it is non-directional

and keeps taking up what Seneca warned us not to waste – time.

Self-reflexively, and Derrida is always aware of this, he begins the text/talk with his

unsettling ‘definition’ of dying – “to wait (with one another) at the limits/borders of

truth”. He writes this at the very beginning of what everyone knows is going to be a long,

long presentation. And rather than bustle forward with assurance, indicating exactly what

problems he will state, address and solve, always in aid of making progress, Derrida asks

us to wait with him and, three pages into the talk, to “wander around” with him in the

vicinity of three questions – of truth, property and death . We are not waiting inside any

of the questions. We are wandering on the borders of all three, unsure, from Derrida’s

diction – he mentions one question and three topics – whether all these borders are the

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same one, whether death and truth and property are intimately related, and how to cross

the borders to get at the questions or, horribly, if there are even ways to cross the borders

at all, or whether what seem like borders are not perhaps blank walls.

This is a very disturbing way to start a long talk and, after Derrida does go about his

business of showing that Heidegger’s clear, methodologically impeccable, and forward-

moving account of death is none of those things, he returns us, at the end of Aporias, to

these same multiple borders, where we are still wandering, unresolved. Can anyone not

think of the parable in Kafka’s The Trial, “Before the Law”?

But these borders are not filled with despair. When Derrida writes that to die is

“s’attendre” he does not specify with whom we are waiting and in the English translation

there is the parenthetical insertion “awaiting (one another)”, as if the interminable

experience at the borders was waiting for someone, for some arrivant, for someone either

from beyond the borders (a savior, a revenant from the other side), or someone from this

side of the border, a fellow human or animal, whose death might now mean something

because, once Dasein has been deconstructed, my death is no longer uniquely important.

Perhaps as we wait together for the unknown event, for some unspecified and perhaps

illusory arrivant, we create a community of those waiting, those who have no power over

death, those live the impossibility of dying, as an interminable possibility.

Anyone who has read Derrida immediately before and immediately after Aporias knows

that a bit earlier, in Donner la mort, he writes extensively on what we might be doing at

these broders, especially in his segments on Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and on

Levinas famous sentence, “Tout autre est tout autre”. In both of these pieces he uses his

linguistic and phenomenological skills to open up the borderlands and to begin talking

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about what appears to be nothing else than a religious vision, something about which

your recent distinguished visitor, John Caputo, has extraordinarily interesting things to

say in his The Prayers and Tears of Derrida.

I do not have time to detail what Derrida does in Donner la mort but do suggest that it is

indissociably connected to Aporias, taking up where Heidegger and his deconstruction of

Heidegger left off because, as we recall, Heidegger was clear that his work in Being and

Time was rein diesseitig, done purely from this side of death. Donner la mort takes up

the bordferlands using work that opens up the borders to a possible other side.

And about a year after Aporias, in 1993, Derrida presented another set of very long talks,

this time in English, at the University of California at Riverside, (which I had the good

fortune to attend and where I met Derrida for the first and only time). These talks,

published later in French as Spectres de Marx and in English a bit later as Specters of

Marx, Derrida returns to what is going on on this side of the borders, and presents what

he calls his ‘hauntologie’, an account of the specters that still haunt Europe, and the

globalizing capitalist world, even, and perhaps especially, after the fall of Soviet Russia

and the collapse of Communist governments throughout Eastern and Central Europe.

In Spectres Derrida is studying he aporetic ‘spectres’ or ‘haunts’, located ontologically

somewhere between spirit and body, that persist after the disappearance of Marxist states.

His point is twofold: the disappearance of Marxist states is not equivalent to the

disappearance of either Marx or of the specters – the unseen and denied victims of

capitalism – that he invoked and revealed. The disappearance of Marxist states also does

not mean the disappearance of those other spirits, the fetishized commodities and their

successors, the ghostly financial instruments such as derivatives and credit default swaps,

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that haunt the present day victims of the capitalist system that purports to end history.

In these works Derrida is filling in the landscape of aporetic waiting, populating the

border with possible gods and ghosts, on both sides of the line, to let us know that death

cannot exist in an historical and spiritual vacuum. Those borders can be crowded places,

even if the beings with which they are crowded are as liminal and elusive as every other

figure in the Derridean Weltanschauung, if I can use such a foundational word.

If we are with Derrida, we too wander in these dangerous, unsettled borderlands

(can anyone forget No Country for Old Men and the opening scene at the border?)

without the protection of problems. But we are not alone, even if our situation is

inalterably impossible and morally tragic. As confounded as we are we can still give and

receive impossible gifts, the gift of our own death and the gift of … who knows what

arrivant approaches – or perhaps does not ….

FIN

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the real derrida death paper

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