Lecture 7: Death, Aporia, Finite Thinking
How does one testify to the end? From which side of that margin must one be to call
something finally, definitely over, as if for all time? By what right? Who or what calls the
end? The clock? The sovereign? One has not met that end, the end that is death, and
therefore cannot testify to it, witness it, perhaps all the more so when it is the death of the
Other, the death of the one the state is putting to death, despite all the witnesses the state
shields behind the curtain or just to the side of the scaffold. They never see it coming.
Death is beyond or at the limit of every ontology, every phenomenology: it cannot be a
noema or thought by analogy through Husserlean apperception. And yet there is no
phenomenology, no ontology worthy of the name that can’t face up to death, that can’t
think the finitude of being in the face of what is not appropriable. That can’t face up to
the death penalty. Let’s see if I can make this case today, even if I will deny that one can
have a proper philosophy of death while at the same time seeing if Derrida is right that
philosophy has only ever been, at its core, about the death penalty. Between one death
and the other, philosophy will have been about nothing else.
This does not mean we should not touch on death, attempt to gather its pulse, if you will,
even as it slips away. The rhythm of a certain thinking of death—or to switch metaphors,
its blood line—moves from Heidegger through Levinas to Derrida. Some background is
thus needed: For Heidegger, death was the “possibility of the impossibility of existence in
general” (SZ, 262) For Derrida, Heidegger will always have given death a certain
meaning, a certain possibility for Dasein: “The full existential-ontological conception of
death may now be defined as follows: death, as the end of Dasein, is Dasein’s ownmost
possibility—non-relational [unbezügliche; non-relational as in not relatable to others],
certain and as such indefinite, not to be outstripped” (SZ, 258-9). Yes, this “death is the
possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein,” and also the “possibility which is
one’s ownmost…not to be outstripped [unüberholbare]” (SZ, 250). Or better: “Death is a
possibility-of-Being which Dasein has to take over in every case. With death, Dasein
stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being…Its death is the possibility of
no-long-being-able-to-be-there [Nicht-mehr-dasein-könnens]” (SZ, 250). This “ownmost”
or “most proper possibility” [die eigenste Möglichkeit], as death, would seem to bring
this impossibility within circumspective concern, within the possible, even if it is indeed
the possibility of impossibility. For Derrida, “death is always the name of a secret” (A,
74). And thus he will argue in The Death Penalty lectures:
I believe on the subject of death, the question, what is death?—which is perhaps
preliminary to the question of death given or life taken [donner la mort] (by
suicide: to take one’s own life; by murder, to take someone else’s life; or by
capital punishment, a singular form of putting to death)—I believe on the subject
of death, the question, what is death? Cannot let its vertigo make the head spin in
a simple hermeneutic circle that would give us some pre-comprehension of the
meaning of the word “death,” a supposed pre-comprehension on the basis of
which the question and its elucidation would develop. (323/237)
You should recognize this as the mode of asking a question from early in Being and
Time, such that death cannot be thought in terms of theory or in terms of something that
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brings death within the circumspective concern of Dasein. This joins well with Levinas’s
critique of Heidegger in his 74/75 lectures, God, Death, and Time where Levinas agrees
with Heidegger’s assertion in Being and Time that death is not simply an empirical
experience of the discontinuation of expressive movements in biological matter. This alltoo-usual view of death, according to Levinas, is defined by the “stopping of a behavior,
the stopping of expressive movements” (11; 20). Understood logically, then, death would
be the negation of being, i.e. nothingness. But, for Levinas, there is something about
death that escapes any ability to comprehend it, even if one is only attempting to
comprehend it as the annihilation of being. As such, death cannot be, as Heidegger puts
it, the certitude par excellence, the recognition of finitude from which the thinking of
being and time necessarily follows. On the contrary, for Levinas,
it is nonetheless not certain that death can be called a certitude, nor is it
certain that death has the meaning of annihilation. My relation with
death is also made up of the emotional and intellectual repercussions of
the knowledge of the death of others. But this relation is
disproportionate relative to all secondhand experience. Hence the
question: Can the relation with death, and the manner by which death
strikes our life, its impact upon the duration [durée] of the time that we
live, its irruption within time – or its eruption outside of time – which is
sensed in fear or in anguish, can this relation still be assimilated to a
knowledge and thus to an experience, to a revelation?” (10; 18)
Levinas argues that Heidegger attempts to comprehend death in Being and Time in order
to allow Dasein to grasp itself as a whole, as a totality of an “ability-to-be.” In this way,
death becomes another possibility for Dasein, and is thus part of Dasein’s “ ‘anticipatory
resoluteness’ as Authentic Being toward the possibility” of its death (SZ, 378). Heidegger
thus resolves the problem of death, according to Levinas, by folding it back into the most
authentic mode of Dasein’s being. This authentic mode, however, cannot be deduced
from Dasein’s encounter with the death of another. Dasein is unable to place itself in the
position of the death of the other, just as the other is prevented from doing the same for
Dasein. Dasein must die its own death; it is Dasein’s anxiety in the face of its certain
death that is most properly its own [Jemeinigkeit]. “Death thus shows itself as a
possibility without any possible substitution,” Levinas writes (39). As such, to come to
the end “is the most proper, the most untransferable, and the most inalienable possibility
of Dasein.” (39-40) “In dying, the ontological structure that is mineness, Jemeinigkeit,
reveals itself” (39).
In addition, by being confronted by its own certain death, Dasein comes to recognize a
more originary temporality than the eternal march of clock-time, based on finitude. Time
“is the mortal being’s mode of being, so that the analysis being-toward-death will provide
us with the origin of a new conception of time. …I here have a power that is my own,
proper to me.” (44) Levinas poses several questions to Heidegger’s explication of time,
especially as it relates to the connection between death and time.
Levinas also disputes Heidegger’s seemingly minimal claim that death is the “possibility
of impossibility” that forces each Dasein to account for the finitude of its existence.
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Anxiety, for Heidegger, is Dasein’s recognition of its eventual annihilation, its return to
nothingness. For Levinas, death is not nothingness, but the “ex-ceptional” unknowable.
Instead of being nothingness in constrast to the being of life, death is better thought as the
nothingness of knowledge. Death is not, according to Levinas, the “possibility of
impossibility,” which constitutes Dasein’s finitude. On the contrary, death is an “event
without project,” the “impossibility of possibility” that comes to us inevitably by surprise.
As in the final scenes of Macbeth, death always has the last laugh on us; even in our
darkest hour, we continue to write checks, Levinas remarks, on an empty bank account.
For Heidegger, it is the anticipation of death that marks Dasein’s futural relation to time;
for Levinas, death is exactly that which is unanticipatable, unknowable and has the
surprise of a murder. According to Levinas, to describe “my death” as anxiety, as found
in Being and Time, “comes back to the comprehension [by Dasein] of nothingness. The
structure of comprehension is thus preserved.” This structure of comprehension, even in
Heidegger, who had his own critique of the Husserlian phenomenology, has the structure
of intentionality, which “preserves” what Levinas calls “the identity of the same.”
Heidegger’s thinking, Levinas remarks, is “conceived on the model of the representation
of what is given, a noetico-noematic correlation” (Levinas 2000: 14-5). It is for this
reason, Levinas suggests, that Heidegger can so easily assume that death is the certitude
par excellence.
For Levinas, on the other hand, death is the ultimate question mark, the interrogative par
excellence. Levinas agrees that part of death is indeed the marking of an end. But this end
is but “a moment” of death, whose other side would not be comprehension, knowing and
conciousness, but “the question, and a question distinct from all those that are presented
as problems” (14; 23). Death, as such, is “beyond measure [dé-mesure]” and the relation
with death is “not the vision of being or nothingness” (14; 23). It reveals, Levinas
remarks, “an emotion, a movement, a disquietude [inquietude] within the unknown
[l’inconnu].” As such, Levinas argues that we must think the end in terms of an
“ambiguity of departure without return, a decease, but also of a scandal (‘Is it possible
that he is dead?) of non-response and of my responsibility.”
You go toward death, you ‘learn to die,’ you ‘prepare’ for the last
extremity; but there is the last quarter of an hour (or the last second),
and at that point it is death that completes the last leg of the journey by
itself and is a surprise. In this sense, it is not a possibility like all the
other possibilities, in which there is always a preliminary, always a
project. To be ‘unassumable’ belongs to its very quality. It is an event
without project … It is death alone that goes the last leg. Not us. We do
not, strictly speaking, meet it. (155)
Death is “par excellence a question without response [réponse], and one from which
every question borrows its interrogative mode [modalité d’interrogation]” (37), which
precisely returns us to the Derrida’s questions above. In crucial passages in DP, he argues
that all “alleged pre-comprehensions of the meaning of the word ‘death,’” as in
Heidegger, and “every imagined mastery of the sense of the word ‘death’ in language,
every calculation on the subject (and we are calculating all the time in order to speak and
to count on some meaning-to-say, some intelligibility, some translatability), every
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calculation on the subject…supposes the possibility of calculating and mastering the
instant of death…in murder, suicide, or capital punishment, all three arising from the
same possibility [namely calculating the exact moment of death]” (324/239). As Derrida
notes, we live in an age where all of these presuppositions are being “deconstructed,”
even as this means that one should not “banalize or relativize the death penalty (as finally
a whole Christian tradition has done, which uses an alibi of the beyond so as to deny the
irreversible gravity of death and legitimize the death penalty and thus demobilize
abolitionism)” (327/241). In the closing lecture, Derrida extemporizes on a passage from
Camus concerning a suffering “beyond measure”; it is perhaps the most important in the
book:
I will be tempted to place a lot of weight on this expression beyond measure
[démesuré, taken from Camus’s essay on the death penalty, but the same term
used by Levinas] because in what we are talking about, the death penalty, it is a
matter of an excessiveness [démesure], a penalty without proportion, without
commensurability, without an possible relation that is proportional with the crime.
[Thus pace Kant, and thus pace an entire tradition that thought it could bring
death within the circuit of an economy of crime and punishment, as if the scales
of justice could measure one and the other, could calculate one or the other] With
the death penalty [Derrida continues] we touch on an alleged calculation that
dares or alleges to incorporate the beyond-measure and the infinite and the
incalculable into its calculation. If there is a scandal in all these penalties, the
unheard-of, unique scandal of the death penalty is precisely this excessiveness,
the fact that it cannot be measured, ‘commessured,’ so to speak with any crime.
The death penalty dares to claim to measure the beyond-measure in some way.
(n.2 338/n.11 248)
And this “daring” means that, indeed, we can never be disinterested in life;
deconstruction begins with life’s affirmation, with life’s affirmation beyond a certain
measure as found in the tradition. In For What Tomorrow…Derrida argues that what links
Plato to Kant to Hegel to Heidegger is a “certain concept of what is proper to man, of
what is man’s own: the proper to man would consist in the ability to ‘risk his life’ in
sacrifice, to elevate himself above life, to be worth, in his dignity, something more and
other than his life, to pass through death toward a ‘life’ that is worth more than life”
(147). He thus calls for a “hyper-atheological discourse” (165) that would still have to
pass through a reading of the Abrahamic traditions that have never affirmed life, life as
such, if there is such a thing. Now I will quote at length, quite some length from the tenth
session, where the finitude of deconstruction and its affirmation of life threads the needle
of something like a hyper-abolitionism:
The point is that it belongs to life not necessarily to be immortal but to have a
future, thus some life before it, some event to come only where death, the instant
of death, is not calculable, is not the object of a calculable decision. Where the
anticipation of my death becomes the anticipation of a calculable instant, there is
no longer any future, there is thus no longer an event to come, nothing to come,
no longer any other, even no more heart of the other, and so forth. So that where
‘my life,’ be it originally granted by the heart of the other, is ‘my life,’ it must
keep this relation ot the coming of the other as the to come [venue de l’a-venir] in
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the opening of the incalculable and the indecidable…. I would say by way of
perhaps an excessive shortcut, that what we rebel against when we rebel against
the death penalty is not death or even the fact of killing, of taking a life; it is
against the calculating decision, not so much the ‘you will die,’ …at such at such
and such an hour, in that calculable place, and from blows delivered by several
machines, the worst of which is perhaps neither the guillotine nor the syring, but
the clock and the anonymity of clockwork. Or of the calendar. The insult, the
injury, the fundament injustice done to the life in me, to the principle of life in
me, is not death itself, from this point of view; it is rather the interruption of the
principle of indetermination, the end imposed on the opening of the incalculable
chance whereby a living being has a relation to what comes. [What the death
penalty ends, he goes on, is] the finitude of ‘my life.’ It is because my life is
finite, ended in a certain sense, that I keep this relation to incalculability and
undecidability as to the instant of my death. It is because my life is finite,
‘finished’ in a certain sense, that I do not know, and that I neither can nor want to
know, when I am going to die. … The machine of the death penalty deprives me
of my own finitude; it exonerates me , even, of my experience of finitude. It is to
some finitude that this madness of the death penalty claims to put an end by
putting an end, in a calculable fashion, to some life. Whence the seduction that it
can exert over fascinated subjects [for both the condemned and those doing the
condemning]. The calculating decision…affirms its power over time; it masters
the future; it protects against the irruption of the other. In any case, it seems to do
that, for this calculation, this mastery, this decidability [I would add, this ultimate
sovereignty] remain phantasms. … To be sure, an end will never put an end to
finitude, for only a finite being can be condemned to death, but the finality of this
end as damnation or condemnation, its paradoxical finality, is to produce the
invincible illusion, the phantasm of this end of finitude, thus of the other side of
infinitization. (256-8)
Perhaps this is why Derrida ends with a note that we will never be done with the death
penalty, even if I must call an end to discussing it at some point in this course. It belongs
to a thinking of the immortal and a living-on as much as it can always live on, as
concepts do, through its plasticity, thus we will kill endlessly it seem through other
means. There is no wishing either fate away, though in the name of life we must not
forget those walked one by one through all the figures of the gallows, all the figures of
how the state makes death in our biopolitical age (police shootings, lack of health care,
and so on). Beyond the death penalty, that form of abolitionism must live on.
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