Abstract
If mortality is the most important fact about us, then it is reasonable to think that fear of death is our most fundamental fear. Indeed, while philosophers continue to disagree about whether it is rational to fear death, they tend to assume that fear is the most common, natural response our mortality provokes. I neither want to deny the reality of this fear nor evaluate its rationality. Rather, drawing on Derrida’s remarks on ‘quasi-death’, I will argue that (i) fearful or not, death pervades everyday life; (ii) imagining one’s own death, and thereby remaining semi-present as a spectral observer, is not (as some allege) inherently misleading; and (iii) taking these imaginings seriously highlights another response we have toward our own mortality that is at least as significant as fear; namely, prospective, self-directed grief.
Key words Fear, immortality, quasi-death, prospective grief, ghost
I am quite a ghostly fellow. Not he who is long gone but I who still exist am more the spook.
1
In a way it’s as if I were dead already, or had never really existed.
2
Spectrality is at work everywhere… 3
1. Fearing death
1

We are fleshy, finite creatures for whom death is unavoidable and irreversible – at least, I will assume so here. And yet, even if I plan my death in meticulous detail, precisely how and when it will arrive remains uncertain.
4
Despite our aptitude for either not thinking about our mortality, or seeing death as one (albeit terminal)
‘event’ among others, 5
death is not a discrete, isolated occurrence. Neither is it merely a contingent, empirical fact of our natural history. Rather, as I will discuss shortly, mortality pervades ‘the very structure of our own lives while still living’.
6 (Hence the difficulty, if not impossibility, of imagining a recognisably human life entirely free from corporeal vulnerability and death.
7
) It is therefore reasonable to suppose that our being vulnerable, finite creatures plays a significant role in giving ordinary life its distinctive character and value. As such, we might plausibly think that mortality – and our awareness of it – is the most important fact about us.
8
Thus, according to two recent commentators: ‘Mortality is that in relation to which we can be said to shape our selfhood. It is in relation to the reality of death, both my death and the deaths of others, that the self becomes most truly itself. It is only in relation to the acceptance of self-loss that there might be a self to gain’ 9
; and in a similar vein: ‘The awareness of death serves better than any other thought to invite, sometimes to force, a refocusing on what is of ultimate importance’.
10
If death is of such fundamental importance, then it is unsurprising that fear of death is often thought to be our deepest fear.
11
To choose just a few examples, Rousseau insists that whoever ‘pretends to look on death without fear lies’, 12
while Schutz maintains that the basic experience of each of us is ‘I know that I shall die and I fear to die’.
13
Améry similarly insists that ‘[t]he fact of my death…concerns me more than all others and everything else…That we are here and can no doubt think thoroughly of a world without our being here, not however our own not-being-here, is the fundamental matter of our existence’.
14
(Later he suggests that every fear ‘goes back to the fear of death’ (OA, 120).
15
) Cioran likewise claims that
‘[w]hoever seriously considers the question of death must be afraid’, for even those who
2

believe in an afterlife only do so ‘because they are afraid of death’.
16
He proceeds: ‘What meaning can logical argument or subtle thought have for someone deeply imbued with a feeling of the irrevocable? All attempts to bring existential questions into a logical plane are null and void…[Philosophers] tremble with fear more than anyone else’ (HOD, 27).
17
Finally, on Santayana’s estimation, ‘[d]eath is something ghastly, as being born is something ridiculous’. In fact, so primitive is our fear of death that nothing is more futile ‘than to marshal arguments against that fear of death which is merely another name for the energy of life’.
18
These sentiments are neither idiosyncratic nor surprising. For while philosophers continue to disagree about whether it is rational to fear death, it is generally assumed that we do commonly fear death.
There is, of course, considerable historical and cultural variation in attitudes toward death.
19 Indeed, these attitudes differ greatly even over the course of a normal life span – though this too differs dramatically across history and culture.
20
Still, a number of general philosophical questions can be asked about fear of death. For example, we might wonder what the object of such fear really is. Certainly, it is reasonable to fear a prolonged and painful dying. In fact, fear about dying in particular ways (by heart disease, cancer, and so forth) often motivates us to minimize the likelihood of dying in those ways.
21 But here, one might suspect, what is being feared is the possible suffering involved in dying rather than death itself .
22
(Indeed, given that death will bring an end to our suffering, including the suffering generated by our fear of a painful dying, should we not welcome it?) In any case, we surely would not fear dying – painful or otherwise – if it was not normally followed by death.
23 Alternatively then, one could argue that the real object of fear is not the process of dying, but rather our posthumous non-existence; our being dead . But then, what sense is there in fearing something I cannot experience as such?
24
If we still want to insist on the legitimacy of fearing death, then we might suppose that it is not bare non-existence that we fear – after
3

all, I did not exist prior to my conception and birth, but that causes me little anxiety.
25
Rather, what remains fearful about my death is the resultant deprivation of more time to pursue plans and projects, more time to nurture personal relationships, and so on. In this sense then, prenatal and posthumous non-existence are not symmetrical, for it is only by way of the latter that I come to lose something of great value.
26
In short, only my posthumous non-existence can harm me.
I will not say more about these considerations here, partly because they have received extensive philosophical attention, but also, and more importantly, because I think there is something questionable about the preoccupation with fear of death. This is not to deny that fear figures in our attitudes toward mortality. After all, if I have reason to believe that death will soon befall me, then fear is one likely response. Moreover, we clearly do fear the deaths of others (both human and animal), sometimes more than we fear our own.
27 Still, even if mortality is the most important fact about us, fear of death is not the only response we have to this inescapable, irreversible fate. In fact, when we actually consider our own mortality – that is, when we do not treat death as just another philosophical puzzle to disinterestedly mull over
28
– then fear plays a rather limited role. My aim here is therefore to describe another response our mortality provokes that is at least as significant as fear; namely, prospective, self-directed grief. In order to get to that, however, I first want to say something about the pervasiveness of death within life.
2. The pervasiveness of death
In an interview with the Los Angeles Weekly , Derrida is asked ‘What’s important to you today?’. He responds as follows:
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Many things private, public and political are important to me, but I think of all these things with a constant awareness that I’m aging, I’m going to die, and life is short.
I’m constantly attentive to the time left to me, and although I’ve been inclined this way since I was young, it becomes more serious when you reach 72. So far I haven’t made peace with the inevitability of death, and I doubt I ever will, and this awareness permeates everything I think. It’s terrible what’s going on in the world, and all these things are on my mind, but they exist alongside this terror of my own death.
29
Elsewhere he similarly confesses:
I think about nothing but death, I think about it all the time, ten seconds don’t go by without the imminence of the thing being there. I never stop analysing the phenomenon of ‘survival’ as the structure of surviving, it’s really the only thing that interests me, but precisely insofar as I do not believe that one lives on post mortem.
And at bottom it is what commands everything – what I do, what I am, what I write, what I say […] I think that we are structured by the phantasmic… 30
Likewise, in his last interview just a few months before his death, Derrida admits: ‘I am never more haunted by the necessity of dying than in moments of happiness and joy. To feel joy and to weep over the death that awaits are for me the same thing’.
31
It would be hasty to dismiss this avowed preoccupation with death as morbid fascination on Derrida’s part. For while these remarks have an autobiographical component, 32 their significance is not merely personal. As Derrida suggests, not only is there a sense in which we are ‘structured by the phantasmic’, he maintains that ‘the self is constituted by a certain work of mourning’.
33
The claim that death haunts our everyday lives might seem unduly dramatic. But there is
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something worth pursuing here. After all, the inevitability of death, coupled with the uncertainty of how and when it will arrive, are not merely empirical facts about us. Neither are they the sorts of things we establish by means of scientific investigation, statistical evidence or inference. Rather, as Earle puts it, these facts are embedded in ‘the very structure of our own lives’ (AC, 214).
34
In other words, ‘life’ and ‘death’ are not mutually exclusive categories; rather, death is a pervasive feature of ordinary life.
35
Let me illustrate this with some concrete examples.
Again in his final interview, Derrida admits that the notion of ‘survival’ has haunted his life and work.
36
Specifically, he insists that survival is not something ‘ added on to living and dying’; rather, ‘life is living on, life is survival’ (LLF, 26)
37
:
At the moment I leave ‘my’ book (to be published)…I become, appearingdisappearing, like that uneducable spectre who will have learned to live. The trace I leave signifies to me at once my death, either to come or already come upon me, and the hope that this trace survives me. This is not a striving for immortality; it’s something structural. I leave a piece of paper behind, I go away, I die: it is impossible to escape this structure, it is the unchanging form of my life […] I live my death in writing. (LLF, 32–33)
38
Although Derrida denies that his account of ‘writing’ (iterability, survival and associated themes) constitutes a thesis on mortality
39
– it does not, for example, concern the ethical or epistemic significance of last words 40 – interpretive care is needed here. For while there is something right about the claim that ‘Derrida’s work has always been all about death’ (SEF,
136), what interests him is not the inevitability of death, but the haunting, ever-present possibility of death – and here ‘death’ signifies the most radical form of absence.
41
More
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precisely, Derrida insists that for any meaningful sentence to function entails that ‘I may be absent’. That is: ‘The functioning of the sentence doesn’t require my being present to it. On the contrary, the functioning of the sentence implies the possibility of my being radically “on leave” so to speak, radically absent’. This absence is not an accident that may or may not befall language, but constitutes the necessary or structural condition of possibility for any sentence to be ‘performed, understood and repeated’ (AWD, 102).
42
Thus, for a sentence to function, it must be capable of surviving me.
43 Indeed, even one’s own name – that most intimately familiar part of one’s natural language – ‘says death…while the bearer of it is still living’ (WOM, 34).
44
In this way, death pervades our life as language-using animals.
We do not have to accept Derrida’s specific theses on ‘writing’ to appreciate the manifold ways in which mortality structures ordinary life. After all, our temporally openended commitments, relationships, plans and projects will be cut short by death, just as those temporally bound activities we manage to see to fruition could have been prematurely terminated by death.
45
Indeed, one might consider every significant ending to be ‘an intimation of the final end that is death’. (For example, ‘[t]he end of childhood, youth, and middle age each foreshadow one’s personal death, as do the endings of all the chapters or phases of one’s life’ (DL, 43–44).) It is a contingent fact that, being born into a particular historical, socio-economic and cultural context, some forms of death are more-or-less likely to strike us down. But that we will die in a particular way at a particular time are not trivial facts.
46
For a life temporally extended forever, immune to the ravages of time and natural degeneration, would not be recognizably ours – and thus neither, perhaps, would it be something we could justifiably want.
47 (We might wonder why an immortal life would be any less fearful a prospect than death?) Moreover, it is reasonable to suppose that much of the urgency and significance of our various pursuits derive from the (more-or-less tacit) awareness of our finitude, including ‘[t]he death imminent in any moment’.
48
We might
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therefore wonder what meaning and value our various activities would have if death was avoidable:
Would anything have the slightest value if we had to be around forever, testing it again and again, endlessly repeating everything that in our own actual mortal lives can be done once and once only? [Perhaps]…the entire poignancy and value of whatever we do or suffer in life is necessarily bound up with our mortality; each moment is unrepeatable, unique, irreplaceable. The value of every experience is bound up with the fact that we are always experiencing it for the first and last time…What is the energy of passion, what gives it its intensity, except the imminence of death? (AC,
216–217)
49
While living a human life is a ‘full-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern’ (MQ, 15), we should not exaggerate the control we have over our lives. For living a life is also an inherently precarious business, even for those of us blessed with prosperity and health. For it takes just a little bad luck – faulty traffic lights, treacherous weather conditions, ‘[a] stray bullet, a stray chromosome, a stray virus, a wanton cellular division’ 50
– for life to come undone.
51
There are, of course, many other ways death pervades life. Not implausibly,
Schopenhauer suggests that ‘[e]very parting is a foretaste of death’ 52
– hence the minor mourning experienced when one’s beloved leaves us or we leave them.
53
That I might never see her again, however unlikely this may be, is again inscribed as a necessary possibility – just as it is a necessary possibility that one of us will survive the other’s death.
54
But survival extends beyond our direct interpersonal relations. Consider the language in which we are first trained and which becomes so intimately familiar. Clearly, one’s native tongue is not of one’s
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own invention; rather, it is something we each inherit from a more-or-less anonymous throng of long dead predecessors.
55 And of course, just as their native tongue survived them, so too
(barring an apocalypse) will it survive us.
56
There is, however, a more general phenomenological point to be made here; namely, that the very notion of an objective,
‘surrounding world’ 57
includes ‘thereness-for-everyone’.
58
The everyday natural and cultural objects I encounter refer me, albeit tacitly and indirectly, to other subjects. But as with our native tongue, these others include both those who might come along in the future and those who have preceded me. We might even say that those who will come along after I am dead, and those who already came along and are now dead (or who might be dying at this very moment), constitute part of what ‘objective world’ means . In this way, death is inscribed in my dealings with the most mundane artefacts of the world.
Both the natural and cultural environment I inhabit are littered with traces of more-orless anonymous others who preceded me, just as I will leave traces for those who come along after I have gone.
59
As Nozick remarks, ‘[w]hen people desire to leave a trace behind, they want to leave a certain kind of trace’. But only some of these traces are left intentionally; for better or worse ‘[w]e all do leave traces, causal effects reverberate down’.
60
While some of these traces are concrete – the accidental abrasions left on the objects of everyday life, the names of lovers etched into trees, and so on – other traces are of a less tangible sort. As
Reynolds notes, early audio recording technologies held out the prospect of ‘a kind of immortality, the possibility that our voices would be listened to by “the not yet born”’.
61
But this spectral relation to audio media is not merely of historical interest. For as he proceeds:
‘In a sense, a record really is a ghost: it’s a trace of a musician’s body, the after-imprint of breath and exertion. There’s a parallel between the phonograph and the photograph: both are reality’s death mask. With analogue recording there’s a direct physical relationship with the sound source’ (RET, 312–313).
62
Reynolds is right to highlight the parallel between
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phonography and photography’s own capacity to elicit the return of the dead.
63
The latter is powerfully illustrated in Barthes’ discussion of Gardner’s 1865 ‘Portrait of Lewis Payne’.
Convicted of conspiring to assassinate President Lincoln, Payne awaits execution, looking us
‘ straight in the eye
’ (CL, 111). What interests Barthes about this photograph is its twofold relation to death; namely, that Payne is both going to die (at the time the photograph was taken), and yet already dead (for subsequent viewers). In this sense, Gardner’s photograph
‘tells me death in the future’. Indeed, it is this curious spectral dimension of the photographic image that enables us to ‘shudder… over a catastrophe which has already occurred
’ (CL, 96).
But the relationship between photography and mortality does not only pertain to images of our long-dead predecessors. For Barthes suggests that to see oneself in a photograph is to experience a ‘micro-version of death’ (CL, 14) insofar as ‘each photograph always contains this imperious sign of my future death’ (CL, 97).
64 (Here we might recall what Derrida says of the proper name; that it ‘says death…while the bearer of it is still living’ (WOM, 34), and likewise elsewhere, that ‘the name is always and a priori a dead man’s name, a name of death’.
65
) In living a life, I inevitably leave traces of myself that can survive my absence – including, in the end, my death. But Derrida’s point is not merely that these traces might in fact survive me; rather, the possibility of their survival constitutes part of their very structure.
That is to say, every gesture, utterance, discarded bus ticket, Facebook update (and so on) is inscribed from the very beginning with this possibility of survival.
66
Given that death is both inevitable and possible at any moment, all the mundane traces I leave around me as I pass through life signal my future death. In this crucial sense then, life and death are inextricably entwined. As ‘life is not separable from an experience of death’ (SQ, 103), Derrida thus talks of a certain ‘life-death beyond the opposition between life and death’ (SPM, 67). In short: ‘I posthume as I breathe’ (CIR, 26).
67
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Mindful of these examples of how we are ‘structured by the phantasmic’ (ATS, 89), I now want to turn to perhaps the most familiar experience of mortality; namely, imagining oneself dead.
68
3. Being (not quite) dead
If in death one’s sensory, affective and cognitive capacities are irreversibly terminated, then my death is not an ‘event’ in my life 69 – not, that is, something I will (live to) experience, let alone report on. But if nobody experiences death as such , then how can we even imagine our own death? In one sense there is ‘nothing to think about death’, for death is ‘a nothing, a negativity’ (OA, 104).
70
Of course, I can imagine the process of dying (of lying on my deathbed, or in the street, feeling consciousness slip away), just as I can imagine the probable effects my death will have on those I leave behind; I imagine family and friends dealing with my corpse, organising my funeral, clearing my house and office for their new occupants, and so forth.
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But while I can picture the world without me, I imagine all these scenarios from a particular perspective. For here I remain (partially) present, albeit as a spectral observer of the world as others’ lives continue to unfold in my (partial) absence. As Améry puts it: ‘[E]very subjective utterance about one’s own death contains a logical problem. I am not. Doesn’t this
“I am” exclude the “not”? Not insofar as my utterance lets me both take myself out of myself and view my nonbeing or not-being-here as an objective fact, i.e., from the perspective of the survivor’ (OA, 108).
72
This curious predicament of seeing oneself from the perspective of the survivor – in other words, of being not quite dead – has been a source of philosophical concern over the centuries. Thus, for example, Lucretius warns:
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When you find a man treating it as a grievance that after death he will either moulder in the grave or fall prey to flames or to the jaws of predatory beasts, be sure that his utterance does not ring true. Subconsciously his heart is stabbed by a secret dread, however loudly the man himself may disavow the belief that after death he will still experience sensation. I am convinced that he does not grant the admission he professes, nor the grounds of it; he does not oust and pluck himself root and branch out of life, but all unwittingly makes something of himself linger on. When a living man confronts the thought that after death his body will be mauled by birds and beasts of prey, he is filled with self-pity. He does not banish himself from the scene nor distinguish sharply enough between himself and that abandoned carcass. He visualizes that object as himself and infects it with his own feelings as an onlooker.
That is why he is aggrieved at having been created mortal. He does not see that in real death there will be no other self alive to mourn his own decease – no other self standing by to flinch at the agony he suffers lying there being mangled, or indeed being cremated.
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Likewise, according to Merleau-Ponty, neither birth nor death ‘can appear to me as experiences of my own, since, if I thought of them thus, I should be assuming myself to be pre-existent to, or outliving, myself, in order to be able to experience them, and I should therefore not be genuinely thinking of my birth or my death’. Consequently, I can ‘apprehend myself only as “already born” and “still alive”’.
74
And in a similar vein, Fingarette cautions:
[T]he force of lifelong habit fills in where imagination has no other option. One literally can’t imagine what it will be like to be dead – there’s nothing to imagine.
What one does imagine is the nearest analogy – being separated from loved ones.
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Trying to imagine death, one unwittingly imagines something else instead, something that crucially misrepresents the matter…It’s a self-deception in which I imagine a world wherein I am still alive, gazing, as it were, on my loved ones but, being ‘dead’,
I am unable to reach them in any way… (DPS, 16)
75
Here then we are variously assured that imagining one’s own death is disingenuous, deceptive and a misrepresentation of the facts. For when we imagine being dead we cannot help but imagine part of ourselves surviving to bear witness. As such, we should not take these posthumous imaginings very seriously. Indeed, it might be better to disregard them altogether. But I think that these conclusions are premature. To explain why, let me return to
Derrida.
During an interview at the 1995 symposium ‘Applied Derrida’, Derrida again discusses his own mortality. Of the symposium itself, this is what he says:
You can imagine that when one comes to a conference entitled ‘Applied
You
’, you experience the situation in which it is as if you were dead…[A]mongst the various reasons why on many occasions I do agree to attend conferences on me is because, after a lot of hesitations, a lot of inner contradictions, I would like to see what it looks like as if I were dead, listening and being among them, while not playing the pathetic role of the dead person. (AID, 215)
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Notwithstanding the strange appeal of experiencing himself as if he was dead, Derrida proceeds to suggest that what lies at the heart of our fear of death is not the prospect of bare non-existence, or even the harm incurred by being deprived of more life, but rather the
‘fantasy that we are going to be present at and in attendance at this non-world, at our own
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death’. That is to say, what really concerns us here is the possibility that we might somehow
‘continue to be dead, that is, absent, while attending the actual world, being deprived of sharing the life of the survivors’; this is ‘even more terrible: dead without being dead’. On
Derrida’s estimation then, what is ‘absolutely scary is the idea of being dead while being quasi-dead, while looking at things from above, from beyond’ (AID, 216). Attending conferences dedicated to his work thus affords him the opportunity to experience being not quite dead; to participate in ‘an experiment in quasi-dying’ (AID, 217). And yet, Derrida suggests, the most troubling fantasy is being dead while also surviving to witness one’s absence – to see oneself from a distance, unable to intervene in worldly affairs.
We generally like to think that ‘it shouldn’t ever be as if you had never existed at all’
(PE, 582). Most of us want our being-here to have made some positive contribution, no matter how modest. But unless we are hopelessly deluded about our own importance, when envisioning our ‘quasi-death’ we soon realise that the traces we leave behind will sooner or later disappear, and the world will continue to turn largely unaffected by our absence.
Recognising the minimal and temporary significance our absence will have after we are gone, we might then wonder how much significance our living currently has .
77
Thus, on Cioran’s bleak estimation: ‘This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return…Everything is unique – and insignificant’ (TWB, 38).
78
Pessoa makes the point even more forcefully: ‘Tomorrow I too will disappear…Tomorrow I too – this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be someone who no longer walks these streets, someone others will evoke with a value: “I wonder what’s become of him?” And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other’.
79
But while imagining oneself quasi-dead highlights the fragility and transience of life, the fact that
‘soon all things will have forgotten you’ (MED, 7:21) need not provoke existential despair.
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There may be some value in following Aurelius’ council to ‘[t]ake a view from above – look at the thousands of flocks and herds, the thousands of human ceremonies, every sort of voyage in storm or calm, the range of creation, combination, and extinction. Consider too the lives once lived by others long before you, the lives that will be lived after you, the lives lived now among foreign tribes; and how many have never even heard your name, how many will very soon forget it’ (MED, 9:30). As Brodsky suggests, acknowledging one’s relative insignificance might even have positive moral consequences:
‘You are finite’, time tells you in a voice of boredom, ‘and whatever you do is, from my point of view, futile.’ As music to your ears, this, of course, may not count; yet the sense of futility, of limited significance even of your best, most ardent actions is better than the illusion of their consequences and the attendant self-aggrandizement. For boredom…puts your existence into its perspective…The more you learn about your own size, the more humble and the more compassionate you become to your likes, to that dust aswirl in a sunbeam or already immobile atop your table…You are insignificant because you are finite. Yet the more finite a thing is, the more it is charged with life, emotions, joy, fears, compassion. For infinity is not terribly lively, not terribly emotional. Your boredom, at least, tells you that much […] [P]assion is the privilege of the insignificant.
80
This latter point is beautifully articulated in Wenders’ 1987 film
Wings of Desire . Here
Wenders explores what it means to be a finite, fleshy creature – with all the limitations and vulnerabilities this involves – through the character of Dammiel, a rebellious angel (one of many) who God punishes by imprisoning in Berlin.
81
As Wenders explains, these angels are
‘condemned to be witnesses, forever nothing but onlookers, unable to affect men in the
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slightest, or to intervene in the course of history’ (OF, 237). In his angelic form, Dammiel sees and hears everything – including the most private thoughts of the local (mortal) population. And yet, despite their familiarity with these ordinary folk, the angels cannot fully comprehend their corporeal lives. They do not understand what it is to touch, smell or taste something,
82
or ‘what it’s like throwing a stone, or what water or fire are like, or picking up some object in your hand, let alone touching or kissing’. Wenders proceeds: ‘All these things escape the angels. They are pure CONSCIOUSNESS, fuller and more comprehending than mankind, but also poorer. The physical and sensual world is reserved for human beings. It is the privilege of mortality, and death is its price’ (OF, 240). Whatever advantages an immortal, purely spiritual existence might have, Dammiel confesses that this spectral, quasidead life no longer satisfies him: ‘I’d like to feel a weight in me’, he says, ‘to end the infinity and to tie me to earth’:
I’d like at each step, each gust of wind, to be able to say ‘Now, now and now’. No longer: ‘Forever’ and ‘For eternity’. Sit at the empty place at a card table, be greeted, even by a nod. Every time we participated, it was a pretence. Wrestling, allowing a hip to be put out, in pretence, catching a fish, in pretence. In pretence, sitting at tables drinking and eating in pretence. Having lambs roasted and wine served…only in pretence…[I]t would be nice, coming home after a long day to feed the cat…to have a fever, blackened fingers from the newspaper. To be excited not only by the mind, but by a meal. By the line of a neck, by an ear. To lie. Through one’s teeth. As you’re walking, to feel your bones moving along. At least to guess instead of always knowing. To be able to say: ‘Ah’ and ‘Oh’ and ‘Hey’ instead of ‘Yes’ and ‘amen’.
…Or to feel how it is to take off your shoes under the table and to wriggle your toes, barefoot, like that […] What my timeless downward look has taught me I want to
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transmute, to sustain a glance, a short shout, a sour smell. I’ve been outside long enough. Absent long enough. Long enough out of the world. Let me enter the history of the world. Or just hold an apple in my hand…Look, the tyre marks on the asphalt, and now the cigarette butt rolling…Down with the world behind the world.
In a similar vein, Peter Falk (a former angel, now fully mortal) describes the primitive joy of smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee, of taking a pencil and drawing a line, and of rubbing one’s hands together on a frosty day. Although, as Dammiel recognises, to become human entails entering ‘the ford of time, the ford of death’, his longing for mortality is eventually satisfied. Near the end of the film, he thus declares: ‘I know now what no angel knows’.
More than anything, Wings of Desire is a celebration of human mortality. But by this I do not mean that we should, or even can, welcome our finitude with unrestrained enthusiasm.
Clearly, our relationship with our own and others’ mortality is a more complex affair.
83
Specifically, the death imminent in any moment has a dual aspect in the sense that our mortality is ‘both an enemy and the absolute condition of meaning for life itself’ (AC, 220) 84
– or, to borrow Derrida’s quasi-transcendental formulation: ‘[W]hat threatens is also what makes possible’ (WA, 135). One might therefore say that neither mortality, immortality nor quasi-death are fully satisfying prospects. But what interests me here is that in Derrida’s remarks on quasi-death there is no suggestion that such imaginings are inherently deceptive or misleading. Rather, being neither fully present nor fully absent – in other words, being ghost-like – captures something important about the human predicament.
85
After all, for better or worse (for better and worse), we happen to be the sort of creatures who cannot wholly avoid imaginatively disengaging from our immediate concerns, and thereby envisioning ourselves ‘from above, from beyond’ (AID, 216); one cannot help but imagine oneself ‘surviving, present at one’s death, present or represented in absentia at one’s death
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even in all the signs, traces, images, memories, even the body, the corpse or the ashes, literal or metaphorical, that we leave behind, in more or less organized and deliberate fashion, to the survivors’ (BS2, 117). This natural capacity for self-transcendence is undoubtedly one of our most interesting characteristics.
86
But insofar as our reflexive ability to see ourselves from a distance prevents us from full immersion in momentary experience,
87
it also threatens our well-being.
88
For when I imaginatively step-back and absent myself from my immediate concerns, even those things I care most about – my relationships, achievements and ambitions, my disappointments and frustrations, plans, projects, and not least my mortality – can come to seem arbitrary and trivial.
89
Imagining oneself quasi-dead is the limit case; the ultimate absence.
90
It is, however, an unavoidable consequence of our being self-transcending animals.
In the passages quoted above, Derrida refers explicitly to the fearfulness of death.
91
Nevertheless, his remarks on quasi-death and survival highlight another, at least equally significant, response our mortality provokes. This is what I want to sketch in the final section.
4. Grief and quasi-death
As previously noted, according to Merleau-Ponty envisaging oneself dead is not to genuinely think of one’s death. In a similar vein, Fingarette describes these imaginings as a deceptive misrepresentation of the facts, while Lucretius warns against taking them too seriously, lest they provoke unwarranted self-pity. But as I said above, for better or worse, we happen to be constituted in such a way that self-transcendence is pretty much unavoidable for animals like us. To this extent at least we find ourselves fluctuating between two perspectives on life; the immersed-subjective perspective, and a more disengaged-objective perspective.
92
In
Derridean terminology, although we are corporeal beings, we are nevertheless haunted by the ghostly, quasi-dead component of ourselves, and thereby ‘structured by the phantasmic’
18

(ATS, 89).
93
Imagining oneself dead (to experience one’s quasi-death) is simply part and parcel of our reflexive capacity for self-transcendence.
If this is right, then what else, besides fear, characterises our relationship with our own mortality? When he was first told that someday he would die, Craig recalls being ‘filled with fear and unbearable sadness’.
94
This allusion to sadness is important and relates directly to Derrida’s remarks on quasi-death – specifically his claim that ‘the self is constituted by a certain work of mourning’ (POM, 14). What Derrida means by this is multifaceted. But it is reasonable to suppose that one of its features is self -mourning; namely, my ‘weep[ing] over the death that awaits [me]’ (LLF, 52). If what I have previously suggested is correct, then it is unsurprising that when I envisage my quasi-death it is not only (perhaps not even primarily) fear that I experience, but self-directed, prospective grief.
95
In other words, when I imagine
(prospectively) looking over the countless traces my life left behind, I find myself here and now mourning my (future) death.
96
Let me say a bit more about this before bringing things to a close.
In his analysis of the emotions, Solomon rightly notes that the ‘realization of our extreme vulnerability to loss’ 97
is a fundamental component of human experience.
98
More specifically, it is grief that ‘puts us in touch with our mortality’.
99 Part of what is important about grief, he plausibly maintains, is its moral dimension. After all, grief is not merely an appropriate response in specific circumstances, it can also be obligatory; to not grieve can be a moral failure.
100
Moreover, one’s right to grieve depends upon the sort of relationship one had with the deceased.
101
Although Solomon focuses on the grief of bereavement which follows the death of a loved one, he nevertheless acknowledges that grief need not be otherdirected. For not only can one grieve for the loss of inanimate objects (a treasured family heirloom, a love letter, a wedding ring, and so on), grief can also be self -directed. For example, I might grieve for the life I could have had, or the loss of mobility, sight or hearing
19

brought about by ageing or illness.
102
While these examples of self-directed grief might seem relatively trivial compared to the grief caused by the death of another person, much will depend on contingent contextual factors. Indeed, there is no obvious reason why one must grieve more deeply for the loss of sight than for the loss of a wedding ring, or why the loss of one’s hearing must be less traumatic than the death of a work colleague, or why the death of a beloved dog must be less traumatic than the death of another human being. Be that as it may, what interests me here is Solomon’s more general acknowledgement that grief can be selfdirected. For as I have been suggesting, self-directed grief – specifically, mourning one’s own
(prospective) death – is no less common or significant than the other-directed grief expressed in mourning the (actual) death of another. We might even describe both as forms of bereavement. For while ‘[w]e see others die, and feel in anxiety and grief their disappearance from our world’ (IMP, 154), so too do we imagine ourselves quasi-dead, and thereby
(prospectively) mourn or grieve for our own inevitable disappearance from the ongoing commotion of life.
In McMullen’s 1983 film
Ghost Dance , a student asks Derrida if he believes in ghosts. ‘That’s a difficult question’, he responds, not least because she is ‘asking a ghost whether he believes in ghosts’.
103 Derrida’s suggestion that he is a ghost is the sort of dramatic claim – alongside ‘I live my death in writing’ (LLF, 33), ‘[s]pectrality is at work everywhere’ (PAP, 158), ‘I posthume as I breathe’ (CIR, 26), and so on – that exasperates his critics. This is perhaps unsurprising. For philosophers tend to prefer more sparsely populated ontologies to Derrida’s world of haunting absences. But whatever our metaphysical tastes might be, his talk of ghostly traces, spectres and phantasms is not wilful mystification. That life is ‘structured by the phantasmic’ (ATS, 89), and the self ‘constituted by a certain work of mourning’ (POM, 14), are indeed provocative claims, but they are worth taking seriously, even when thinking about mortality in the most concrete terms. As Solomon notes, the other-
20

directed grief of bereavement is ‘dominated by a peculiar kind of perception’ – namely, that the beloved other ‘is not there ’. But more than that, ‘an absence can be more poignant, more noticeable, more obsessive, than any presence’ (TTF, 77).
104
As I hope to have made clear, this is pertinent both to our mourning the deaths of others and to the (prospective) selfdirected grief one’s own death can provoke.
105
Notes
1
Ben Hecht, quoted in Robert Kastenbaum, ‘Death and Development Through the Lifespan’, in Herman Feifel, New Meanings of Death (USA: McGraw-Hill, 1977), 18 (hereafter abbreviated DD).
2 Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1989), 228 (hereafter abbreviated VN).
3
Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 158 (hereafter abbreviated PAP).
4
See Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (London: Penguin, 2006), 2:5, 3:1 (hereafter abbreviated
MED); Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton CA: Princeton
University Press, 1968), 149, 151; Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell,
1999), 302 (hereafter abbreviated BT).
5
See BT, 296–298, 302; E.M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born (London: Quartet,
1993), 31 (hereafter abbreviated TWB).
6 William Earle, The Autobiographical Consciousness: A Philosophical Inquiry into
Existence (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1972), 214 (hereafter abbreviated AC).
7
See Mikel Burley, ‘Immortality and Meaning: Reflections on the Makropulos Debate’,
Philosophy 84 (October 2009), 534–537.
21

8
See Todd May, Death (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2009) 4 (hereafter abbreviated D); La
Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims and Other Reflections (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007), V:26 (hereafter abbreviated CM); Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and
Other Religious Writings (London: Penguin, 1987), 28–31, 33, 35.
9
Simon Critchley, The Book of Dead Philosophers (London: Granta, 2008), 280.
10
Paul Fairfield, Death and Life (New York: Algora, 2001), 19; see also 21 (hereafter abbreviated DL).
11
See Christopher Hamilton, Living Philosophy: Reflections on Life, Meaning and Morality
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 153 (hereafter abbreviated LP); Gregory
Zilboorg, ‘Fear of Death’,
The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 12 (1943), 466–467; Robert Jay
Lifton and Eric Olson, ‘Symbolic Immortality’, in Antonius C.G.M. Robben (ed.),
Death,
Mourning, and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 32.
12
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, quoted in D.J. Enright (ed.), The Oxford Book of Death (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22.
13
Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1973), 228 (hereafter abbreviated CP1).
14 Jean Améry, On Aging: Revolt and Resignation (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1994), 108 (hereafter abbreviated OA).
15
See also OA, 121; CP1, 228.
16
E.M. Cioran, On The Heights of Despair (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1992), 26 (hereafter abbreviated HOD).
17 See also CM, V:21, 504; Michael A. Slote, ‘Existentialism and the Fear of Dying’, in John
Donnelly (ed.), Language, Metaphysics, and Death (New York: Fordham University Press,
1983), 80; Ernest Becker, ‘The Terror of Death’, in Antonius C.G.M. Robben (ed.),
Death,
22

Mourning, and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 24 (hereafter abbreviated TOD).
18
George Santayana, quoted in Peter Heinegg (ed.), Mortalism: Readings of the Meaning of
Life (New York: Prometheus, 2003), 151.
19
See Jacques Derrida, Aporias (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 24ff, 43ff, 60
(hereafter abbreviated APO).
20 See DD; Irving Singer, Meaning in Life: The Creation of Value (Cambridge, Mass. and
London: MIT Press, 2009), 67–70 (hereafter abbreviated ML).
21
See OA, 105–106; Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, ‘Fearing Death’, Philosophy 58 (April 1983),
176.
22
See APO, 51. It is unclear what ‘death’ names besides that infinitesimally small transition from dying to being-dead . On a related point see ML, 49.
23
See Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge, UK: Canto, 1991), 3 footnote (hereafter abbreviated MQ).
24
See Epicurus, in Brad Inwood (ed.), The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and
Testimonia (Indianapolis and Cambridge, UK: Hackett, 1994), 4:125.
25 See Lucretius, quoted in Geoffrey Scarre, Death (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007), 98–99;
Stephen E. Rosenbaum, ‘The Symmetry Argument: Lucretius Against the Fear of Death’,
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 50 (December 1989), 353–373; Arthur
Schopenhauer, quoted in Herbert Fingarette, Death: Philosophical Soundings (Chicago and
Illinois: Open Court, 1997), 144 (hereafter abbreviated DPS).
26 See MQ, 1, 4, 7–8; ML, 62–63; Robert C. Solomon, ‘Death Fetishism, Morbid Solipsism’, in Jeff Malpas and Robert C. Solomon (eds), Death and Philosophy (London and New York:
Routledge, 1998), 168 (hereafter abbreviated DF).
27
See DF, 152–153.
23

28
See DD, 19; DF, 153–155, 169; DL, 13; OA, 114.
29 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Three Ages of Jacques Derrida: An Interview with the Father of
Deconstructionism’,
LA Weekly , November 6, 2002 (http://www.laweekly.com/2002-11-
14/news/the-three-ages-of-jacques-derrida/?showFullText=true) (hereafter abbreviated TAJ).
30
Jacques Derrida (with Maurizio Ferraris), A Taste for the Secret (Cambridge, UK: Polity,
2001), 88–89 (hereafter abbreviated ATS).
31
Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview (Basingstoke and New York:
Palgrave, 2007), 52 (hereafter abbreviated LLF). See also TWB, 157.
32
See Jacques Derrida, ‘Circumfession’, in Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington,
Jacques Derrida (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 37, 43, 51, 58,
94, 112, 119, 127–128, 137, 142–143, 148, 165–166, 177, 184, 191, 206–207, 221, 232–233,
260–263, 284 (hereafter abbreviated CIR).
33 Jacques Derrida, ‘Perhaps or Maybe’, in Jonathon Dronsfield and Nick Midgley (eds),
Responsibilities of Deconstruction , PLI Warwick Journal of Philosophy 6 (1997), 14
(hereafter abbreviated POM); see also Jacques Derrida, in Screenplay and Essays on the Film
Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 101 (hereafter abbreviated SEF).
34
See also ML, 58–60. Of course, we have to learn what death means (see TOD, 24).
35 See PAP, 158. The ‘structural’ role of mortality figures in Derrida’s treatment of a wide range of issues, including the self (see POM, 14), truth and objectivity (see Jacques Derrida,
‘ As if I were Dead’, in John Brannigan, Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (eds), Applying:
To Derrida (London: MacMillan, 1996), 216 (hereafter abbreviated AID)), friendship (see
Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2005), 139 (hereafter abbreviated SQ)); Jacques Derrida, The Work of
Mourning (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 107, 171 (hereafter abbreviated WOM)), choice (see Jacques Derrida (with Elisabeth Roudinesco), For What
24

Tomorrow… A Dialogue
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 5), giving and taking
(see Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1995), 44; Jacques Derrida, Given Time I. Counterfeit Money (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 102), the promise (see Jacques Derrida, ‘Following
Theory’, in Michael Payne and John Shad (eds),
Life After Theory (London and New York:
Continuum, 2003), 15–16 (hereafter abbreviated FT)), and ethical relations (see ATS, 23).
36 See LLF, 25.
37
See also LLF, 24, 51; Jacques Derrida, ‘Demeure: Fiction and Testimony’, in Jacques
Derrida and Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 45; Jacques Derrida, Adieu: To Emmanuel
Levinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 6; Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion
(London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 382–384, 391. Indeed, as infants we are already survivors insofar as ‘[t]he creation of a new human life does emerge from the context of possible life in which a vast number of potential individuals are terminated while still in their
“makings”’ (DD, 21).
38
See also LLF, 51; PAP, 158.
39 See Jacques Derrida, in Simon Glendinning (ed.), Arguing with Derrida (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001), 102 (hereafter abbreviated AWD).
40
See Robert Kastenbaum, ‘Last Words’, The Monist 76 (1993), 270–290.
41
Other absences include the absence of a speaker’s seriousness and sincerity (see Jacques
Derrida, Without Alibi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 111–112 (hereafter abbreviated WA)).
42
See SQ, 103-104; FT, 16–17; Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Sussex: Harvester,
1982), 315–316, 324–327; Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc.
(Evanston, Il.: Northwestern
University Press, 1988); Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena And Other Essays on
25

Husserl’s Theory of Signs
(Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 54; Jacques
Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1987), 29, 33 (hereafter abbreviated TPC); Geoffrey
Bennington, ‘Derridabase’, in Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington,
Jacques Derrida
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 49–52, 148).
43
In this sense, language is ‘immortal’ (see AWD, 104).
44 See also TPC, 39.
45
And, of course, these activities are inevitably bound up with the lives (and deaths) of others
(see DF, 174–176).
46
See ML, 58.
47
See AC, 226; D, 48; LP, 164.
48 Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1998), 159 (hereafter abbreviated IMP).
49
See also AC, 226; Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Immortal’, in Labyrinths (London: Penguin,
1970), 135–149.
50
John D. Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant
Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1993), 234 (hereafter abbreviated AE).
51
It is surely not incidental that Tolstoy describes Ivan Ilyich’s demise as beginning with an injury sustained while hanging curtains (see Leo Tolstoy, The Raid and Other Stories
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 245 (hereafter abbreviated ROS)).
52 Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms (London: Penguin, 1970), 167.
53
See Roland Barthes,
A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
(London: Penguin, 1990), 37–38.
54
See SQ, 139; WOM, 107, 171.
26

55
Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002), 111 (hereafter abbreviated NEG). Derrida maintains that, as language is ‘there before us, it is older than us, its law precedes us’ (SQ, 104), it is never fully
‘owned’ (SQ, 101).
56
See LLF, 36.
57
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy, Second Book (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer, 1989), 206.
58
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (The Hague,
Boston, London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 92.
59
On a related point see CP1, 10, 15ff, 318.
60
Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1981), 584 (hereafter abbreviated PE).
61
Simon Reynolds,
Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past
(New York: Faber and Faber, 2011), 312 (hereafter abbreviated RET).
62
The Derridean term ‘hauntology’ (see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the
Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (New York and London: Routledge,
1994), 63, 202 (hereafter abbreviated SPM)) has been used to describe the work of a number of contemporary musicians, notably those associated with the record label Ghost Box (see
RET, 311–361; Mark Fisher, Ghost of My Life: Writings of Depression, Hauntology and Lost
Futures (Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2014), 97–181; Christopher Budd, ‘A
Half-Remembered Past’, Shindig!
32, 14–15).
63 See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 2000), 9 (hereafter abbreviated
CL). Photography, Barthes claims, ‘has something to do with resurrection’ insofar as ‘what I see is not a memory, an imagination, a reconstitution…such as art lavishes upon us, but reality in a past state: at once the past and the real’ (CL, 82; see also 5–6, 76–77, 80–81, 87–
27

88, 92; Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), 21,
80; Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1979), 15, 70).
64
Barthes notes how, in photographs of others, we are certain that the referent once existed
‘ in flesh and blood
… in person
’ (CL, 79; see also Jacques Derrida,
Copy, Archive, Signature:
A Conversation on Photography (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 9 (hereafter abbreviated CAS)), but of their continued existence we often cannot be sure. Although
Derrida seems reluctant to endorse Barthes’ realism (see CAS, 3–7, 12, 14–15, 35, 44–45;
Jacques Derrida (with Bernard Stiegler), Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews
(Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002), 3, 5, 8, 10, 38–40, 50, 70, 97, 128–129 (hereafter abbreviated
EOT)), he nevertheless warns against the fashionable ‘inflation of the simulacrum’, and the view that everything is socially ‘constructed’ (EOT, 5–6; see also 77, 123; NEG, 88).
65 Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 7.
66
Derrida remarks that the ‘testimentary desire’ that ‘ something survive, be left behind’ after one has died ‘is a feeling that haunts me not only for what are called works and books, but for every banal, everyday gesture that will have been witness to this and that will keep the memory of this when I will no longer be there…I always ask myself whenever I leave a piece of paper at home or write something in the margins of a book – an exclamation mark, for example – Who is going to read this?
And what will my children get from this, if they ever read this?
’ (Jacques Derrida (with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy), in
For
Strasbourg: Conversations of Friendship and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2014), 23 (hereafter abbreviated FS).)
67
See also Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II (Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 117 (hereafter abbreviated BS2).
28

68
It is often assumed that the primary philosophical issue here is what death means for the subject him / herself . Although I have argued against this assumption elsewhere (see [Author’s name], ‘The Banality of Death’,
Philosophy 84 (October 2009), 571–596), here I want to focus primarily on one’s relation to one’s own death.
69
See BT, 284; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London and New
York: Routledge, 1995), 6.4311.
70 See also OA, 112.
71
See DF, 175. In this sense, in death I am at the mercy of others (see BS2, 126–127; Jean-
Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (London:
Routledge, 1993), 541–543).
72
See also OA, 111.
73 Lucretius, ‘We Have Nothing to Fear in Death’, reprinted in Oswald Hanfling (ed.), Life and Meaning: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 79 (hereafter abbreviated NFD).
74
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London and New York:
Routledge, 2002), 250; see also Sigmund Freud, On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia
(London: Penguin, 2005), 183 (hereafter abbreviated MM).
75 See also Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 60; Bernard N. Schumacher, Death and Mortality in
Contemporary Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 129.
76
See also SEF, 101, 110.
77
On a related point see TWB, 18; Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (London: Penguin, 2000), 184–
185.
78
See also TWB, 83.
79
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2010), 6; see also 34–35,
50, 65–66.
29

80
Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason: Essays (London: Penguin, 2011), 94–96. Freud describes walking through a summer landscape with a poet who was ‘disturbed by the idea that all this beauty was bound to fade’ (MM, 197). For the poet, as for Cioran, transience devalues things. Freud, however, is of a different opinion: ‘The limitation of the possibility of enjoyment makes it even more precious. It was incomprehensible, I declared, that the thought of the transience of loveliness should cloud our delight in it…If there is a flower that blossoms for only a single night, its blossom seems no less glorious to us for that. Neither could I see how the beauty and perfection of a work of art or an intellectual accomplishment should be devalued by their limitation within time’. Freud then diagnoses the poet’s negative response as a ‘psychical revolt against grief’. More specifically, recognising the transience of things gave him ‘a foretaste of grief’ (MM, 198). I will return to grief in the final section.
81 See Wim Wenders, On Film: Essays and Conversations (London: Faber and Faber, 2001),
237 (hereafter abbreviated OF).
82
See OF, 239.
83
As Hamilton says of Wings of Desire
: ‘It is possible, if we are lucky, that in this we might find some consolation for our mortality’ (LP, 161).
84 See also TWB, 120; OA, 123; D, 76; ML, 65.
85
What can be said about ‘animals’ here I will leave open.
86
See MQ, 23; see also 14, 20, 21; [Author’s name], ‘Absurdity, Incongruity, and Laughter’,
Philosophy 84 (January 2009), 111–134.
87
See MQ, 21.
88 See Harry G. Frankfurt, Taking Ourselves Seriously & Getting it Right (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2006), 1, 4.
30

89
See MQ, 13–15. This contrasts with the subjective perspective where my death can seem scandalous (see ROS, 234, 259; OA, 109, 128; Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
(London: Penguin, 1991), 685). On a related point see TWB, 6, 17; FS, 28.
90
See VN, 226.
91
See AID, 216; TAJ.
92
There are circumstances in which we are more-or-less temporarily immersed in the subjective perspective; pain being one example (see AE, 205–206; Jean Améry, At The
Mind’s Limits
(London: Granta Books, 1999), 33, 40).
93
On a related point see Simon Critchley, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying:
Conversations with Carl Cederström
(Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010), 50.
94
William Lane Craig, ‘The Absurdity of Life Without God’, in E.D. Klemke (ed.), The
Meaning of Life (Second Edition) (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),
41.
95
Of course, we do not only (prospectively) mourn our own deaths; we also mourn the future deaths of beloved others. As Derrida remarks of his dying mother: ‘I am mourning her while she is not dead yet’ (Jacques Derrida, ‘Composing “Circumfession”’, in John D. Caputo and
Michael J. Scanlon (eds), Augustine and Postmodernism: Confessions and Circumfession
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), 26).
96
As noted earlier, Lucretius warns against unwarranted ‘self-pity’ (NFD, 79) when imagining oneself dead. But while narcissism is certainly a risk here, it is a necessary risk.
Interestingly, Derrida opposes the neat distinction between narcissism and non-narcissism.
There are, he suggests, degrees of narcissism. Indeed, even in one’s relation to death
‘narcissism does not abdicate absolutely’ (Jacques Derrida, Points… Interviews, 1974–1994
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 199).
31

97
Robert C. Solomon, True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 72 (hereafter abbreviated TTF).
98
As Solomon notes, in most cultures mourning is a ritual of central importance (see TTF,
74; see also DF, 175), not least because it reminds us of ‘our mortality, the fact that we are ultimately significant not just because we exist as individuals but because we together form a people that will outlive us and give our lives meaning’ (TTF, 78; see also Thomas Attig,
‘Meanings of Death Seen Through the Lens of Grieving’, Death Studies 28 (2004), 352).
99
Robert C. Solomon, In Defense of Sentimentality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),
79 (hereafter abbreviated IDS).
100
See TTF, 75; IDS, 75, 78, 86–87, 97.
101
See IDS, 82.
102 See TTF, 74; IDS, 77.
103
Commenting on Ghost Dance a few years later, Derrida insists that, ‘contrary to what we might believe, the experience of ghosts is not tied to a bygone historical period’, but is rather
‘accentuated, accelerated by modern technologies like film, television, the telephone’
(Jacques Derrida, ‘The Ghost Dance: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’,
Public 2 (1989),
61).
104
See also FS, 17. As Derrida notes, ‘the dead can often be more powerful than the living’
(SPM, 60).
105
Thanks to Gerry Hough for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
32