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LIVING UP TO DEATH

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

PREFACE BY OLIVIER ABEL............................................................viiEDITORS' NOTE BY CATHERINE GOLDENSTEIN AND JEAN-LOUIS SCHLEGEL.....................xxiiiUP TO DEATH MOURNING AND CHEERFULNESS..............................................1FRAGMENTS...........................................................................57POSTFACE BY CATHERINE GOLDENSTEIN..................................................91NOTES...............................................................................99

Chapter One

Where to begin this late apprenticeship? By what is essential, right away? by the necessity and difficulty of mourning a wanting-to-exist after death? by joy—no, instead, with cheerfulness joined to a hoped-for grace of existing until death?

No: the essential is too close, therefore too covered over, too hidden. It will reveal itself bit by bit, at the end.

[THE FOLLOWING THREE PARAGRAPHS ARE CROSSED OUT IN ORDER TO BE MOVED BELOW. WE REPRODUCE THEM HERE SINCE THERE IS NO LATER PLACE IN WHICH TO INSERT THEM.]

I will begin with what is most abstract, in this sense, easiest to speak of, to articulate. [IN THE MARGIN NEXT TO THIS SENTENCE THERE IS A CORRECTION: No, by the make-believe that covers it over—and hides it.]

The most abstract? The equivocations of death, of the word death.

I see three major meanings—maybe more?—that need to be distinguished, for it is their mutual overlapping and the confusion that results from this that leads to the foreboding anxiety about death. In this regard, here I think of things like when faced with other situations of conceptual confusion, conceptual clarification already has a therapeutic value. Here, as elsewhere, this is the minimal task for philosophical reflection: analyze, clarify. [END OF THE PARAGRAPHS CROSSED OUT.]

1. There is first of all the encounter with the death of a loved other, of unknown others. Someone has disappeared. One question comes up obstinately again and again: does he still exist? and where? where else? in what form invisible to our eyes? visible in another way? This question connects death with the dead person, the dead ones. It is a question for the living, perhaps for those in good health I shall say later. The question What sort of beings are the dead? is so insistent that even in our secularized societies we do not know what to do with the dead, that is, with the cadavers. We don't throw them in the garbage like domestic waste, which they physically are, however. The make-believe proceeds by a slide and generalization: my death, our deaths, the dead. Generalization by dissipating the differences: the loved one -> the third person. The dead like disappeared third persons, the deceased, the day of the Dead. The place of sepulture, among the criteria of humanity, along with tools, language, moral and social norms, the testimony of antiquity and the persistence of this certain fact [?]: one does not get rid of the dead, one is never finished with them.

And yet it is this kind of questioning about the lot of the dead that I want to exorcise, for which I want to do the mourning for myself. Why?

Why?

Because my own relation to a death which hasn't yet happened is obscured, obliterated, altered by the anticipation and internalization of the question about the lot of the already dead dead. It is tomorrow's death, in the future perfect tense, so to speak, that I imagine. And it is this image of the dead person I will be for others that takes up all the room, with its load of questions: what are, where are, how are the dead?

My struggle is with and against this image of tomorrow's dead, this dead person that I shall be for the survivors. With and against that make-believe where death is in some way sucked up by the dead person and all the dead. To begin the struggle against this make-believe, I will take up again the analysis at the point where I introduced the reference to survivors. The first fact is this one. Others still alive survive the death of their own. In the same way, others will survive me. The question of survival is thus first of all a question about the survivors who ask themselves whether the dead do continue to exist, in the same chronological time or at least in a temporal register parallel to that of the living, even if this mode of time is held to be imperceptible. All the answers given by cultures concerning the survival of the dead are connected to this question not called into question: passage to another state, expectation of resurrection, reincarnation, or, for more philosophical minds, change of temporal status, elevation to an immortal eternity. But these answers are to a question posed by the survivors, concerning the lot of the already dead dead.

I come back to the key word in my answer about why the mourning I want to enter into—as a work of mourning ...: the internalization before my death of a question post mortem, of the question: what are the dead? To see myself dead before being dead, and to apply to myself in anticipation a survivor's question. In short, the dread of the future perfect. I said, in passing, that it is a question for those in good health. In effect, its capacity to give rise to dread is strongest when it comes to disturb, confront, insult the insolence of our appetite for an invulnerable life. This adjective "invulnerable" brings into play the difference from what I shall say below, later, toward the end, if my discourse gets there, the joy of living to the end, hence about the appetite for a life colored by a certain insouciance that I call cheerfulness. But let's not go too fast. We aren't there yet. We are only at the beginning. That is, with abstractions, mixed-up meanings, confusions that need to be clarified.

[THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH HAS A NOTE IN THE MARGIN: in its place? No.]

The third idea about death is mortality, obliged-to-die one day, having to die. Philosophies of finitude have undertaken to make this category of existence the high point of their reflection. In this way, they make it a corollary, a variant of finitude. They carry to the extreme their proposal when they think of finitude, of being toward the end or for the end, from within, I mean with a gaze that forbids itself a bird's-eye view, one from above, on a boundary whose two sides could be looked at—from above. Seen from within, finitude goes toward a limit beginning from the inside and not toward a boundary that our gaze can cross, leading to the question: quid afterward? In a sense, my meditation is akin to that of these thinkers about finitude. But, contrary to appearances, finitude is an abstract idea. The idea that I must die one day, I do not know when, or how, carries too flimsy a certitude (mors certa, hora incerta) for my desire to take hold of—what I shall call below (distinguishing the two phrases): a desire to be, an effort to exist. I am well aware of everything that has been written and said about anxiety about one day no longer existing. But, if the path has to be taken up again of an accepted finitude, it is after the struggle with the make-believe death concerning which I have so far spoken of only one of its figures, the internalized anticipation of a death tomorrow for which I will be dead for...