Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566339 .
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Diacritics.
http://www.jstor.org
PREFACE
diacritics30.3: 3-11
ness ...," accordingto Hegel, "putaside its limitation;its purposeis [now] the general
purpose, its language universal law, its work the universal work" [357]. In attaining
citizenship,underthese terms, each person casts off concrete specificity to become a
sign of his or her own particularity.The Subject-citizenis, in this sense, the deathof the
individualhe or she was and, in some vestigial way, continuesto be.
In "DavidPaintingDeath,"DidierMaleuvrereadsJacques-LouisDavid'sDeath of
Marat to show how the "state of death"can be localized in visual art. He reads the
of Marat'snonexistenceinto the materialityof a paintedcanvas,wherethe
"translation"
instant of demise is situated in the fluctuationbetween representation(the image as
what it depicts) and the materialityof the paint and canvas themselves. By referringto
David's otherworks and by drawingon earliertheoreticaltexts in aesthetics,Maleuvre
arguesthatthe noncoincidenceof image and material,the fact thatone registerseither
the pictureor the paint, but not both at the same time, was probablyintendedby the
painteras a visual metaphorfor the noncoincidenceof a person with his or her own
death.
We could arguethatwithin its historicalcontext, the workingthroughof deathand
representationthat Maleuvreidentifies in David's canvas is partof a broaderissue of
representationthat was being workedout simultaneouslyin the inventionof the state.
Marathimself had been especially vocal in calling for executions to protectthe nascent
republic,and it was this vociferousnessthatultimatelyled to his murder.6Accordingto
Maleuvre,the mutualantagonismbetween the specificity of a materialobject and the
image it createsis figuredin the depictionof Marathimself, the championof the guillotine in the service of the state. In the painting, as in the republic itself, as in Hegel's
readingof the Terror,that mutualantagonism,that noncompossibility,is identified as
death.The paintingis, in this sense, a displacementof the guillotine. Or rather,both the
paintingandthe guillotineareworkingthrougha similar,morefundamentalissue about
the relationsamong death, representation,and individualitythat were coeval with the
violent birthof a new state and social order.
Although Maleuvrecarefully nuances his position, it should be noted in passing
that he views death as the groundingof selfhood. "To be a self," he writes, "is to be
mortal,or an entity in whom the concept of limitedness is foremost" [24]. While he
questionswhetherthatlimitednessmust, in fact, be defined by deathand contendsthat
"deathis an instance,ratherthan the blueprint,of our overall awarenessof being limited, that is, of subjectivity,"he will eventually conclude that "it is as self-admittedly
finite beings that we see, and being self-admittedlyfinite means that we are mortal"
[24]. This last propositioneither evacuates the specific meaning of mortalityas the
condition of one who will die or reestablishesan equivalencebetween death and subrights of the citizens, attack the fundamental laws of the State, overturnthe constitution,and
reduce thepeople to servitude"[160].
6. On November10, 1789, Marat wrotein L'amidu peuple: "is thereany comparisonto be
madebetweena small numberof victimswhomthepeople sacrifice tojustice, duringan insurrection, and the innumerablemass of subjects that a despot reducesto abjection,or that he surrenders to his fury, his avarice, his vainglory,his whims? Whatare a few drops of blood that the
populace has shed to recover itsfreedom, in thepresent revolution,next to the torrentsthat have
been spilled by a Tiberius.. ." [178-89]. On December 18, 1790: "Stopwasting time tryingto
imaginemeans of defense;you have but one left: a generalinsurrectionandpopularexecutions..
.. Six monthsago, five or six hundredheads would have been enough to pull you backfrom the
abyss. Today... it may be necessary to cut offfive or six thousand;but even if it were twenty
thousand,there cannot be a moment'shesitation"[183]. And on January30, 1791: "Blindcitizens! Willyou never open your eyes? Six months ago, five hundredsevered heads would have
assuredyour happiness:to save youfrom perishing,you will beforced to cut off perhaps a hundred thousand"[185].
in this very moment, unleashed into the world," he writes, "thatbetween the I who
speaks and the being whom I call on it has suddenlyrearedup: it is between us like the
distance that separatesus," and in this sense, "realdeath is ... alreadypresent in my
language"[P 313]. As the separationbetween speakers,or between wordsandthe realities they designate,deathis the negationthatlanguageeffects. But if language is negative by virtueof its distancedrelationto the "realities"it signifies, as Blanchotargues,it
is hardto understandwhy one shouldtry to derive thatnegativityfrom somethingmore
primordial.And even if one accepts that the term "negativity"must be taken from a
nonlinguisticsource, two problemsarise. First, Blanchot will subsequentlyarguethat
"negationcan only be effected on the basis of the realitythatit negates"[P 316], which
means thatlanguageshould not be the enactmentor even displacementof "real"death,
but insteadits annihilation.Thatis to say thatalthoughBlanchot'sargumentis based on
languagebeing a form of death,it should,by his reasoning,actuallybe the determinate
negationof it-a nondeath.Second, it is unclearwhy linguistic negation,if it is derivative, could not derive from other absences. Why, for instance, should the separation
between me and "this woman"come from death,insteadof the otherway around?
"Deathalone allows me to grasp what I want to reach,"Blanchot writes. "It is in
words as the only possibility of their meaning. Withoutdeath, everythingwould collapse into absurdityand nothingness"[P 313]. The incalculablevalue of Guerlac'sessay is the way in which it leads us to question the validity of that statement.While
Blanchotcontendsthatdeath,as an epistemologicalabsolute,gives languageits meaning, the "transcript"of Hugo's Jersey seances argues otherwise. Its text, accordingto
Guerlac,"at once literalizes death and its foundationalrelationto writing, throughits
claim to be a historicaldocument,a transcript,andat the same time ... trivializesit. The
text itself is too literary,too well structured.It does not appearto take the groundingof
writingby deathquite seriously or absolutelyliterally"[89].
While Guerlac'sarticletends towarda critiqueof mortalityas an epistemological
surety,in "AfterDeath,"I have attemptedto reconsiderits use as an ontological absolute in forming subjectivity.What emerges tangentiallyelsewhere, I have triedto state
explicitly. If for Blanchot,deathgives meaningto language,and for Maleuvreit allows
people to see, therearea host of writers,most notablyMartinHeideggerandAlexandre
Kojeve, who have arguedthat death impartssubjective structure,indeed humanity,to
humanexperience.By examiningthe most compelling articulationsof this proposition
over the last two hundredyears, I contendthatdeathis not an ontological absolute,but
should instead be considered a fiction derived from other experiences of loss, most
significantlythat of otherpeople. Since it is unknowableto me directly,since I cannot
experience it, my death is imaginable only through the deaths of others, despite
Heidegger's assertions to the contrary.Or rather,not even throughtheir deaths, but
from their sheer alterity.Similarly,my death is an awarenessof myself that I can only
have throughthe idea of the otherswho will surviveit, and it is in this sense a blind spot
of my self-knowledge.Death always takes me frombehind,is only reflectedin the eyes
of others.And so, my individualityis not groundedin mortality,but ratherin the experience of those othersandin theirineffabledifferencefromme. It comes fromthe preontological condition thatEmmanuelLevinas has called ethics.
In the final essay of this volume, Alphonso Lingis writes about this relation between others and my own death. In a series of musings, his article thinks through
Heidegger and Hegel by placing their argumentsin the context of daily experiences,
such as compassion, and extraordinaryevents, such as childbirthor killing. He begins
with a question that echoes the existentialist philosopherJos6 FerraterMora: "when
someone with whom we sharedour life dies, do we not feel thatsomethingof ourselves
has died too? In several senses of the word, we die with others"[106]. Unlike Ferrater
contention that the death of a human being, in particular the death of a loved one, cannot be
consideredas a purely externalevent"[177] and "AsRobertMehl has written,the experienceof
another'sdeath 'exhibitsan aspect throughwhich it is convertedinto an experienceof one's own
death,'for 'the Other'spresence is never a qualitythat belongs exclusivelyto him'" [177-78].
10
11