"Death Reckoning in the Thinking of Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida"

[Peter Kosenko]

Here's an interesting product of a certain
literary theory mindset: "Death Reckoning in the
Thinking of Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida" (
you can read it on line at
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~ov/jnschust/death.html
).  If the title doesn't make it clear, the order
of discussion is intended to lead you to the
Derridean deconstructionist conclusion.

The author's subject: "So, too, I think, death
remains the imperative horizon today, the
background limit against which we project a
certain understanding of our own society."
Portentious lingo there, no? And in English, not
German or French.

I'll spare you the journey.  What does the
philosophical meditation on death get us?

"While we are a long way away from any workable
everyday ethics here [no shit, my marinalia],
there is nonetheless a real interest in opening up
the possibility of locating a common space for
what we all share in our separations from which we
are further separated, our ownmost possibility of
otherness."

Okay, so I have left out the bridge.  It is this:
because we cannot experience our own deaths, only
the effect of the deaths of others, the idea of
death becomes a location of our idea of
"otherness" (in ourselves), and ethics depends on
our ability to acknowledge the other.  (Actually,
for the writer of the essay, death becomes THE
priviledged location of recognizing "otherness.") 
Now that is all perfectly vacuous and pretty
platitudinous (unless you want to use it to hammer
on religious fundamentalists, who seem to be
immune to the reality of death).  Reduce it to
this: If we all acknowledged the mortality of
others, we would be moved to "dialogue" and create
better societies.  But do YOU really believe that
it's that simple to get people to stop killing
each other or one class or economy from trying to
dominate another?  Should we call a
deconstructionist consciousness raising session
about death at the U.N.?

Here is the Derrida that sets the writer off on
his concluding flight:

"For if death is indeed the possibility of the
impossibility and therefore the possibility of
appearing as such of the impossibility of
appearing as such either, then man, or man as
Dasein [i.e., limited, finite historical being],
never has a relation to death as such, but only to
perishing, to demising, and to the death of the
other, who is not the other.  The death of the
other thus becomes again 'first,' always first . .
.  [the deconstructionist flip-flop]  The death of
the other, this death of the other in "me," is
fundamentally the only death that is named in the
syntagm 'my death.'"

Voila, the great pseudo-philosopher has once more
deconstructed the putative "autonomy of the
subject" (which you yourself never believed in
anyway) by pointing out how we are connected to
others through the experience of death.  But do I
really need the vacuous circumlocutions of the
deconstructionist to understand that?  I can think
it quite a bit more clearly in terms of my own
experience of the death of my mother, or the death
of the homeless and family-less photographer
friend who got cancer and whom I visited in the
hospital for three months before he died.  A good
poem might bring it home to me as an experience. 
So let's all hear it for not hiding the experience
of death from ourselves.

But I have no clue what Derrida's lingo gets us or
how the writer of the essay thinks that he has got
some priviledged insight into ethics from it. In
my honest opinion, there is a lot more to
understanding others than just their deaths as the
abstract index of their "otherness."  Perhaps it
might be good to imagine their LIVES (but that is
more complex, no?).  And how the hell did this
insight about death become the privilege of
"philosophers" or literary theorists?  Because
they can wrap it up in cirumlocution?  To the
Derrida above I am tempted to give Dennis
Redmond's response to the review of Badiou:
"zzzzzzz...."  Maybe Foucault was right when he
said of Derrida (this may be aprocryphal) that "he
is the kind of philosopher who gives bullshit a
bad name."

As for the writer of the essay, he talks of
"opening spaces" (that he will leave empty) and
"possibility" (which will forever remain
indefinite -- i.e., we need take no action, since
action connotes "ends," and ends suggest purpose,
which is totalizing because "teleological," and
all purpose is subject to error, so our job as
deconstructionists is only to awaken people to the
vague and empty possibility of the multiplicity of
many open-ended ends).  But if you think that
social change requires political action, I dare
you to find any analysis on which to base a
program -- even a tentative one.  So let's scratch
the bullshit about "the background limit against
which we project a certain understanding of our
own society."  The social analysis isn't going to
be forthcoming because the writer isn't interested
in it.

zzzzzzzz...

Peter Kosenko

=============================================================
Peter Kosenko
Email: mailto:kosenko at netwood.net
URL: http://www.netwood.net/~kosenko
=============================================================
"Man is a rational animal.  He can think up a
reason for anything he wants to
believe."--Benjamin Franklin