The Living and the Dead

Introduction

Life forever holds within itself, coiled at the very centre of its unfolding, the fearful promise of death. That death, emerging from the shadows of the living, from the darkness that forever follows the living, brings about an absolute end-of-life, brings down its sickle upon the vitality of the existent in order to return it to nonexistence. Death, then — the absolute, final end-of-life — is that nothingness, that emptiness, that hollow darkness, which is forever stalking the living, anticipating that twilight upon which it may exercise its right to return ashes to ashes and dust to dust, restoring that which is living to the barren desolation of the nonliving. This is the conception of death that has so often paralyzed thought, leaving us unable to fully appreciate the complexities and nuances of the relationship between the living and the dead.

Such a conception of death, as that which brings an absolute end-of-life, has been persistent, and for all good sense, and indeed philosophy, it appears as though it could be no other way. How can it be possible for one to speak of death other than as an absolute end-of-life? Is it not precisely a complete and absolute lack of life that is characteristic of death? It would appear foolish to attempt to think otherwise, to think death as something other than the final, absolute and total end-of-life. Nevertheless, in spite of its apparent stupidity, its total lack of good sense, its absurdity and indeed, as some might say, its impossibility, that is precisely the task to now be placed at hand: that of thinking life and death tendentially. That is to say, what is here sought is an exploration of the relationships between the continuous tendencies of the living and the nonliving. Our failure to think death in a manner other than what shall be referred to as the finalist conception does us great disservice.

This conception of death, as we have said, is pervasive, and with good reason; for to all good sense death can be nothing other than an end-of-life, an absolute and final end. As is customary within discussions of those means, systems and frameworks of knowledge known as episteme and indeed of the episteme itself — for we cannot pretend that we are an exception and that we may discourse beyond its limits — we may start by reading from Aristotle. In the Nicomachean Ethics, where the task is the question of an art of living, Aristotle confronts the question of death. He writes, [n]ow the most terrible thing of all is death; for it is the end, and when a man is dead, nothing, we think, either good or evil can befall him any more.⁷ Here, the finalist conception of death is stated clearly and precisely. The occurrence of death is that of rupture, it is that which brings an end-of-life and an end of affection, for it is the end. Nothing may be brought into connection or relation with the dead. The living, in death, escape from their pharmacological entrapment by the ever-fluctuating duality of good–evil. Death is terrible. The dead may not be befallen by anything for they have already fallen to death and there is nowhere further to fall. Persistence, presence and duration are severed. The bottom has been reached.

But we must not simplify. Let us read on, for what Aristotle is considering here, in the foreground at least, is the role of Courage in living well. He continues,

But even death, we should hold, does not in all circumstances give an opportunity for Courage: for instance we do not call a man courageous for facing death by drowning or disease. What form of death then is a test of Courage? Presumably that which is the noblest. Now the noblest form of death is death in battle, for it is encountered in the midst of the greatest and most noble of dangers. And this conclusion is borne out by the principle on which public honours are bestowed in republics and under monarchies. The courageous man, therefore, in the proper sense of the term, will be he who fearlessly confronts a noble death, or some sudden peril that threatens death; and the perils of war answer this description most fully.⁸

Aristotle’s questioning concerns the transition of life to death; that is, a transference between states that are clearly segmented, static and oppositional. The question of the Courage of death concerns the manner by which one transfers from living to dead, the door through which one passes in order to traverse the threshold between life and death. Death has already been established as being beyond affection, being beyond the ethical pharmacology of good–evil, poison–medicine, for death is the end. It is the door through which one passes that is subject to the determinations of an ethics; the question of how to live in the face of the absolute end-of-life that is death.

The conclusion reached by Aristotle — that the Courageous and therefore good death is death in battle, death in the face of conflict — is reached by the consideration of the principle on which public honours are bestowed in republics and under monarchies. The judgement of Courage, the determination of the good death, is determined by the living for neither good nor evil can befall the dead. It is only for the living that one dies Courageously. The threshold that stands between the living and the dead is subject to the determination of an ethics, but only from the side of the living, for the dead have already fallen and can fall no further. The states are total. The means of dying, the transference, only exists as the barrier between two states, and further only exists from the side of the living, for in death there is nothing, only a complete negation that would forbid any ethical determination. For the dead, then, there is nothing noble or Courageous about falling in battle. Courage only belongs to the living, to the living-in-theface-of-death or the living-considering-the-death-of-others, the former being the state of those set to die in battle, the latter being the state of those bestowing public honours.

The question of death then is set as an opposition between two states, one pertaining to ethics as the art of living, one pertaining to nothing. If death is a concern, if it becomes a question at all, it is only insofar as it concerns the living. The process of death, that is of dying, is not given the same treatment as the process of life, that is of living, the latter being the concern of ethics. The movement from life to death is lost. There is either life, for which there is a good death, or death, for which there is nothing. It is perhaps peculiar that Aristotle should reason in such a way, in a way that is both devoid of tendency and devoid of duration. Peculiar because this is the same Aristotle who will, in Physics, refute Zeno’s paradox of motionless movement precisely by, in his own way, demonstrating the necessity of duration and connectivity.⁹ But the arrow of Zeno persists in Aristotle’s conception of death, it is the same succession of states, devoid of continuity and fluidity, that is at work in death becoming the absolute end-of-life, the state which ends the preceding state being entirely unconnected and unhampered by any tendential movement, any gradation. It is this lack of continuity and stubborn refusal of fluidity that is the basis of Zeno’s staggering arrow, which will haunt episteme in the finalist conception of death. The life of one state ends absolutely and that which follows is absolutely different — there is no connection. But of course, we must not forget that as all good sense will tell us, death is an exception for it is the absolute end-of-life. It is that nothingness which stubbornly encroaches on the living, that negation which remains forever at the core of life. How else could it be?

Let us turn our attention back further. When Socrates states in Phaedrus¹⁰ that writing has the capacity to destroy memory, what is at stake is not only the pharmacological character of technics,¹¹ its dual role as poison and medicine, but also death. It is a tendency of life towards the nonliving that is the basis of technicity, of the letter and tool, those nonliving organs of memory and action. Socrates opposes the destructive capacity of the dead letter, to the generative power of living words; for Socrates there is another kind of speech, or word, which shows itself to be the legitimate brother of this bastard one.¹² Such a word is the word of the living, the word imbued with vitality, or as Phaedrus responds, the living and breathing word of him who knows.¹³ Life brings life, but death brings only death. The living word is legitimate in uncovering logos, the ground of reason or ordering principle of knowledge. And as such, this living word is that which may bring forth logos through discoursing, it is that word which may grasp its vitality in order to defend itself, may thrust itself, living as it is, towards truth and in turn uphold and defend this truth. Such a living word may respond, for in its utterance it is unified with living memory. The dead word of the inscribed letter threatens the vitality of memory, threatens it with destruction, threatens to condemn logos to remain hidden, to fall with the dead into the bleak domain of the nonliving. There is nothing for the dead letter precisely because it is dead.

To bring forth logos, to allow its emergence, we can only turn to active memory of the living word, unified as it is with truth, life and thought, determined as it is by the art of living, by the determinations of good–evil. The purity of the living word, its unity with intelligence, with the untainted idea must be guarded against its bastard brother, that illegitimate, deformed sibling that would threaten its destruction. The unity of thought and word, of logos and discourse, is threatened by the artificial externality of the inscribed letter, by the disunity, disequilibrium and destruction that it will bring about, by the threat of death as an end of memory, as an end of the living memory of pure word brought about through the degradation of the dead memory of inscription. The dead inscribed word cannot adapt, defend or consider as does the live memory of speech.

Socrates fears the dead letter, but it appears he does not fear death. The finalist conception of death, for him, emerges not in the fear of his death, but it haunts him in the manner in which he approaches the inscribed letter. Socrates does not fear the unknown, but he does fear the destruction of the known. He fears the death of the known, the concealment of living logos by the dead tainted letter. But of his own death, it seems he cares little; the state of death is one of two things: either it is virtually nothingness, so that the dead has no consciousness of anything, or it is, as people say, a change and migration of the soul from this to another place.¹⁴ Socrates fears the realm of the nonliving in the form of the inscribed letter, but the death of his individuality scares him not. How is it that these two perspectives on death and the nonliving operate at once? How can it be that death is either nothing in the sense of an eternal-life of the soul, or nothing in the sense of a return to nihil, the hollow domain of nothingness? And how is it that death here constitutes itself in relation to life and life in relation to death?

In the pages that follow we will seek to establish that death is not the limit of life, it is not that which brings an end to living and it cannot be fairly represented by the sweeping of a scythe, by a movement of severing; neither can it be reduced to nihil in the sense of hollow nothingness, or nothing in relation to an eter-nal-life. We cannot see in death an end-of-life, and an after-of-life, but this does not mean we only have recourse to an afterlife; and so too, in life we do not see a lack of death, a total vitality that would remove us from the nonliving. In short, death is not the outside of life as life is not the outside of death. Many histories of thought have suffered greatly by a general failure to contemplate the continual game of life and death, the continual flux between the living and nonliving and the confusion and perspectival transformation such contemplation entails. In this sense then, these pages concern tendency and flux, the inseparability of two movements and passages of becoming that have often been placed in opposition to one another, and that have appeared as the limit of one another, as the severing of life and the escape from death. It is the premise of these pages that such a separation is not useful and does not fairly represent the complexity and interdependency of life and death that is vitality itself.

This use of language may appear peculiar; one may be tempted to respond that there’s nothing death could possibly mean other than a lack of life, an end-of-life, that it is an absolute finality, that vitality only concerns the living. But this is precisely our task, to explore how death is constituted in life and life in death. The nonliving and living speak with one another, dance with one another, and the echoes of their communication never cease to reverberate throughout one another. The nonliving live with the living, dwell with the living and inhabit the living, just as the living die with the dead, dwell with the dead and inhabit the dead. Their separation has been that of finality, of our inability to think beyond finality, in that beyond that would always be beyond precisely because it is beyond and thus cannot be brought forth from the beyond.

So how do we begin to think life and death beyond finality? How do we seek to grasp this beyond that continually remains beyond? How do we seek to approach that which is forever receding in the form of the horizon? Not in a beyond of life, or a beyond of death, but a beyond in so far as temporality always exceeds any moment, always exceeds any event, always demands a place and voice simultaneously in pasts, presents and futures. Not in a beyond that would be eschatological or teleological, that would reach a final goal or arrive at a final conclusion; but a beyond that would be tendential, that would be beyond in as far as it is of continual exchange and movement, a continual and powerful communication. How do we begin to think a beyond that is always so, a beyond that cannot be encapsulated in a presentation of a concept, but remains beyond precisely due to its inability to become static, precisely in its continual partiality, its eternal fluctuation?

This is what is at stake in these pages — the question of life and death without finality or originality, without ends or origins. It is a question through which we may try to reignite vitality, through which both the living and nonliving may be allowed to exist as continually fluctuating, incomplete tendencies and escape from the tyranny of state-hood and