Abstract

Death can be read as the very possibility of possibility. But such a reading of death overlooks the profoundly disturbing questionableness at the heart of this phenomenon--death as possibility turning into death as impossibility, that is, turning into death as an absolute alterity that infinitely approaches , the "is not yet" or "dead time." This question of death is explored throughout this dissertation with respect to the "work" of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, and Blanchot. The question of death not only opens up new and provocative readings of the "work" of these thinkers, but also raises the question of their proximity to one another, oftentimes despite their expressed intentions. It should also be noted that the question of death will call the ideas of "work" and "production" into question--hence, the quotation marks around the term "work" both in this abstract and in the title of the dissertation