In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.3 (2000) 3-11 [Access article in PDF] Preface The State of Death Jonathan Strauss In reality, there is perhaps a greater distance between old age and youth than there is between decrepitude and death, for here one must not consider death to be something absolute.... Death is not armed with a blade, nothing violent accompanies it, life ends by imperceptible nuances.... (D. J.)We dare... to assert, on the (...) basis of a knowledge of the structure and properties of the human body and a large number of observations, that death can be cured. (m.) —Diderot and d'Alembert, Encyclopédie1But if Man is Action, and if Action is Negativity "appearing" as Death, Man, in his human or speaking existence, is only a more or less deferred death, and one that is conscious of itself.Therefore: to recognize Discourse philosophically, or to recognize Man as one who speaks, is to accept unambiguously the fact of death and to describe... its significance and reach. Now, this is precisely what philosophers before Hegel omitted to do. —Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de HegelDeath changed in the nineteenth century. The shift probably began during the Enlightenment, when, as Philippe Ariès has argued, people learned for the first time to fear their mortality—not just the terrors and uncertainties of their demise or the anguish over an eventual punishment for their sins, but extinction itself [1: 112-14, 125]. Within the space of a few decades, death became a sheer and unredeemable absence, an unconsolable loss, and a confrontation with pure negativity. During those years, death was transformed from a nuance between different states to an absolute. It became, in itself, infinite and sublime, a nothingness whose discovery, like that of the zero, unleashed unknown and limitless powers. These now had to be grappled with, to be grasped theoretically as well as practically, in both the intimacy of private fears and the communality of public legislation. And once death was recognized as an absolute it could be put to use as one, for both the individual and the social collective.Hegel, as Kojève taught, was the first to harness the new forces of mortality within an intellectual mechanism worthy of their scope. "Death," he wrote in the preface to the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, "... is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength" [19]. This power to grasp one's demise, to confront it and "tarry" with it, was what he called the Subject—at once the isolated unit of humanity confronted by the limits of its mortality and the key to the social orders that [End Page 3] depend on it, in a pragmatic sense. As justice and enfranchisement increasingly rely on the responsibility of single subjects, so does death rise in importance as the final determiner of socially answerable individuality. In this setting, where mortality is the limit of the subject, society becomes a state of death, a collective grounded in the transcendental absolute of a nothingness that intervenes regularly and practically within the events of life.In such a state, executions are not merely exercises of authority or purgings of unassimilable elements from the social body; they are also, and most significantly, spectacles of the transcendental grounds of the social itself. Here, death is democratic not merely because it is the universal leveler, not simply because it imposes a one hundred percent experience tax on all brackets of the population, but because it produces the uniform units of untransferable humanity, individuals, who at once suffer the obligation to conform to the state and enjoy the, at least theoretical, enfranchisement to transform it. Throughout our days, in the most insignificant details, we feel this mortal isolation organizing our legal relation to our social context, and in each case my death to come draws a line around me, saying: this is you. My metro pass and airline tickets will be valid, my response to the jury duty summons required, and my vote counted, unless I die. It does not matter that I have changed lovers, or... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.3 (2000) 90-104 [Access article in PDF] After Death Jonathan Strauss According to Philippe Ariès, the nineteenth century was a turning point in the history of death. On the one hand there emerged a new sense of the irreplaceability of individual people, of the finality of death and the immeasurable preciousness of a single life. On the other hand death, that which followed one's demise, became conceptually more (...) austere. For the first time since antiquity, perhaps ever, the belief that death is pure negativity or nothingness asserted itself with enough success to become a generally accepted cultural attitude. 1 This image of sheer nonexistence, this death stripped down to its ontological minimum, is the most extreme form of mortality that has arisen in the history of the West, the hardest perhaps to take, the most naked. In ways that could not have occurred before, these two developments in the history of death have worked with and against each other to create a new understanding of subjectivity, a set of theorizations about human individuality that, for all their diversity of detail, are bound together by a certain historical determinacy. Hegel's views on the relation between mortality and subjectivity, for instance, like Heidegger's or Blanchot's, have no precedent, but they do have endless repercussions. Whatever their causes, the newness and the effectiveness of these theories indicate that during the nineteenth century a unique cultural formation arose in relation to mortality. The moment still has not passed, since the basic elements of the new death continue to operate on contemporary imaginations and theorizations. What follows is an attempt to draw the portrait of the death that emerged for the first time in the nineteenth century: to critically and analytically examine formulations of the relation between death and identity in order to determine the value of absolute mortality as an individualizing principle. Often these formulations are most clearly articulated by post-nineteenth-century thinkers, but they are the products, and indeed the expressions, of that historical transformation that occurred sometime after the Revolution. When we read these texts and arguments, we are asking not merely whether they are valid as arguments, but about the value of the general attitude they reflect—the value not only of a specific kind of death, but of a kind of subjectivity that is unique to the last two hundred years. And since that subjectivity is probably the most significant product of those centuries, the most pervasive and the most intimately affecting, we are also, intentionally or not, asking about the value of a whole period.To read this relation between mortality and subjectivity, we must come to some understanding about the terms at issue, especially what death is or is not when considered in its most extreme form as simple nothingness. It may seem odd that this is an issue at all, but nonexistence has proven a difficult concept to integrate into theorizations [End Page 90] of human life. The first question to raise in this context is whether death can be considered a state, a divisive proposition on which much hangs. In the introduction to a recent collection of essays on metaphysics and death, John Martin Fischer baldly asserted that "being dead is a condition or a state" [4]. The philosopher Paul Edwards, however, has pointed to some of the "absurdities," as he puts it, of considering death as an ontological condition. To imagine death as a state is, he argues, to attribute to it some sort of being, but death, understood as the permanent loss of consciousness and experience, has no being and is simply absence. To imagine otherwise leads to attempts (made by such existentialist philosophers as Ferrater Mora [175-203] and Tillich) to understand death "from the inside"—that is, to imagine what it would be like to experience the absence of experience. 2 Edwards's approach does not deny the possibility or value of investigations into the psychological significance of that absolute privation (that is, the meaning of death for the living), but it does preclude any understanding of death as such. This is, undoubtedly, part of the... (shrink)