2.54
Meditation on one’s death can open one to the worldness of one’s world. It ruptures the immersion in the world (§2.4), for it makes various projects and their relations, including the for-the-sake-of-which, conspicuous. New possibilities, including possibilities of respectful response, become possible. Now, it’s not only humans who reflect on or encounter their own or another’s death, nor do humans encounter death as such (through any attempt, we’re still there, surviving any such fantasy; §2.38). Nonetheless, meditation on one’s death is transformative.
This meditation illuminates that being alive is an opening, a clearing, as thin as a knife’s edge, such that experience is possible as it is, for us.
Death isn’t outside of life; it permeates it in our experience of loss (and with every choice, we lose possibilities), so that we will say, “Life will have been so short.”[1] For death is etched into the structure of experience, marked in advance by irreplaceable loss. Each entity—in particular, those we love most[2]—traces its loss.
Nothing is ever fully present, for we’re all relationally, constitutively, and temporally distended: we’re constituted by relations (present and absent), different from all other things (for things are what they are through not being all others), in time (things are revealed in perspective through time). – This also means that nothing is ever fully absent. For we house the absent—wandering spirits—in one way or another.
Derrida and Wittgenstein are right: each death is the end of a world, of the world, each time.[3] Worlds aren’t individualistic, though they’re housed in individuals. The death of the individual isn’t the death of the world, but it can feel that way: it’s the death of a unique site of world.
No death is an example of death; just like no existence is an example of a situation of world. Death is the foreclosing of a clearing that was a particular clearing: this clearing is gone.
We can think towards our own death. Here, we’re struck: struck by the incomprehensibility of nothingness. (One imagines it black, but death is not closing one’s eyes.) It ‘is’ ‘nothing.’
But not as negation: ‘placed’ outside the binary of being/nothing, death removes us from where even nothingness makes sense. Thus, it’s outside the binary of negation/affirmation. Death is not that there’s nothing there; it’s that there is no there at all. – In another sense, death is not negation: for one’s being carries on in those left living.
‘But why dwell on death? — It makes it hard to get on with things!’
— Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing? For we re-evaluate what matters. – It can precipitate a transformation of one’s self, a transformation of one’s world.
[1] E.g., Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign, Volume II, p. 51; Derrida, Aporias, p 49.
[2] Zwicky, W&M, LH56.
[3] Derrida, The Work of Mourning, p. 95, 107, 115; Wittgenstein, Tractatus, §6.431, p. 87.