The Death of Me

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Lancaster E-Prints LANCASTER UNIVERSITY The Death of Me Literature, Relational Death, and the Human Thing Aaron Aquilina (BA Hons., MA) Submitted for the award of a PhD in Literature September, 2019 This thesis is my own work and has not been submitted in any form for the award of a higher degree elsewhere. ii THE DEATH OF ME Literature, Relational Death, and the Human Thing Submitted for the award of a PhD in Literature by Aaron Aquilina (BA Hons., MA) in September, 2019 This thesis argues that literary fictions of the death penalty, which present us with the liminal status of those who are condemned to death, are a means of reading the political and philosophical subject otherwise. To be sure, a certain strand of (post-)Heideggerian thought has always posited the idea of “my death”, where death is only and always mine, which makes any ontological dissolution of the “I” unthinkable. However, this thesis reads fictions of the death penalty by Sophocles, Dickens, Hugo, Greene, Sartre, Nabokov, and Blanchot, among others, to show how the death penalty also condemns to death Heideggerian “Being-towards-death”. By being condemned to death, a state not solely bound to the cells of death row, the thesis argues that the self and death collide in a post-Heideggerian way. When the supposed futurity of death is brought into the here and now, or even the past, we encounter what this thesis will call “relational death”: that is, living on with the death one has already died, when the subject’s foremost relation to death puts under erasure all other relations—to itself, the Other, and to political sociality as a whole—and puts into question not the individual subject but subjectivity itself. In a sustained engagement with Blanchot’s thought, which also encompasses the work of Hegel, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Agamben, this thesis concludes by re-evaluating the human, less as a named and recognisable “being” than as an anonymous living corpse or “thing”, residing beyond names and concepts. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My utmost gratitude is owed to Prof. Arthur Bradley, without whose invaluable advice, patience, and support this thesis would have been a much poorer work. His academic rigour, critical perspectives, and encouragement have inspired me from the beginning and will continue to do so in the years to come. I am also extremely grateful to Prof. John Schad and Prof. Steven Connor, who read this project incredibly closely, productively tested its limits, and unreservedly put their faith in the ideas discussed here. Special thanks to all members of staff at Lancaster University, especially Dr Michael Greaney and Prof. Alison Stone—who engaged my ideas with expertise, respect, and friendship—as well as to members of staff at the University of Malta, especially Dr Mario Aquilina, Prof. James Corby, and Prof. Ivan Callus, who guided me with their individual brands of brilliance. Particular thanks, too, to Prof. Laurence Hemming, with whom Heidegger was discussed over many libations, and to Dr Omar N’Shea, who introduced me to the history of the ancient Near East over innumerable cups of coffee. I owe the completion of this work to the support of my family, the dog who lives with us and the one who died with us, and my dearest friends Dr Kurt Borg, Dr Maria Christou, Bethany Dahlstrom, Dr Joel Evans, James Farrugia, Elsa Fiott, Steven Kosiak, Valentino Paccosi, Wayne Pye, and Joslyn Sammut. I am happy to say that, either overtly or less obviously, all the above are directly engaged with in this study, whether in terms of their own publications or our private conversations (yes, even with the dogs). I am not a man of many beliefs, but I do believe in all of them. iv CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Literature, Questions, Death 1 Dead Politics 4 Literature’s Sword 14 CHAPTER 1 The Instant of My Death 22 CHAPTER 2 Death Penalties Horses 47 For Whom the Bell Tolls 49 The Impossibility of My Death 64 CHAPTER 3 Missing Death Stations 86 Living Corpses 91 Acknowledgement contra Recognition 110 v CHAPTER 4 After Death, Anonymity Angels and Demons 132 The Unbecoming Subject 136 The Human Thing 155 CHAPTER 5 The Death of No One Who? What? 177 Anonymous Voices 178 Sovereign (without) Subjects 194 CONCLUSION The Death of Me 216 BIBLIOGRAPHY 224 vi ABBREVIATIONS The following texts are cited with these abbreviations in text and footnotes. A ‘Antigone’, Sophocles AP Aporias, Jacques Derrida BSI The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, Jacques Derrida BSII The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 2, Jacques Derrida BT Being and Time, Martin Heidegger D Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, Jacques Derrida DPI The Death Penalty, Volume 1, Jacques Derrida DPII The Death Penalty, Volume 2, Jacques Derrida EE Existence and Existents, Emmanuel Levinas GD The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida HS Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben IB Invitation to a Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov ID The Instant of My Death, Maurice Blanchot LD The Last Day of a Condemned Man, Victor Hugo LPS Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Alexandre Kojève LRD ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, Maurice Blanchot PS Phenomenology of Spirit, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel TC A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens TI The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky TM The Tenth Man, Graham Greene TW ‘The Wall’, Jean-Paul Sartre 1 Introduction: Literature, Questions, Death In the history of the ancient Near East, from as early as the Isin-Larsa period up until around the time of Alexander the Great, its influential cultures manifested an odd practice that has since come to be called the ritual of the substitute king.1 An eclipse, likely in conjunction with other omens, heralds calamities that only the death of the king will appease. At this point, fearing for his life, the king and his counsellors call for the enthronement of an appointed substitute (šar pūḫi) who is to die in his stead. The surrogate, often a commoner (saklu) or even a prisoner or criminal (dābibu), is now clad in robes and diadem, and, subsequently, there are enacted specific traditions in front of the god Šamaš— such as recitations, sign-making, ceremonial eating, burnt offerings, libations, and ablutions— which prepare this substitute king for his fated death (referred to as ana šimtīšu). Once killed, psalms, litanies, and wailing wash over the surrogate’s corpse and, after his honoured burial, there are performed exorcistic rites and the consequent burning of the original king’s regalia, insignias, furniture, and other possessions. Throughout the reign of this substitute, whose duration as monarch differed depending on the circumstances but never lasted more than a hundred days, the man who used to be king 1 Our knowledge of this ritual in one such culture, that of the ancient Assyrians, is severely limited: the surviving fragments are few relative to the extent of the original writings, their legibility is considerably deteriorated, and one is hindered by the inadequate or general lack of decipherments of the cuneiform tablets. As such, there is no commentary on this ritual that is considered canonical or finalised beyond other interpretations, although Simo Parpola’s translations and commentaries are currently considered the most authoritative and Jean Bottéro’s work the most frequently cited. As such, several texts were consulted, although ones that look at specific variations depending on the region or period have been left out. See, in particular: Preston Kavanagh and Simo Parpola, Ezekiel to Jesus: Son of Man to Suffering Servant (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2017), specifically ‘The Assyrian Substitute King Ritual’ and ‘Letters from Assyrian Scholars’, pp. 59-103; Jean Bottéro, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods, trans. by Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), specifically ‘The Substitute King and His Fate’, pp. 138-55; M. Rahim Shayegan, Aspects of History and Epic in Ancient Iran: From Gaumāta to Wahnām (Washington: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2012), specifically ‘The Concepts and Reality of the Substitute King in Mesopotamia and Iran’, pp. 35-42; W.G. Lambert, ‘A Part of the Ritual for the Substitute King’, Archiv für Orientforschung, 18 (1957-1958), 109-12; John H. Walton, ‘The Imagery of the Substitute King Ritual in Isaiah’s Fourth Servant Song’, Journal of Biblical Literature, 122(4) (2003), 734-43 (pp. 736-38); and Lorenzo Verderame, ‘Means of Substitution. The use of figurines, animals, and human beings as substitutes in Assyrian rituals’, Rivista degli Studi Orientali, Supplemento no. 2, 86 (2013), 300-23 (pp. 317-21). 2 completely withdraws from all royal engagements and hides in the palace. His abstention is, however, only public; the original king retains the power of governance, and, after the substitute king’s death, he is quickly reinstated. Šamaš is appeased—a king has died, after all— and, as always, life will go on after death. Through this initiatory example of the substitute king, this study acknowledges a complex and longstanding interrelation of death and politics, one which finds itself reconfigured across times and cultures in a myriad of forms. Here, even religious beliefs, at least in their social performance, are subsumed under the exhaustive dynamics of power, for while the ritual is indeed indebted to religious reasons for its (surprisingly not so rare) enactment, it nonetheless remains undeniably political at core. As Jean Bottéro sees it, the substitute’s office was to ‘serve as a lightning rod […] in order to take upon himself […] the evil fate that threatened his master’, and what emerges as being of utmost importance is not the appeasement of the gods but rather the facilitation of the sovereign’s survival.2 The ritual’s spiritual aspects, therefore, find their mediation through the political control and regulation of death—one that extends, even, to its exchange.

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