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Death and Authenticity: Reflections on Heidegger, Rilke, Blanchot

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Death and Authenticity: Reflections on Heidegger, Rilke, Blanchot Volume 9, No 1, Spring 2014 ISSN 1932-1066 Death and Authenticity Reflections on Heidegger, Rilke, Blanchot Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei Fordham University [email protected] Abstract: This essay considers the relationship between death and authenticity, a concern in philosophy since Socrates' speech about his own death sentence in Plato's Apology. While death lies outside both ontology and phenomenology, a proper relationship to death has been central to existentialist thought. In Heidegger's philosophy, the notion of being- towards-death defines the singularity of existence, and death dramatically informs both Rilke's poetics and the literary theory of Blanchot. The essay shows how the relationship between death and authenticity in their works forms the horizon between the imaginable and the unimaginable, and forms a mode of thinking about the limits of thought and language. Keywords: Death; writing; authenticity; authorship; Heidegger, Martin; Rilke, Rainer Maria; Blanchot, Maurice. To what extent is death thinkable or imaginable, Blanchot's understanding of literature and language. and what would entail an authentic relationship to Death, as the absolute temporal limit, marks the death so thought or imagined? Certainly a central human being in a uniquely defining way, and so death existential theme in respect to death is authenticity. This haunts the imagination and delimits the horizon of what involves fear of death and the overcoming of such fear, is thinkable. While death is lamentable and sometimes philosophically pertinent since Socrates who, in Plato's tragic, it is implied, in Socrates' discussion, that the Apology, suggests that a virtuous relationship to death fear of death may occasion a kind of existential or means first of all to acknowledge our ignorance of it. ethical failure. What then would be authentic about an In modern literature and philosophy, death emerges authentic relation to death? Is it more or less authentic to as a problem in that, while of utmost concern to us, it fear the unimaginable, or rather to imagine death—that lies outside our experience and knowledge. Death is is, to domesticate it within the actualizations of human the event horizon of thought: there can be, properly imagining? To live in denial of death is to live within speaking, no ontology of death, since it is nothing, the confines of illusion, uninformed by the ecstatic and there can be no phenomenology of death, since temporality of human existence. Yet to imagine death it never appears. Yet death is the defining concept of would be to misunderstand its absolute alterity, the Martin Heidegger's phenomenological ontology of the radical possibility of our own impossibility. Throughout human being or Dasein, since the temporality of our works of Heidegger, Rilke, and Blanchot, explorations of existence, its finitude, structures our relation to Being as fear and authenticity are relative to central assumptions such. Similarly, death dramatically informs the poetics about the imaginability—or unimaginability—of death. of transcendence in Rainer Maria Rilke, and Maurice Insofar as death is accessible to thought and writing, it Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, "Death and Authenticity: Reflections on Heidegger, Rilke, Blanchot," Existenz 9/1 (2014), 53-62 First posted 4-24-2014 54 Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei comes to define the limits of both. A brief turn to Franz in dying, only becomes what it is, in the sense of an Kafka through Blanchot's interpretations will question identity as a relation of the self to the self, by means of to what extent human mortality, the embodied reality this idea of mortality as irreplaceability.… The identity of oneself is given by death, by the being-towards- of our vulnerability to dying, is recognized in casting 2 the problem of death in terms of authenticity. death that promises me to it. Dasein's own authentic being, then, is given by and Death and Existential Authenticity through death. Yet Dasein's not-yet having reached this extreme, however impending, seems to leave Dasein as a In Being and Time, Heidegger considers death in whole out of reach, since death never "s" except in respect attempting to grasp the possibility of being-a-whole to that which obliterates its very being. Thus Blanchot's of Dasein, or the human being concerned about its question whether one can die—peux-je mourir?—is about being. If the human being is defined ontologically the je. If I am only in death, then I never am. and existentially, as its "being there," how can this This radical singularization that death gives cannot be apprehended across the whole range of Dasein's be understood according to a biological account of existence? This range would have to include not only death. Heidegger differentiates the existential analysis the origin or nascency of existence (to which Heidegger of death (concerning Tod and sterben, to die) from other gives little attention, as Hannah Arendt has charged, designations, for instance the physiological perishing but for the notion of thrownness), but also its end. (verenden) which he employs to indicate the extinction Death is the end of Dasein, yet with respect to any of living beings. Demise (Ableben) is also set aside from given individual existence, it is always outstanding, death in the existential sense, as designating simply never-yet achieved, and the totality or wholeness of living out, as in using up, one's life, as in expiration. A Dasein evades us or is marked by impossible closure: psychological account of death, too, would not tell us for when Dasein dies, or as Heidegger puts it reaches anything about Dasein's death and its individualizing its most extreme possibility, Dasein is no longer there, nature, for psychology describes living through the is no longer, and thus is nothing. Along these lines one approach, tells about the experience of dying, rather can even ask, as Blanchot does, whether one can die at than about dying itself. The existential analysis of death, all, since death obliterates the individual who could be Heidegger argues, cannot have anything to do with the subject of that sentence. "an experience of…factical demising." Anthropology Yet Heidegger describes death as "Dasein's or ethnography will also not suffice to orient an ownmost possibility."1 The death of others is, for investigation of death. In a rare reference to so-called Heidegger, no clue either to death as such, at least not primitive peoples, Heidegger suggests that their ways in the existential sense of facing, and being marked by, of comporting themselves towards death in magic and the nothing it implicates. I can sacrifice myself to save cult may tell us about their understanding of existence, someone, but I still cannot die his or her death, and but this does not get at the heart of it, for it "already he or she cannot die mine. Death, rather, individuates requires an existential analytic and a corresponding Dasein even more than Dasein's life does: I can share in conception of death" (BT 292). And any religious notion others' opinions, participate in others' rituals, make the of life after death merely skips over the phenomenon same choices, think thoughts already spelled out and in question by projecting life across the chiasm toward utter sentiments, however inwardly felt, experienced another life. by others and even universally expressed. But death But is death, aside from biological perishing or is one's own, as finitude aligns a temporality—for inevitable temporal demise, a phenomenon at all? it is my ultimate future, my end—that radically Death is merely a possibility, though a certain one, and singularizes. Dasein's Jemeinigkeit, its mineness or is phenomenal only to the extent that a possibility is ownmost singularity, is—as Derrida emphasizes in his that horizon of expectation toward which we can be interpretation—given by death: comported, or from which we can turn away. Death as The sameness of the self, what remains irreplaceable possibility gives such horizon while never itself being given; it is mere possibility which Dasein can either, at 1 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper 2 Derrida, Jacques, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills, & Row 1962, p. 307. [Henceforth cited as BT] Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1996, p. 45. http://www.existenz.us Volume 9, No. 1, Spring 2014 Death and Authenticity: Reflections on Heidegger, Rilke, Blanchot 55 least existentially, evade, or take upon itself. So death from which it comes. That in the face of which one has is the condition of possibility for life lived existentially. anxiety is characterized by the fact that what threatens In the "preliminary sketch of the existential-ontological is nowhere.…it is already 'there' and yet nowhere; it structure of death," Heidegger describes death in an is so close that it is oppressive and stifles one's breath, existential sense: and yet it is nowhere. [BT 231] Death is a possibility-of-Being which Dasein itself has One cannot fear or embrace death, unless the very to take over in every case. With death, Dasein stands possibility and extremity of death is diminished by before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. This some presenting symbolic reification, some actualizing is a possibility in which the issue is nothing less than domestication of impossibility within the possibility of Dasein's Being-in-the-world. Its death is the possibility of the rendered imagination. no-longer being-able-to-be-there. If Dasein stands before That is to say, one cannot fear death as one fears itself as this possibility, it has been fully assigned to its something (etwas fürchten) but one can experience dread ownmost potentiality-for-Being. When it stands before itself in this way, all its relations to any other Dasein have or anxiety (Angst) regarding death's very indeterminacy, been undone.
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