Ethics, Death and the Other

Death. As Martin Heidegger says, it is the one thing we won’t ever experience. “Death is a way to be, which a Being takes over as soon as it is.”

Death represents a moment of individual totality. Ironically, it is something we will never know. We will never be able to look back upon our lives as done, complete, over, fully lived. 

Therefore, death is a way of operating, a way of comporting one’s self, in life. It is an anticipation. It is, Heidegger says, the very source of possibility in life. “The closest closeness which one may have in Being towards death as a possibility, is as far as possible from anything actual . . . Being-toward-death, as anticipation of possibility, is what first makes this possibility possible, and sets it free as possibility.”

Death is the one thing, perhaps the only thing, we really go through on our own. It is the one authentic moment in our life, and as such, gives shape and meaning to any possibility for authentic existence in the here-and-now. 

Now Derrida draws perhaps his deepest inspiration from Heidegger. It is therefore quite compelling to insert some Heidegger alongside  Derrida’s meditations on death, experience, and the Other in Part II, Section 3, in Of Grammatology.

Derrida notes how, for Rousseau, imagination serves as pure auto-affection. “Imagination alone has the power to giving birth to itself. It creates nothing because it is imagination. But it receives nothing that is alien or anterior to it. It is not affected by the ‘real.’” 

Auto-affection, you will recall, is something like “thought-thinking” or “reason-reasoning.” It is a purely interior unfolding of some essence. It is the Cartesian cogito: I think therefore I am: the attempt to found a pure and essential knowledge on the basis of a self-evident claim from within a closed and regulated system.

You will further recall that imagination, for Rousseau, is the moment where the human animal enters onto the social stage, encountering for the first time, both the Other and death: “Rousseau delineates man out of this possibility. Imagination inscribes [note: writes] the animal within human society. It makes the animal accessible to humankind . . . Indeed, the animal does have a potential faculty of pity, but it imagines neither the suffering of the other as such nor the passage from suffering to death. Indeed, that is one and the same limit. The relation with the other and the relation with death are one and the same opening.”

The animal doesn’t know the other as Other, just as the infant does not know herself as self and mother as Other. Neither does the infant-animal know death, either its own nor the Other’s. The animal-infant lives, Rousseau would say, a life of pure determination, rather than one of determined possibility.

What does this all mean? 

A life of possibility--a life where ethics has importance, because there is the ability to choose and act, in however circumscribed a manner--is a life lived in relationship to both death and the Other. Death and the Other are foundational to “the I.”

Derrida says, “one may say that in one way or another, [writing] had already begun to undermine and shape ‘living’ speech, exposing it to death within the sign. But the supplementary sign does not expose to death by affecting a self-presence that is already possible. Auto-affection constitutes the same (auto) as it divides the same. Privation of presence is the condition of experience, that is to say, of  presence.”

Writing--as the always already articulated, appropriated, withdrawn, purloined--is death, because it interferes with the phantasy of pure auto-affection. There is no pure auto-affection. There is only an articulation that separates self from other, me from you, human from animal, life from death. This articulation is what makes experience possible, and cries out for a new way of thinking through our ethical relationship to the Other. 

So my question for you next week is: How can we develop an ethical relationship to the Other that takes into account writing and the originary supplement?

Further reading: I like the word of Ted Aoki. This is a nice and simple example of post-structural thinking in action. I also recommend my own pieces that work in the spirit of Derrida: my reading of Herbert Kliebard’s Dewey and Gloria Ladson-Billings’ Dreamkeepers.