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Memento moriRobert Smith aa Professor of French and Chair, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures , WayneState University , 1214 N. Clark Street #5, W. Hollywood, CA, 90069, USA E-mail:Published online: 04 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: Robert Smith (1998) Memento mori, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 3:3, 45-57

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Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities 3:3 1998

Philosopher, c'est apprendre à mourir.Montaigne

Being - we have no idea of it other than"living." - How can anything dead "be"?

Nietzsche

What, then, is it to cross the ultimate bor-der?... Is it possible? Who has ever done it andwho can testify to it?

Demda

Once is never" — this phrase, according toPeter Szondi, encapsulates the golden rule

of science and all verifiable knowledge in general.What occurs only once poses something intolera-ble and indeed impossible for scientific thinking:it cannot be verified and so escapes the order ofknowledge as the ground of certainty. How canwe be certain of what happens only once? Einmalist keinmal - scientific thinking views the par-ticular only as a specimen, a species implicitly orexplicitly belonging to a genus. Knowledge isderived by inference from specific cases inrespect of a general order. In the essay from 1962entitled "On Textual Understanding" it is literarycriticism which Szondi charges with too readilyembracing this scientific code of practice whenon the contrary it should pause to consider theextreme possibility raised by the way in whichtropes work in literary texts, that of existing atrandom and in relation to no other figurai or lit-eral moment, eluding verifiability and thusbreaching scientific decorum.1 I will come backto this but mainly I want to follow a different setof implications provoked by Szondi's insight intoscience's repression of the singular, its sideliningor denial of it. They concern our knowledgeabout death. Paul de Man in a later essay (1979)perhaps influenced by Szondi develops thisnotion of the absolute contingency of the literarytrope and associates it with what he thinks of asthe random power of death.2 I read this randompower of death, its absolute contingency, itssheer unrelatedness and saturated specificity, interms of the requirement that it happen to usonly once. Death can be experienced only onceby definition for death is the death of experienceüberhaupt. On the surface one might say, what

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could be more particular, more "real" and thusmore choice for a scientific materialism than anevent so specific that it happens just once andwhich therefore cannot in principle belong to anidealising, totalising scheme of history? Its par-ticularity could not be gainsaid and no idealisthistoricism could assimilate it. At the same time,however, such an opportunity brings on a crisisfor scientific materialism which thereby reachesits own limit, for it finds an object, an event sospecific or singular that it may be unthinkable,no apparatus may comprehend it; and thus anaporia between materialism and the scientificcredibility it aspires to is lit up. This singularityof death, its particularity and one-offness, consti-tutes one of at least two essential characteristics,the other being that insisted on by Heidegger,namely that no-one can die my death in my place— it is unavoidable - which would be a secondform of death's uniqueness. "Death," Heideggerwrites, "is Dasein's ownmost possibility."3 Thisis not to be confused with cases of sacrifice inwhich someone dies for another. The phrase "to

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die for another" misleads us for the sacrificialvictim will still die his or her own death in dyingfor another, and only metaphorically or by elisioncan they be said to die someone else's death. Ishall examine such specificity. The question thatemerges is, "if death happens to us only oncehow can we have any knowledge of it?" Can thegolden rule be applied here? Surely sciencewouldn't say, because death can be experiencedonly once that it therefore never happens? Whatdoes it mean for something to have to happenonly once — both to have to happen only once andto have to happen only once —, to be intrinsicallyunrepeatable, and what are the consequences forour knowledge about it? What follows is a briefenquiry into the status of our knowledge aboutdeath in the light not only of this "onceness" andspecificity but also of other aspects, for example,whether death can be known as certain or if notas certain then as fictional, rhetorical or specula-tive; whether we can be absolutely certain of itand yet forget it; and how it conditions humanexperience. In short, how can we ihinU death?

three responses to pascal

I would like to begin with two excerpts from aletter of Pascal:4

You do not need a greatly elevated soul to real-ize that in this life there is no true and firm sat-isfaction, that all our pleasures are simplevanity, that our afflictions are infinite, andlastly that death, which threatens us at everymoment, must in a few years infallibly presentus with the appalling necessity of being eitherannihilated or wretched for all eternity.

And a few paragraphs later:

Nothing is so important to man as his condi-tion. Nothing is so frightening to him as eter-nity. And so the fact that there are menindifferent to the loss of their being and to theperil of an eternity of wretchedness is not nat-ural. They are quite different with regard toeverything else: they fear even the mostinsignificant things, they foresee them, feelthem, and the same man who spends so manydays and nights in rage and despair over the

loss of some office or over some imaginaryaffront to his honour is the very one who, with-out anxiety or emotion, knows he is going tolose everything through death. It is a mon-strous thing to see in the same heart and at thesame time both this sensitivity to the slightestthings, and this strange insensitivity to thegreatest.

It is "monstrous," in Pascal's eyes, to be so neg-ligent of the fact of death, our "condition." Inorder to contemplate and respond to his right-eous indignation we need to make a distinctionbetween forgetting death and forgetting aboutthe fact that we are going to die. Clearly Pascalhas his mind on this second form. After all onewill never be able to remember one's own death.That is something that death brings, an end tomemory, the impossibility of remembering any-thing ever again including the death whichimposed the impossibility. Rilke in the first ofthe Duino Elegies says that in death you loseeven your own first name.5 Death cannot beremembered. Rather, one remembers or ought toremember that one will die. One is called to a"that," a direction or attribute; a grammar routesthe thought, adjusting it towards a determinatecontent, that one will die. However, this deter-minate content turns out to be empty. Because ithappens only once we cannot know what this"that" points towards in saying that we will die.In this regard the thought is meaningless. Thisdeterminate and absolutely certain thought thatwe will die subsists undetermined. The thoughtof death presents itself as thoroughly unique inthis regard. No other thought in the world man-ages absolute certainty and complete indetermi-nacy at the same time. The price paid forabundant certainty is lack of content. I am cer-tain of something I absolutely do not know. Onlythe "that" of death can ever be invoked and pre-cisely because death occurs only once and pre-cludes any subsequent reflection on it; deathprecludes all subsequence, or more succinctlystill, death precludes. "We are a sign," asHölderlin says, "meaningless." There is a sensebut there is no meaning; there is direction but nohorizon.

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And yet, given its certainty, how is it possibleto ignore or even forget about death? If Pascalrankles at the indifference of those who do notruminate upon it, there must be a prior possibil-ity that death can indeed be forgotten. Thestately fact of death in all its gravity and rele-vance for the human condition may be set aside,overlooked or, what's worse for Pascal, relegatedin favour of more immediate worldly concerns.

Is it not strange to have to remember that onemust die? That one has to be reminded of this,the most crucial and determining condition ofone's existence? For insofar as death can be for-gotten it forfeits its pre-eminence as a fact; in itsforgettability it stands on a par with all else thatmay be forgotten; I can forget about death just asI might forget my umbrella. It could well beproved an epistemological or psychological lawthat nothing exists which cannot in principle beforgotten, but the forgettability of death — is thatnot a scandal of some sort? Ought that not to bea special case when it comes to remembering andforgetting? Isn't there something hubristic or atleast irreverent in forgetting about death, somefailure to salute an absolute authority? Is it notsimply too important to forget even for amoment? St Paul writes in his letter to theThessalonians of the requirement to pray withoutceasing: isn't something equal to that requiredfor the thought of death? Socrates in the Phaedo(80C-81) even speaks of the soul as that whichemerges through meditation on death. The soulcomes into its own through a separation from thebody, growing thereby into its condition as "wis-dom" or thought which is nothing but an appre-hension of the soul's final separation fromcorporeality, the intimation of its own being-towards-death. For Socrates all thought, as aform of "'practising death'" (80e), should bedirected towards this end. The soul becomesitself, identifies itself, through this meditation ondeath. As the epigraph from Montaigne echoed,"philosopher, c'est apprendre à mourir." And onecould go further and conclude from Socrates thatif death is the most appropriate state for the soulbecause it is the most noncorporeal and the mostintellectual state, then such a death cannot betold apart from the pure exercise of the intellect,

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that is, wisdom or philosophy.6

And yet this solemn task of thought may beforgotten. I can think of three responses to thisbizarre opportunity which humans possess of for-getting about the one thing of which they are cer-tain, the fact that we shall die. The first responsecomes by turning the question round to make itnot "how is it possible to forget about death?,"but "how would it be possible to have to remem-ber it?" What would it mean for something thatit would absolutely have to be remembered, tothe extent that it absolutely would be remem-bered for certain? For if something must beremembered absolutely — with an absolutenessnot to be circumscribed — and therefore will beremembered in each case, then the notion ofmemory, paradoxically, no longer makes senseand falls away. The certainty that death would forsure be remembered because it absolutely had tobe, would do away with the responsibility at theheart of memory, the responsibility which countssimultaneously as memory's possible failure andits only chance. It would no longer be necessaryto remember death because death wouldabsolutely have to be remembered. Under anabsolute injunction there can be no question ofits being forgotten; we need no reminding toremember it. An absolute injunction to remem-ber amounts to an invitation to forget. A respon-sibility conditions memory, injects it with a kindof free will, making it real by giving it the chanceto select and to default on what it collects andrecollects. Which is as much as to say that mem-ory qua memory can never be absolute. If notstructured by the possibility of forgetting theexperience of memory would become mere pro-grammatic, unreflective, irresponsible retentionthat would involve no remembering as such at all.

This would be the first response to Pascal.How is it possible to forget about death? Becauseit is impossible absolutely to remember it. Thepossibility that I forget it furnishes the conditionof my remembering. Only insofar as I might for-get it does my remembering death become mean-ingful.

This paradox may be transposed onto an ethi-cal plane to produce a second response. It maylook like hubris or disrespect that from time to

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time I forget about death in its absoluteness, itssovereignty, its authority, but that's just howmemory works. Thus I remember-and-forget,respect death and disrespect it. This revealssomething about the ethics of respect. The call torespect death, such as Pascal's, unfortunatelycannot be answered in a straightforward way. Torespect death faithfully, to acknowledge its prece-dence and incontrovertibility, requires two irrec-oncilable gestures simultaneously, and thisapplies to all forms of respect. The practice ofrespect demands on the one hand that I concernmyself with its object (in this case death), that Itake it to myself, dwell on it, incorporate it andas it were watch over it, care for it, my respect-ful concern drawing me to an appropriation of it,a becoming busy with it, an allowing of it to fillme up, to learn it, to study it, to know it, becomeinstructed in it and give myself over to it in itsdifference and otherness from me; but on theother hand and owing precisely to that differenceand otherness, my respect for death enjoins onme the contrary gesture, of letting it go, respect-ing it as other, as different and distinct from me,needing to be released, never to suffer the injuryand inappropriateness of my appropriation of it,my intentions for it, my crude assimilation whichwould turn its otherness into my sameness andthus no longer respect it as it. Respect in generaland the respect for death in particular necessi-tates this ambiguous intention both to know andnot to know, to solicit and to relinquish, and thusmy forgetting about death contains an ethicalrightness in performing one half of the dividedgesture that respect demands, that of letting go,of the movement towards not knowing at allabout death, giving up any rights over it, as asign of my respect for it. Risk, rather than truth,informs the concept of respect, for not to incor-porate and not to know death in the respecting ofit runs the risk of disregarding, abandoning andthus disrespecting it altogether. It is within thishorizon of risk that the ethics of respect emerges.What would an ethics be which didn't involvesome responsibility and therefore risk, imperfectknowledge, prior hesitation and the freedom thatderives from having no certain, prescribed courseof action to pursue? The decorum of respect

entails an essential anxiety in the perpetual strug-gle between an apprehension of its object (deathin this case) and a nonapprehension, one thatcould be said to be matched by the interfusingand undecided movement between rememberingand forgetting. To know death as death, throughthe figure of absolute respect which it imposes, isalso to abjure the knowing of it. Just as I remem-ber-and-forget death, having no choice but toswitch back and forth, so also I acknowledge itcarefully, anxiously, through knowing and not-knowing, approaching and withdrawing, respect-ing it thereby at the risk of disrespect andunobservance, this being the very risk by whichmy respect achieves validity.

As for the third response as to how it is possi-ble to forget death, we can elaborate on theabsolute injunction from the first response andwith it raise the question of force. The phrase"memento morì" which I have taken as a titlemeans "remember you must die." You must die,of course, but there are two kinds of "must," twoorders of obligation at issue. First, the order of"you must because you are ordered to," "youmust because I tell you," "you must do this orelse." Some empirical stricture binds you, andthis stricture belongs to the realm of positive law,of force as enforcement where a "must" must beenforced because it could go unheeded. Thus theforce in this first case is a symptom of a basicweakness. If necessary to prescribe that you stopat a red light, it is because it is always possiblefor you not to, and this possibility has to be coun-tered positively by a law which says you muststop. Obviously this is not the kind of "must"involved in death. The phrase "remember youmust die" does not stipulate that we must diebecause without such a stipulation we might not.It pertains to a different category of must. Youmust die because you will die, order or no order.No-one could give the order to die more strongly,more forcefully than it is already given. Try it.This is a law that does not need to express itselfas an order, and requires no enforcement. Itcould be called force without force. So forcefulthat it needs no forcing, the force of mortalitythus differs from the gratuity pertaining to thefirst kind. And this throws up the question of the

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ambiguity of force in general: force is both essen-tially gratuitous — where force is required, therehas been some lack of force prior to it for whichit is making up - but at the same time forceachieves an immanence within itself, a perfectentelechy whose force lies in exactly such self-suf-ficiency and containment.

The phrase "remember you must die" belongsto the second category of obligation. As such itrequires no recollection, unlike in the first whereevery time I stop at a red light I am in a sensereminded of a law (which could in principle beforgotten). From this perspective the phrasebecomes redundant. There is no need for me toremember I must die; it will come about regard-less of my remembering it; it is simply the caseand dispenses with any need to be recalled orinvoked, sublimely indifferent to human appre-hension of it. As a third and final response to"how is it possible to forget about death?" we cantherefore say that to remember it in any case isirrelevant. A human remembering makes no dif-ference to it; that we must die is so unassailablytrue that it has no need of being sheltered in andby our memories. And so equally we can forgetit without any consequence.

In this last aspect death becomes that whichdeprives us of any meaningful psychic relation toit. We might wonder what the consequences ofthis would be for psychologies of death, andspecifically any psychoanalysis of it. What possi-ble ground could there be for the death drive, forexample? The psychic pursuit of death as sug-gested by Freud, the exercise of the deathinstincts, in a sense implies that death mustindeed be pursued as if it were not the inevitabil-ity it is. What need a death instinct? No instinctfor it is required. If the death instinct is a driveas Freud's German word Todestrieb indicates,this drive qua drive appears supererogatory, gra-tuitous, for death requires no driving towards.Pre-emptingly it outstrips all psychic relation toit, conscious or unconscious.7

Where, then, and how can death be appre-hended? I would now like to bridge from Pascalto Heidegger. We have begun to see some of thedifficulties in conceptualising death. Heideggerwill suggest that our mistake is in viewing death

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as actual rather than possible, which I shall try toexplain in a moment. In general a move thatmight be made is one that takes us away from anepistemology of death, away from the language ofapprehension, away from the dimension of con-sciousness, which includes unconsciousness. Inrelation to the last point, for example, about psy-choanalysis, there are already resources for think-ing in a new direction. The Todestrieb finds itsmotor not only in the psyche. The drive of thedeath drive, according to Freud, that which urgesthe psychic drive in a particular direction, lodgesin the organic determinations of psychic develop-ment, prior even to the formation of the uncon-scious. If the psyche tends towards its own death,it may owe to a phylogenetic link with its pre-psy-chical past as simple organism. The death drivecomprises an a-psychic element, a purely organicor biological compulsion to return to a state ofabsolute simplicity that can be called death. Thepoint is that the psychic relation to death can beconceived in a way that includes an a-psychic com-ponent. Psychoanalysis moves in this direction, asdoes the fundamental ontology of Heidegger.Both gesture towards a structural, prepsychologi-cal relation to death of the human being, thoughof the two it is Heidegger we shall pursue.

the possibility of death

Towards the very end of A la recherche du tempsperdu, the narrator muses on his time runningout, how age caps artistic endeavour:

For the fundamental fact was that I had a body,and this meant that I was perpetually threat-ened by a double danger, internal and external,though to speak thus was merely a matter oflinguistic convenience, the truth being that theinternal danger - the risk, for example, of acerebral haemorrhage - is also external, since itis the body that it threatens. Indeed it is thepossession of a body that is the great danger tothe mind, to our human and thinking life,which it is surely less correct to describe as amiraculous entelechy of animal and physicallife than as an imperfect essay - as rudimentaryin this sphere as the communal existence ofprotozoa attached to their polyparies or as the

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body of the whale - in the organisation of thespiritual life. The body immures the mindwithin a fortress; presently on all sides thefortress is besieged and in the end, inevitably,the mind has to surrender.8

We arrived at this juncture from a third responseto Pascal which said that death needed noremembering, thus frustrating psychic relation toit. A mind-body dualism underlies the point forwe are implying that because the body is going todie anyway there is no need for the mind toaccommodate the fact of death in any fashion.Proust writes pointedly of this disjunction, whatcould be called the "dyschronic" link betweenthe two systems that human beings consist in.Death discloses this dualism between the appar-ent and illusory immortality of the mind and thecertain, felt mortality of the body. The mindwould not necessarily surrender were not its bod-ily ramparts eroding.

True, death actually happens and it happens"to" the body while the mind plausibly mightsurvive indefinitely; similarly, the body is caughtup absolutely in time's forward movement whilethe mind can skip about over the surface of time,recalling, anticipating, imagining, not shackled tothe present. In these simple terms, death appearsas an event, that which comes, that which hap-pens. The body arrives at death, or death arrivesat the body, and once the body falls the mindmust fall too; it goes down like a captain with hisship. It is an event. We think death in terms ofactual event-time. If we think of it as happeningit is because we think of its taking place in thecourse of such time. But in so thinking,Heidegger warns us, "death gets passed off asalways something 'actual'; its character as a pos-sibility gets concealed." Let us examine this char-acter of possibility that death has.

Pascal's vexation depended on the actuality ofdeath, whose actuality as actual allows for psy-chological cognisance of it albeit in the impededmanner we have sketched. What, by contrast, isdeath's possibility? What kind of a possibility isdeath? Heidegger answers that "death is the pos-sibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein."What kind of possibility is this? Two orders of

possibility open up, one at the centre ofHeideggerian thought, and another which willtake us away from Heidegger through Derridaand back to de Man. The first kind of possibility,the Heideggerian kind, also bears a kind of force.We have already enumerated two kinds of force:that of positive law which requires enforcementand that of actual death which requires noenforcement but which in flagging death as a fac-tion brutum depends on a rather unrefined mate-rialism of the body, a biologism. Heideggerianpossibility too represents a force in that it signalspower. Possibility is strong because it gestures toits own ability, capacity, faculty, to do or tomake. The Latin "posse" from which the English"possibility" comes abbreviates the phrase "potisesse," which is having the power and the potencyand the "can" as the force to do something. TheGerman "Möglichkeit" which Heidegger uses for"possibility" relates to "Macht" for "power."And death, for Heidegger, marks some kind ofpossibility though its power, as I shall try toshow, is nothing more or less than rhetorical.

In a very general sense the force of possibilityconstitutes the strongest force conceivable. Itmakes something possible; it claims some worldlychange; it envisions an adjustment of the veryfuture; it forces open a virtual space where noth-ing had existed. But one should not conflate thisidea with the notion that anything is possible.Virtual space, one could say, gives the easiestspace of all to open. It takes no force to open, justa little imagination, for any possibility may beconceived — there is no resistance, at one level, inthe realm of the imagination. This does notamount to creating the conditions for the possi-bility of something, however. There is a differ-ence between the received idea of the possible asthat which might become actual in the future andalready exists in the realm of virtual actuality, onthe one hand, what we could call "soft" possibil-ity; and the possible as a transcendental condi-tion, on the other - "hard" possibility perhaps.Death is a hard possibility.

How does Heidegger conceive it? It is deathitself which allows us to conceive it for, to put itbaldly, death annihilates actuality per se. Hewrites:

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The closest closeness which one may have inBeing towards death as a possibility, is asfaras possible from anything actual. The moreunveiledly this possibility gets understood, themore purely does the understanding penetrateinto it as the possibility of the impossibility ofany existence at all. Death, as possibility,gives Dasein nothing to be "actualized," noth-ing which Dasein, as actual, could itself be...Being-towards-death, as anticipation of possi-bility, is what first makes this possibility pos-sible, and sets it free as possibility.9

Since actuality vanishes at death, destroyed bydeath, the only character available to death canbe that of possibility. Death bears the force of theentirely nonactual — "Death, as possibility, givesDasein nothing to be 'actualized." It bears theforce of possibility which, qua possibility, callsfor a concept of anticipation in regard to it — withthe proviso that anticipation anticipates nothingactual, belonging rather to a structure of timethat opens elsewhere than into the actual, andthus once more pre-empts any psychologicalapprehension thereof. Onceness again — deathnever happens not so much because it never hap-pens but because it never happens. It is unhap-pening. In this sense death cannot even beexperienced. Death is an "event" without begin-ning or end. There is no "death"; there is onlythe stopping of life, the notion of "death" a merepersonification of that stopping. As such its pos-sibility will have withdrawn from the realm of theactual and of empirical time, becoming evenharder than "hard"; it is hypertranscendental. Itholds the status of something entirely structural,preceding all empiricism, all psychism, and ifthis possibility has power it is the power or forceof that which can never become vulnerablebecause it never "exists," never comes into time.Death does not die in time. I would suggest thatthe deathliness of death - its sheer incontestabil-ity - resides precisely in this, its having alreadybeen constituted as possibility. On account ofnever being actualized the possibility of death iseffectively a perpetual possibility; but insofar asit is also the perpetual possibility of death, thelast thing it can be is perpetual for it must die.

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We are forced to think the possibility of death asperpetual and finite at the same time.

There are one or two comments relating towhat has already been said that may be madeabout this structure. Firstly, where we spokeabout the forgettability of death we can apply anew filter to our thoughts. If we forget aboutdeath it is not only because remembering it cre-ates problems in the ways suggested but alsobecause of a more stringent reason. There is noforgetting or remembering of death to be had for,according to Heidegger at least, its deep charac-ter is one of possibility which pre-empts andremains absolutely foreign — not just indifferent- to apprehension of it. How is it possible, otherthan through some mystificatory theory of anam-nesis, to remember or forget something whichentirely outflanks the actual? True, one canremember things that are not "actual," such asfictional narratives or lies, but even these are sub-tended by a virtual actuality. Secondly, thenotion of forgetting and remembering we havebeen using has been rather naïve, suggestive of asimple consciousness at work. What aboutunconscious forgetting or repression? But evenhere we can say that death's possibility remainsintact for it does not appear in any form whatso-ever, harbouring its structurality, thus offeringnothing of itself, no matter, to repress. If there isrepression at large it pertains to possibility asrepression, as that which will never become actu-alized. Which means too that death "is" repres-sion; is the object of that possibility as theimpossibility of any actualization - an impossi-bility which perhaps may be called absoluterepression. What more effective repression couldbe envisaged than one which precludes actualiza-tion in general?

We commonly use the word "possible" torefer to something which may or may not hap-pen; it might happen precisely to the extent italso might not. Heidegger's notion, by contrast,has the sense that the possible certainly will nothappen, death forcing the paradox, it being "thepossibility of the impossibility of any existenceat all." Why does he not use the word "neces-sity" for this condition? Why does he not writethat death is the necessity of the impossibility of

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any existence at all? One could venture answerssuch as "because necessity belongs to the orderof actuality whereas death is nothing actual," butthere is a more fruitful line. In our quotationHeidegger said that "Being-towards-death, asanticipation of possibility, is what first makesthis possibility possible, and sets it free as possi-bility." As such the possibility of death is cre-ated, not given, made by Being-towards-death,and to this extent "contingent."

But isn't that preposterous? Can death reallybe contingent? Can it (death!) lack transcenden-tal force? Let's read Heidegger's sentence again:"Being-towards-death, as anticipation of possibil-ity, is what first makes this possibility possible,and sets it free as possibility." We could objectthat there will have had to be death before itsbeing made possible by Being-towards-death ifonly because the latter is just that, Being-towards-deoiA, aiming at the death it purports tomake possible. Yet Being-towards-death, asBeing-towards-death must indeed precede death,for there must be Being in some form in orderfor there to be death (and in this sense also deathis contingent — on the existence of living thingswhich, as living, can die; there would be nodeath if there were no life, this suggesting animportant respect in which death differs fromnothingness which must be absolutely uncontin-gent). There is a contingency of death, then, inthat its possibility must be made, created ratherthan received, but a contingency not to be con-fused with the contingency of what might havebeen otherwise, with the optional. It was not pos-sible for this possibility of death not to be madefor it inheres in Being as Being-towards-death,but all this does not quite add up to a necessity,and it is in the space that the spectrality andrhetoric of death opens up.

death persuades me with an ¡mage

In deference to the work of Nietzsche, Ricoeur,de Man and Derrida on it, I elect the term"promise" to indicate this space where necessityand contingency overlap and where possibility isperpetual yet finite. Death may be inevitable butnot so inevitable and not so transcendentally

forceful that its possibility exists prior to beingmade; it necessarily will happen, but rather a for-tiori than a priori, its necessity depleted by thefact that its happening is not an actuality but apossibility; and as possibility - one which, more-over, requires being made - it also depends. It issimultaneously necessary and contingent and tocapture the internal energy of this aporetic linkthe notion of the promise appears helpful. Apromise also is both necessary and contingent,assuring an outcome while risking exposure to allthat precedes it. Death appears both necessaryand contingent and can only be possible becauseit will itself have done away with actuality, so allit can ever do is promise itself. There will neverbe an actuality of fulfilment for it.

This promissory structure of death representsthe other kind of possibility mentioned above.The first was of a more orthodox Heideggeriankind, shall we say, of the possibility of death assomething structural. While not opposingHeidegger in this new view we are nonethelessfinding room in his account for thought of a dis-tinctly post-Heideggerian kind. As promise deathbegins to appear both speculative and rhetorical.It therefore continues to defy any epistemic cer-tainty we might have about it, remaining withoutdeterminate content. In this respect we truly aredeparting from Heidegger who contrasts thebeing certain with regard to one's death withcases in which one merely has a view about some-thing or another. In the same section as quotedof Being and Time he talks of the kind of cer-tainty that applies "in any arbitrary fiction or inmerely having some 'view' ['Ansicht1]": in suchcases, he says, the kind of certainty one has aboutdeath "is lacking. "W There exist in other wordstwo distinct and even opposite types of certainty,one exclusively to do with death, the other withhaving a view about arbitrary things in general.But from what we have seen very little differenceobtains in fact between our supposed certaintyabout death and the relation we might have tosomething arbitrary or fictional. For if death,bearing nothing that could be actualized yet sus-taining possibility, is structured like a promise,and thus has a character that is both rhetoricaland speculative, then we can be certain about it

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only in the mode of the kind of trust or credu-lousness we bring to the reception of just sucharbitrary fictions. And all the more so in that thepromise does not pertain to real time, to the timeof actuality. A transcendental promise engagesus, one which does not bind itself to an empiri-cal future but which, like a fiction, takes place inthe realm of pure possibility. Indeed the arbi-trariness is crucial.

In terms of force this means that althoughabsolutely certain, death can never be strongerthan a promise. It is both absolutely certain andnot absolutely certain, for the mode of its cer-tainty, taking place outside actuality, thereby ren-ders the certainty inaccessible. It becomesabsolutely certain precisely because not subject tothat actuality which would always maintain somethreat, no matter how small, to certainty, in thatit could vary events unpredictably; but in becom-ing so very certain, the certainty of death becomesimpossible to establish. Hence the force of deathinterrupts itself in making itself absolute. It hasto weaken itself to be as forceful as it is. It hasbecome so forceful that it has absconded fromand even done away with the realm in which itsforce can be expressed, for it has obliterated actu-ality. It has reached the level of a hyperabsolute-ness in which mere absoluteness has beensuperseded with the both weaker and strongerquasi-absoluteness of a promise; and so on and soforth. Having become slightly "weaker" throughits absolute strength, it must resort to a kind ofsublime rhetoric to affirm its force.

In terms of "being," however, things appearsimpler at first sight. Nothing in the transcen-dental workings of the promise disturbs thebeing to which it appends. Yes, its relation todeath in Being-towards-death gets complexifiedby the promise, but "being" stays in place as thepromise's transcendental referent or counter-weight. To this extent our analysis remainssoundly metaphysical, upholding a tradition ofthinking about the promise as a kind of stabilis-ing element in concepts of being. In another deMan essay, for example, the author says in a foot-note that Nietzsche derives the transcendentalreferent, "man," from the promise:ll man is dis-tinguished from animals by his capacity to syn-

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thesise his identity forcefully over time and mak-ing promises affords a pre-eminent modality ofsuch continuity; man outfaces the contingency ofhistory, wilfully positing his promise and thushimself as what will override the future. I shallcome back to this, the point for now being thatthe promise offers a means of configuring thefuture according to one's will, thus in a senseanthropomorphizing time, assuring the ontologi-cal power of the one animal capable of makingpromise — man, who achieves a transcendentalcontinuity, a self-necessity in the face of the acci-dents otherwise looming. Paul Ricoeur makes asimilar point though with an emphasis more onthe duty to the future than the mastery over it ofthe promising animal. For Ricoeur the promisebinds its maker to the future in an ethical waywhich enjoins responsibilities on him or her -and again an ontological substrate forms.l2

But surely the transcendental promise as wehave introduced it would fail to support an ontol-ogy? Not only does it not pertain to an actualtime in which being could be sustained but itpromises the nonactualization of being per se.And besides, the promise of death is not made byanyone, is not the object of an intention, thus onecould not derive a subjective agent for it withontological properties. The promise of deathmust indeed concern the death of being or of abeing — for as we said, only being can die - andto this extent we cannot simply deny or bypassthe ontological dimension; but at the same timewe are obliged to consider a more enigmatic kindof death which radiates at the limit of ontology.We must try to think this very difficult aspect ofdeath.

As promised death is coming but not as any-thing actual. In this sense it does not come at all;it cannot come for there is no actuality for it topenetrate. Its coming conforms rather to analready-here. What is promised has already beengiven for though only ever promised it cannot bedeferred since no actuality exists into which toproject it. It will have already insinuated itself.This would be the structure raised by the tran-scendental or rather quasi- or hyper-transcenden-tal promise. Death consigns us not only to anactual death to come but also to a being already

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dead; contained in the "towards" of Being-towards-death is an echo of the death that haspreceded it, thus one travels towards the thingone has departed from.

In this respect actual death, the common-senseversion of death, might look like the typologicalfulfilment or the prophetic completion of thedeath that has taken place surreptitiously before-hand. In dying one is catching up with death asin a kind of delayed effect, and in saying this Ihave in mind not only theoretical work on thissubject - by Freud, of course, in terms ofNachträglichkeit and by Žižek in not dissimilarterms13 - but also a couple of fictions. There isTolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich (to whichHeidegger devotes a footnote in Being and7ime14), for example, and a later fiction by DonDeLillo called Mao II which seems tacitly toinvoke Tolstoy's story. Ivan, having suffered thevicissitudes of a civil service career in Russia,eventually secures a prestigious post in StPetersburg. Full of pride he buys a house in thecity for his family and sets about decorating it:

He was so taken up with it all that he often didthings himself, rearranging the furniture or thehangings. Once when mounting a step-ladderto show a workman, who did not understand,how he wanted some material draped, he madea false step and slipped, but being a strong andagile person he clung on and only knocked hisside against the knob of the window frame.The bruise was painful but it soon passed off.All this time, indeed Ivan Ilyich felt particu-larly alert and well. "I feel fifteen yearsyounger," he wrote.15

That trivial knock to his side turns out to be fataland it works like a memento morì. The story iswritten so as to suggest the prior necessity of thedeath, with implications for the vanity of humanambition. The long remainder of the story detailsthe time-lag, so to speak, of the stay of execution,the gap between Ivan's having already died in theknock, his actual death at the end of the tale, andthe background sense of the knock on the sidemarking the irruption of an already-deadness ofthe man. In DeLfflo's story the hero, a writer, ona trip to Israel, receives a slight knock to his side

from a car as he steps off a pavement. Accordingto a similar, even identical, structure, the knockturns out to be fatal as if some malign promisehas been awakened.16

This "promise," this strangely contingent butindubitable necessity which cannot be provedbecause never actualized, this promise of beingalready dead entombs its subject, gives it overeven in the midst of its actual Ufe to a kind ofmourning. If already dead by this promise theliving being has a kind of monumentality con-ferred upon him or her. In other words themourning process begins with the beginning ofUfe for life is already a kind of death, the beingwhich lives it promised to a death anterior to it.Life begins and continues with a protest againstthis constant monumentalization, against theceaseless becoming-dead and sclerosis whichmakes every image of it a death-mask. In termsof the forgettability of death we could thereforeoffer a fourth response to Pascal. There can beno forgetting of death at all, transcendentallyspeaking, for every image I have of myself oranyone becomes a remembering of them as deadeven while alive, a precocious mourning. My veryself-consciousness becomes posthumous. Everyimage I have of every animate thing arrives as anobject of mourning; though I may forget aboutdeath I cannot forget the deathliness of the deadwho live around me. And in turn I am subject tothe uncontrollable reproduction of myself as"dead" in the images of me carried by others.Hardened into an image object, my deathly beingproliferates irregularly in these fissiparous, sculp-tural, pseudoaesthetic forms.

One of a number of inferences derived byDerrida from this situation reveals a sheer force-lessness on the part of actual death.1? Actualdeath fails to register, it makes no difference: Ican be remembered as dead before dying; actualdeath does not alter the mode of my beingremembered. Rather it is the transcendentalpromise of death which has power over me, anda hyperbolic power to boot for the promise deliv-ers me over to the other who will have begunmourning for me — not just to a singular other,either, but to the possibility of an endless divi-sion and dissemination of my image among every

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other in general. This is power or force as sheerreproduction and augmentation, reiteration,regeneration, repetition and so on, which is inprinciple infinite. The promise speaks with arhetoric that affirms the fission of my self, thusmy self-identity and my very being, firing it intoa myriad specular structure where I am trappedbehind glass so to speak, imaged in the other amillion times over. I describe it as rhetoric notonly on account of its force, that of identityexplosion, but also because — as we must neverforget — it remains without a basis in actuality,with all the rhetorical certainty of the unprovable- for this is where rhetoric springs up, in theabsence of an apodictic truth. Meanwhile theforce of being for its part must consist in resis-tance to this promise which saturates it but can-not be confronted, the promise that it is alreadydead, already mourned for, already turned intoan icon and thus, before being even begins,already appropriated by the other. And Derridamakes another inference from this, namely thatthe a priori confusion of my self with the othermeans that the being I have and which dies willnot be entirely my own, that the other always diesmy death with me and the "mineness" of mydeath fails to soak it all up. Which would fly inthe face of one of the essential characteristics ofdeath mentioned at the beginning of this discus-sion, viz. that my death is always my own andnone can die it for me.

once again: such celerity in dying

We have looked with reference to Pascal at someof the problems in conceptualising actual death.We then at Heidegger's prompting changed thediscussion to the level of possibility at whichdeath, though necessary, gives nothing to beactualized, thus creating for itself the character ofa perpetual promise. This promise, rather thanprojecting an actual future, lay in a possibilitywhich as such inhabited a space of the already.The already of the promise of death led in turnto the being-mourned-by-the-other which affectsall "living" things. But our enquiry began, andhere and there referred back to, the "onceness"of death. This onceness reappears at the juncture

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we have reached and I shall conclude with someremarks about it.

It transpires that rather than dying once I dieagain and again through the other, in the other'simage of me. My self-identity such as it is getsposited outside myself in unconnected acts deriv-ing from the rhetoric of a promise. And it is notjust rhetoric but fiction which springs up forthese images of me abound from my death orabsence and are thus not controlled by veracity.They begin with my absence or death, myremoval from actuality, thus apocryphal bynature; they can be multiplied and distortedwithout reference back to a living me, withoutratification from anything actual. Derrida saysthe origin of fiction lies in mourning, in just such"apocryphal figuration" as he calls it.18 This gen-erative figuration makes me die over and over indifferent, distorted non-self-identical versions,makes me die even as it preserves me in multi-farious forms.

It is perhaps little wonder then that Paul deMan associates rhetoric with death, as we saidback in the first paragraph. De Man wants tostress the true force of both rhetoric and death asstemming from their violent randomness, theirabsolute disruptiveness and discontinuity. In theessay referred to earlier, for example, he writesthat:

[Shelley's] The Triumph of Life warns us thatnothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text,ever happens in relation, positive or negative,to anything that precedes, follows, or existselsewhere, but only as a random event whosepower, like the power of death, is due to therandomness of its occurrence. I9

It is what makes him also deconstruct theNietzschean concept of the promise we referredto, as that which sustains over time and thus ide-alises the identity of its wilful, forceful maker.For de Man there would be a force of thepromise greater than that of the person whomakes it in that the promise fails, precisely, tosustain the identity of its maker over time. Itwould be an act of violent positing without recu-peration somewhat along the lines we have laidout. The promise of death such as we have

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described it allows for an absolute randomness in

the imaging of me by the other who can make

images, posit figurations of me in an arbitrary

and fictive manner. Thus I am indeed posited,

but posited only in the de Manían, rhetorical

sense, as a series of linguistic acts which bear no

ideal relation to one another and no transcen-

dental relation to the referent, the me, they

"derive" from. For I begin, begin to be, only

within the possibility of this prior distortion and

appropriation. A rhetorical machine will have

begun to randomly posit my being outside

myself owing to the fact that this being is

promised to the possibility, rather than the actu-

ality, of death. In this light death appears as the

radical intermission of my being per se.

This allows us to conclude that death may

indeed remain unknowable in its happening only

once. But it happens only once again and again

in these severely truncated rhetorical acts that

ought not be humanised into a meaningful chain.

Each time, each toll of death, is a one-off in that

I am fictively distorted in each case, thus bearing

only accidental and not essential similarity to

myself from one time to the next. A principle of

confusion is at work, therefore, allowing me also

to be mistaken and misprised. The distortion of

my image operates by such a principle of confu-

sion, allowing for mistaken identity,

projection, prosopagnosia and the

dreams of others' deaths.

notes

1 Peter Szondi, "On Textual Understanding," On

Textual Understanding and Other Essays, trans.

Harvey Mendelsohn (Manchester: Manchester UP,

1986) I3ff.

2 Paul de Man, "Shelley Disfigured," The Rhetoric of

Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984) 122.

See below for quotation.

3 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John

Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1962) 307.

4 Blaise Pascal, "A Letter to Further the Search for

God," Pensées and Other Writings, trans. Honor

Levi (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995) 160-62.

5 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer

Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell (London:

Picador, 1980) 155.

Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth

no longer,

to give up customs one barely had time to

learn,

not see roses and other promising Things

¡n terms of a human future; no longer to be

what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to

leave

even one's own first name behind, forgetting it

as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.

6 Plato, The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton

and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton UP,

1961) 63-66.

7 See in particular Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure

Principle," in vol. 11 of The Pelican Freud Library,

On Metapsychology. The Theory of Psychoanalysis,

trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1984) 269-338.

8 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol.

3, trans. Terence Kilmartin, Andreas Mayor and C.

K. Scott Moncrieff (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1981) 1092.

9 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John

Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1962) 306-07.

10 Ibid. 300.

11 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figurai

Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust

(New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979) 273.

12 See Paul Ricoeur, "Self as Ipsè," Freedom and

Interpretation: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1992, ed.

Barbara Johnson (New York: Basic, 1993) 103-19.

13 For references to Freud's use of this term see

J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of

Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith

(London: Karnac, 1988) 111-14; Slavoj Žižek,

"You Only Die Twice," The Sublime Object of

Ideology (London: Verso, 1989) 131 -49.

14 An essay on Heidegger's footnote by Robert

Bernasconi, "Literary Attestation in Philosophy:

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Heidegger's Footnote on Tolstoy's The Death of

Ivan llyich,'" appears in Philosophers' Potts, ed.

David Wood (London: Routledge, 1990) 7-36.

15 Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan llyich and Other

Stories, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, I960) 121.

16 Don DeLillo, Mao II (London: Vintage, 1991 ).

17 See Jacques Derrida, Mémoires: For Paul de Man,

trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler and Eduardo

Cadava (New York: Columbia UP, 1986).

18 Ibid. 34.

19 See note 2 above.

smith

Dr Robert Smith

1214 N. Clark Street #5

W. Hollywood, CA 90069

USA

E-mail: millersmith@earthlink.net

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