8 - Death, Being, and the Place of Comedy in Representations of Death

Summary

IN SECULAR THOUGHT, RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDINGS of death as a transition to a new life, as a stage within a morally meaningful process, function as cultural narratives that, as well as offering a foundation for a particular ethical system, also provide a comfort of sorts: death is not final, and the meaning of life is not defined by the bare, finite life of the body. It is fascinating to observe, then, how many modern philosophers are unwilling to understand death as simply the biological demise of an individual organism, part of the ethically indifferent natural process of reproduction and evolution. Thus, for example, Simon Critchley argues that “if (and this is a vast qualification) death is not just going to have the character of a brute fact, then one’s mortality is something in which one has to find a meaning.” And even with his positive engagement with biology Gilles Deleuze “is keen to avoid […] a purely geneticist account of evolution as well as a DNA mythology.” Critchley’s phrase “if death is not just going to have” is a contemporary expression of a more general reluctance amongst many post-Nietzschean philosophers to accept the meaning of life provided by evolution and genetics, which, ethically, offers no meaning to life at all, even though they acknowledge the loss of transcendental guarantees of meaning. So death does not remain a “brute fact,” “just” death. Rather death has, in different ways, been fundamental to much twentieth-century thought, including the work of Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and in psychoanalysis, where its complex and central structuring relation to existence is asserted and explored. For these thinkers our anxious relation to the horror of finitude takes on particular significance for understanding being, subjectivity, and ethics. Yet the loss of transcendental certainty, along with the perceived inadequacy of the scientific account of death for thinking about meaning and ethics need not result in death having ascribed to it a fundamental and traumatic role when considering life. Deleuze, for example, is also interested in exploring the ethical potential of life beyond a strict biological definition, but in his work it is the primary emphasis on life that then leads to a reconceptualization of death.