allo allo..?
September 24th, 2009I came across this quotation this morning:
“Levinas, in a fundamental debate, reproaches Heidegger, as well as an entire tradition, for wrongly thinking death, in its very essence and in the first place, as annihilation.”
- Derrida, Aporias, pp. 13-14
Now I don’t know the technical details of the disagreement between Levinas and Heidegger to which Derrida here refers but it got me thinking about what is not annihilated in death. The first thing that comes to mind is the relationship to the person who is dead that continues after the event of the death. It is this odd relationship that structures grief.
The relationship to the dead is a strange relationship because in order for it to be a relationship there must be something that is being related to, there must be something to which the griever relates that is not annihilated in death. The history of the dead is not annihilated in death and neither is the habitus of our relationship to them. The relationship to what is not annihilated in death is also in some sense the object of the relationship itself – the intentional projection of our relatedness beyond ourselves makes it possible for grievers to relate to the externality of the relation itself. The misery of this self relation is part of what makes grief terrible but this is not to suggest that grief is only something terrible that we are trapped within. Grief is also beautiful in its solemn profundity, it is also an ode that we willingly gift to the dead. Our very willingness as givers constitutes the receiver that has not been annihilated in death.
The image comes to me of making a phone call to the person who has died. Their phone rings and the phone is picked up but they never speak.
When my mother died I often had dreams of her still being alive and happy, joking and chatting, but she would never hear me and would never speak to me. It was as if I were the ghost, not her.