(The following comprises two brief responses to the opening of Jacques Derrida's Gift of Death (as translated from Donner la mort by David Wills). The first is by guest author Kenneth Rufo, who blogs astutely at Ghost in the Wire The idea for this series originates somewhere around here. –ed. (as if))
Titular Ruminations
Ken Rufo: What would it mean to think death as a gift? To give death? And who is
in a position to give it? A few possibilities.
First, as the title's acronym implies, we have the almighty, the
transcendent creator, the beginning and, of course, the end. Our mortal
lives are his gift to us, a Christian gift. Death is God's gift to his
chosen people, for with death comes the possibility, at least the
Judeo-Christian possibility, of transcendence. Death comes from the
diving to, in effect, return us to the divine.
Second, almost opposite in inclination, death is the gift given to us
through indirection, sacrifice, and happenstance by the poorest, the
lowly, the Other. It is their labor, their contribution, their living –
and especially their dying – that gives us so much. Our privilege, be it
that of intellectual hegemony or the means by which we blithely take a
disproportionate share of the world's natural and industrial wealth.
Third, death is the gift we give ourselves. The good (eu-) death
(thanatos), the question of how to die, of one's relationship to death.
It is here that we find the most strident split between Heidegger and
Levinas, for while Heidegger founds Dasein on an authentic resoluteness
towards one's own death, Levinas finds in this resolution a
quintessential selfishness that belies those Other that makes our own
death (and life) possible. Being towards death cannot, for Levinas, mean
only being towards one's own death, hence the near universal ethical
injunction: thou shall not murder.
Fourth, death is the gift of the other, for it is through death that we
learn of our own mortality. We can take this in two directions. On the
one hand, it is through the death of others, through the realization of
their terminality, that we come to recognize our own finitude. These
“little Ds” - Ernest Becker's name for them – help us to understand the
existential and psychological importance of death. On the other hand,
death is an exemplar, a reset, a terminal experience much like the
terminus/terminal of some machine, the interface that defines the point
at which everyday life smacks into its own heuristic limits. It is in
this sense that Bataille can talk about the virtues of excess or that
Baudrillard can speak of death as a metaphor. It is in this sense that
the tragedy of Katrina accumulates meaning.
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