Tristanne Connolly is associate professor at St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Spectacular Death

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability

By Tristanne Connolly

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-322-6

Contents

List of Figures,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction Tristanne Connolly,
Classical Death: Comedy and Tragedy,
1. Life, Death, and the In-Between: The Duck-Rabbit/The Face of the Clown Alan Blum,
2. The Illness of Hope, the Cure of Truth and the Difference of Principle: A Reflexive Analysis of Antigone’s and Meursault’s Confrontations with Death Kieran Bonner,
Enlightenment and Romanticism: Aestheticizing the Corpse,
3. Reflexive Vectors: Art, Anatomy and Death in Cowper and Gamelin Morgan Tunzelmann,
4. “Mother of Unworthy Woe”: Infant Death and Sentimental Maternity in British Romantic Women’s Poetry and Midwifery Books Tristanne Connolly,
5. Speaking of Death: Remembrance and Lamentation Jan Plecash,
Memorialization and the City,
6. Enjoyment’s Petrification: The Luxor Obelisk in a Melancholic Century Michael Follert,
7. Barcelona, In Memoriam: The Tension Between Urban Renovation and the Past Marta Marín-Dòmine,
8. Jewish Victims and German Youth: Questions of Pedagogy and Responsibility at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Elke Grenzer,
9. X Marks the Spot: New Orleans Under Erasure Kevin Dowler,
10. Life and Death in New Orleans: Disaster Tours Imagined Stephen Svenson and Cory Ruf,
Policy: Border Control Between Life and Death,
11. Hope and Resignation in Medical Care: When Doctors Go to Court to Terminate Patient Treatment Diego Llovet,
12. Life-threatening (Anaphylactic) Food Allergies: School Life, Health and Well-being Saeed Hydaralli,
Live Deaths and Afterlives,
13. Game Death: Fantasy and Mastery in Scenario Paintball Ariane Hanemaayer,
14. Delirious Exhibitionism: Negotiating Technologies in Timothy Leary’s Live Death Elizabeth C. Effinger,
15. How the Dead Circulate (in Life) Peter McHugh,
Bibliography,
Notes on Contributors,

CHAPTER 1

Life, Death and the In-Between: The Duck-Rabbit/The Face of the Clown

Alan Blum

Introduction

The distinctions between life and death and the passages between them seem good examples of the fundamental ambiguity expressed in the notion of the Grey Zone, pointing to a border both necessary and opportune, an occasion for reflection that is correlative with the materiality of mortal existence and the spiritual demands it makes upon humans. One reminder of such indistinct distinctions is the need for an art of living, more than a good disposition but a desire to develop a way of “seeing-as” in the idiom of Wittgenstein (1953), empowering us to see two aspects of one thing and one aspect in and of two things as a kind of art of artfulness in seeing as such, perhaps even a road to an art of life. Wittgenstein used Jastrow’s famous illustration of the figure of a duck-rabbit, a duck that could be seen as a rabbit or vice versa, a rabbit that could be seen as a duck, to show how it was not one thing or the other as in a choice, or intelligible simply as dependent upon context or circumstances or on more information to be filled in, because the figure itself was what it was because of seeing it as such, where it is seeing-as that is fundamentally ambiguous, capable of pointing out aspects in one that are two and for two that are one, serving in its way as a standard for the relation to ambiguity.

The duck-rabbit (Fig. 1.1) is both together and apart: together it is two-in-one, one figure with two aspects, which makes seeing it as either one or the other gratuitous; on the other hand, this is not correct since seeing it as one, as a duck-rabbit, assumes that we can identify the two aspects first, that we can recognize and identify rabbits and ducks separately. That the duck and the rabbit share a togetherness and an apartness means that seeing them as comparable requires identifying and differentiating them, but that distinguishing them in this way in the first place depends upon their being presented to and for us in this strange juxtaposition as a figure. Thus, what is first is not the figure but the need to which it answers, the situation in which it emerges, or the problem to which it replies.

The contradiction displayed by the figure, instead of being an idle curiosity, invites us to ask after its point: notably, here, to demonstrate the enigmatic inevitability of ambiguity in a demonstrably palpable way, to one conceived as subject to an inflexible relation to thought and language. Beyond the interaction that seems to be referenced by choosing and decision making — as if the puzzle of the figure and its need for a solution appears to center intersubjective relations as a decision to be made, over the question of whether it represents one thing or the other — when what it really intimates is a movement of desire aspiring for clarity about the problem of ambiguity rather than its resolution, and so, an imaginary anticipating dialogue as a means of pedagogical transformation.

Death is like this: on the one hand, it is together and apart since its togetherness speaks to our all sharing death in a way that seems to erase its singularity, but then to focus only on this is to concentrate on generic or abstract death. On the other hand, the apartness of death seems to make reference to the finite singularity of the life it brings to a tangible end, the possibility (in the words of Deleuze and Guattari) of confiding “to the ears of the future the enduring sensations that give it its body: the ceaselessly revived suffering of men, their renewed protest, their relentlessly resumed struggle” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 166–7, in Rancière 2008: 5).

Rancière gives to this reading an inflection that invests life with the character of art through the figure of the monument, as if a singular life condenses and expresses collective suffering with an eye to the future, to what he calls a people yet to come. Thus, death is together and apart in these senses: it is together with the life that it embodies with an eye to a people yet to come, to posterity, and yet must remain apart from this fate by virtue of its particular manner of displaying the tension between its “means for producing an effect and … the reality of that effect” (Rancière 2008: 5). Death, raising the question of the real effect of a life, offers the life to a people yet to come as an expression of the intimate connection of the life to collective suffering as if the life itself is a trope. If death, like the duck-rabbit, is together and apart, the death of one is comparable to the death of all, while yet the death of one must be oriented to as incomparable in ways that make the work of addressing this space, what we might call death work (which is together and apart from life in this respect). The art of the life is then not dependent on its great achievements nor on some vision of narrative closure, but on the capacity to make its effects real “for a people yet to come,” that is, as a mediation for a future that remains free and open.

Loss and Lack

Death begins to dramatize the difference between loss and lack, for it is not as if we overcome a lack of whatever could prevent death (something that could make us more complete or live forever) as if death is like an imperfection, or even that what we lose in death is what we once had, like a fuller or longer life, because whatever life we did have never included a guarantee of being eternal as something that we could be said to have possessed. If death does raise the question of the kind of loss to which it is true, that could only be answered by the living. I suspect that in many cases the living would equate losing someone with missing someone, and even this misrecognition could help us see the difference between someone essential to us and someone who just happened to be there, as a doorstop or chattering television set or yapping pet, as a way for us to think about what and who really matters, or about mattering. Yet if death is an occasion to reflect upon mattering, then grief allows us to realize the life that we lose in mourning it is a life so essential to us that, in its loss, we seem to lose some essential part of ourselves, inviting us to reconsider what really matters. But then we have no way of thinking of our own death as loss because this can only be measured against what we have and are now, and so, a loss imaginable only as unimaginable. Because the loss we might anticipate in our death is imagined only as a deprivation of what we now have, it seems an external abstraction similar to a theft, making a robbery rather than an aporia the paradigm of loss.

Beyond lack and loss, we exist within the field of this contradiction. If it is a burden, it has not been inflicted upon us in the same way as misfortune, because mortality seems part of the grammar of being human, and so makes death nature’s way of showing its indifference. Descartes’ questioning whether he is dreaming or even dead asks for criteria to distinguish between life and death, which we cannot provide and never could because what we need and lack here is not something more (e.g., information or knowledge) since we have all there is (see Descartes 2008: 14-17). As we said, we are not lacking; what we have is death and there is nothing more than this (or what we have is life and there is nothing more than this). Everything is just perfect, thank you! No need for more science or research. There is nothing more to be known about death; everything is as it is. This does not mean that we need and desire nothing more, but it is not, say, the cure for death, because death is incurable, although the fear or preoccupation surrounding death might have to be healed. Death, then, helps us recognize healing as analogous to what Socrates called the second sailing: the best the sailors at sea in a storm can do when they realize they have to rely on their own human resources rather than external or magical intervention (Bernadette 1989). In the absence of cure, we turn to healing, for it is the human way, second best. This might mean that we have death and something more: the capacity for healing, the capacity to laugh (or better, to be artful).

Descartes proposes that mediation (and so, meditation) is essential to life, making the absence of mediation inconceivable to us since we would have to meditate on that (see the possibility of impossibility in Heidegger 1962), facing its incommensurability or difference that makes it only external and nothing more, formal in that sense, with no inner life. For death to have an inner life, we would need to imagine it reflexively as a relationship to being dead. Imagining being dead is one of the many comic ways that circulate in collective life around the question of death and its obscurity. Typically, this is the only way death is part of our life, and because of this, we often imagine the dead as coming to life (e.g., the undead or zombies). But then we said that death is not obscure at all, just as clear as the nose on your face. Perhaps that is the enigma: the riddle of death is to address the question of whether it is obscure or clear.

Living as Prayer

It is just hard to comprehend life as anything more than an article of faith, because, if it requires being measured by what is unlike it (other than life), what is unlike life in this sense cannot be reflected upon because it is immune to reflection. What this implies, curiously enough, is that life itself is immune to reflection since we cannot reflect upon its limits as if they were other than life, making life into a kind of sickness that, because immune to reflection, cannot be cured by reflection. This is part of the discourse on the pharmakon that Plato initiated and to which Derrida (1981) contributed, making life the affliction to which reflection, as antidote, is continuously applied in the expectation of cure. But then, as we said, life might be immune to reflection in that sense.

If life (and death) is immune to reflection, one could say, so much the worse for reflection! But then, if we need to do what is being done here (reading, writing, reflecting upon death), that is, reflecting upon what seems immune to reflection and is insoluble, there might just be a place in life, necessary and desirable, for such foolishness, for reflection upon what seems immune to reflection. It might be this conception of immunity rather than reflection that needs rethinking. This is the inspiration for the digital divide, not between those who are and are not literate with respect to that, but between analogical and digital representation. For example, if death is immune to reflection for any of the reasons offered, then it could be treated simply in terms of the information it discloses, that is, as a sign system contained in the records, archives and traces handed down and which allow death to “speak” in the way of the History Channel, in which the life that is gone can still be material to be read and reread. As information, life and death are alike in being available for enumeration. In this way, according to those engineers who treat the world as a computer, life and death are similar in being data, and life itself is an ongoing process of creating and disposing of such matter. In line with this view, death does not end circulation but continues it as long as bureaucracy has the force to perpetuate a trace. Depriving death of its intimacy in this way makes any life into data or material, keeping it alive in the surreal shape of an archival afterlife to be plundered. We might contrast this view of keeping the dead alive with that of the Greeks described by De Coulanges (1955) who showed, in The Ancient City, how a life can live after death only in the traces of the intimate relations in which it has participated and reciprocally shaped. The dispute here is over different views of immortality and ways the imaginary of digitalization strives to rescue death from its essential finality by claiming that anything is thinkable, and so, reversible, because scientific research is an unending process of revision and the return of the dead to life might be “just around the corner.” And what kind of prospect would that be, the return of the dead, or living forever?

To say that death only “lives” within life means that the inner life of death is something like a living relation to such a condition (say, to inertia). This is one point of Melville’s Bartleby character: to represent such a relationship (Melville 1997). To many, Bartleby is the living dead (the uncanny presence) that seems somewhat measured in relation to the zombie (if the dead coming to life is a fantasy, a wish, etc., the living dead is part of life). Note that Bartleby can be made to incarnate the freedom from the body that the character Cephelus praised in The Republic (freedom from the complexity of the symbolic order and its trials and tribulations, which he named eros and attributed to youth in contrast to agedness) (Plato 1941: 4-6). Death can also be construed as freedom from mediation in ways that make mediation two-sided, a necessary condition and a curse. Thus, Bartleby, as a figure for the living dead, has also been used to personify antipathy towards work and productivity, and so, as a spokesperson for the deconstruction of convention and as an incarnation of freedom, transgression and resistance, as well as an icon of the living dead. One could certainly propose that Bartleby can stand for the extinction of singularity endangered by generic versions of death (and of life) that treat mortality as external and “relative” rather than as an intimate aspect of the life.

The intimacy of death is the territory explored by Barthes (1981) through the photograph and its link to death through its capacity to revive the life of the deceased, or of the past as a force in the present, because it summons to memory not only the loss, but also a sense of falling short, of knowing in retrospect how more could always have been done. So the photograph reinstates the intimate character of the relation as such, not in its generic role as archive and “information,” but as a way of arousing a reflection upon culpability, remorse and desire, and so, upon mattering.

The Singular Experience of Death

Lacan says that what appears as absolute to and for the individual is always relative in relation to Other. The finality of death seems here a good example, binding and incorrigible for the subject, and yet always intelligible as part of a process that circulates for all alike in a way that recurs, correlative with life itself, and so, relative in that sense. Here I rely on Jacques Alain-Miller (2007: 19): “Jouissance as a relationship to the Other, is an absolute for the subject … The term is well made to distinguish the jouissance of the Other, since in the Other, all terms are relative to each other and are held in a system, and the Other is so little an absolute, that the question is posed of its guarantee, of the Other of the Other, of the Other of the Other which would guarantee it, and this Other of the Other cannot be found.” In other words, while the death drive is absolute for the subject for whom life appears imperative, no such drive can be imagined for the Other (unless we rationalize its movement as agency through the objet a that provides solutions through notions of purposiveness, God, innate or sufficient reason) because its circulation deprives it of any necessity except the sense of absolute contingency, or in the idiom, brute, contingent chaos. The discourse on death recurrently displays the working out of this relationship in the search for justification (a guarantee), for a method of speaking absolutistically while remembering relativism, or of being in two places (absolutism and relativism) at once, trying to gain access to non-being, and in general, speaking under the auspices of the “as if,” as if our life is eternal, while forgetting, or forgetting we are forgetting, that it is not. Derrida tries to raise the problem of forgetting that it is, and then of forgetting that we forget, as an ethical problem (Derrida 2002) which Lacan (1997) had discussed as a phenomenon in the spirit of Freud rather than pejoratively, centering forgetting and the forgetting of forgetting as researchable opportunities rather than occasion for a deconstructive lament. That the discourse of death circulates upon this agonistic terrain ratifies death in life as a problem to work out by reinstating its eventful character. Note, though, that this distinction between jouissance for the subject and for the Other is, as a human distinction, a classification done under the auspices of the symbolic order, essentially imaginary (dare we say, in anticipation, a formula?).

(Continues…)Excerpted from Spectacular Death by Tristanne Connolly. Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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