The Deaths of Others
Timothy Secret, The Politics and Pedagogy of Mourning: On Responsibility in Eulogy
Bloomsbury, 296pp, £70.00, ISBN 9781472575142
reviewed by Stuart Walton
The valiant attempt by Epicurus to dismiss death as a philosophical concept barely survived the third century BC. Its ringing simplicity – there is no point in maundering on about death if you are still alive, and no possibility of maundering about it after you have departed – sought only to remove the fear of it, but death has always been about much more than fear. The ways in which people die, the influence they continue to exert over their successors, the correct attitude to memorialising them, and the undecidable question of whether death is a closure, an opening or a suspension, linger on after the scent of incense has faded and the tears dried.
20th-century history offered more immediate opportunity for reflecting on the matter than ever before, which is why it is scarcely accidental that what Jacques Derrida called the three principal determinate 'angles of discourse' on death – those of Freud, Heidegger and Levinas – emerged in the course of that turbulent time. Timothy Secret's study faithfully traces these interconnecting lineages in the light of Derrida's own copious work on mourning and eulogy, much of it manifested in the performative context of the many obituaries and hommages he delivered throughout his career to those intellectual comrades and friends who had gone before.
The aftermath of the Great War saw a significant rethinking of the idea of death and its relation to the survivors. In 1920, Freud formulated the concept of the death drive in complex opposition to his earlier theory of the pleasure principle, and by the time of The Ego and the Id (1923), and the construction of the fully formed ego and superego in melancholia, there is a complete shift in the centre of gravity in his work from sex to death. Where all was once the thirst of unresolved desire, all is now the morbid dread of annihilation, or as Secret puts it with brisk indecorum, 'coffins seem to pop up everywhere in the manner that phalluses did in his earlier work.’
There is an invisible line between the mourning brought on by the deaths of loved ones, and the melancholia into which mourning all too readily pathologically spills over. The common experience of mourning becomes the site of a state of traumatic self-antagonism, in which the individual might become obsessed with his or her loss of the protection of the mother as the founding moment of a lifelong anxiety of hopeless longing. For Freud, lamentation over death is in itself essentially irrational as a yearning towards what has gone and can never be restored, and the healthy psyche incorporates the loss as quickly and painlessly as possible, by subjecting it to a constructive amnesia.
Heidegger would have none of this. The ever-present certainty of death creates a framework for lived experience that can paradoxically become liberating, because of its combined attributes of being both inevitable and unknowable. It is the great overwhelming motive force that is not to be outstripped by anything else, to the extent that the existence of sentient creatures – human beings, not dogs or snakes or stones – is a Being-towards-death, a notion that has come to obsess contemporary philosophy to a degree that Freud would have found pathological. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Being-towards-death is that it is non-relational, which is to say it only makes sense in the context of the individual's 'ownmost' death, which is all he really needs to worry about. The deaths of others will happen, but that's their business.
Pop philosophy's version of Being-towards-death would be the cheery nostrum that says you might as well go for it now because you're a long time dead. If we were properly immortal, we might be tempted to live our present lives out in monastic cells, scourging ourselves raw while enunciating the catechism, but grim mortality, by imposing on us what Heidegger calls 'the possibility of impossibility', brings about the imperatives of action of which an existential freedom ought to be composed. Only when the indeterminate aspect of death was removed – say, in the extermination camps established throughout Europe by Heidegger's political colleagues – can existential freedom be seen to falter, but then death being non-relational, what do they matter?
The work of Emmanuel Levinas was an extended presumption to differ with the non-relationality of death. It is precisely the deaths of others that teach human beings what death is, and that call forth the properly ethical question of what the living owe to the dead. What the encounter with the dead comprises is a relation not just to the Other, but to another Other, one who now relies on the living for justice. In what Secret calls an ‘ethics of vulnerability,’ the living must find a way to compensate for the fact that the departed can no longer express themselves. What remains of their articulacy is now an incumbency on those they have left behind. Levinasian ethics is what phenomenology looks like when it comes to address the very thing it hadn't previously noticed – that which isn't before our eyes.
Secret momentarily considers the objection to Levinasian otherness that Zizek raised in Organs Without Bodies (2004), that it is strictly an abstract ethical imperative, but that, when it comes to concrete political circumstances, such as the plight of the Palestinian people in Israel, one is as entitled to decide which others deserve our respect, and which don't, as everyday prejudice has always insisted. Zizek, Secret thinks, has missed the point, which is that ethics is not a single continuum, but is always a matter of the engagement of a third who, in looking on, is often called on to adjudicate between the rightness and wrongness of two contending parties, and establish where justice lies. But that is exactly what undermines the project of an unconditional ethical alterity, which once it has decided in favour of one side, doesn't give a rat's ass for otherness.
The consideration of a handful of Derrida's eulogies in the final chapter of this study is in many ways its richest source of insights, and the book would undoubtedly have benefited from allowing itself the space to study these in greater depth. Secret is a sensitive and illuminating reader of Derrida, and although the earlier chapter explaining some of Derrida's key concepts seems hardly essential in an academic world steeped in them for at least the last thirty years, he does notice an often overlooked aspect of what might paradoxically be called classical deconstruction, which was that it was initially conceived as something like an ideological critique. Secret may insist that it doesn't set out to 'destroy, reject or even devalue' its critical objects, but from the horse's mouth comes the assertion that 'what has made it possible for philosophers to effect a system is nothing other than a certain dysfunction or ‘disadjustment,’ a certain incapacity to close the system … [D]econstruction … is an attempt to train the beam of analysis on to this disjointing link’.
The central ethical dilemma posed by death remains. If mourning mandates the quest to do justice to the dead, on which every ethics worthy of the name concurs, the challenge is to find ways of bestowing it that do not turn out to involve the further postponement of justice for the living. If the universe is construed as doing nothing other than absorbing the dead indifferently, then as Secret nicely puts it, 'we must do better than the universe', but inasmuch there is such a thing as eulogy, and a continual engagement with its contradictions and dilemmas, we are already doing better.
Contemporary experience is curiously conflicted about the question of death. On the one hand, nobody wants to think about it, and those who do are enjoined to ‘lighten up,’ as though we had all internalised Freud's teaching on the subject. On the other, acts of extravagant public mourning over the departures of certain culture-heroes, and the yearning for meaningful acts of symbolic memorisation, such as the national minute's silence for the murdered tourists of Tunisia, speak of an urgent desire to engage with it. Somewhere between these, the relentless persistence of the justice campaign for the Hillsborough dead serves notice that the unique injustice that every death represents – albeit some more acutely than others – can still be confronted by a human solidarity that will not dispense with the idea of defeating injustice altogether.
20th-century history offered more immediate opportunity for reflecting on the matter than ever before, which is why it is scarcely accidental that what Jacques Derrida called the three principal determinate 'angles of discourse' on death – those of Freud, Heidegger and Levinas – emerged in the course of that turbulent time. Timothy Secret's study faithfully traces these interconnecting lineages in the light of Derrida's own copious work on mourning and eulogy, much of it manifested in the performative context of the many obituaries and hommages he delivered throughout his career to those intellectual comrades and friends who had gone before.
The aftermath of the Great War saw a significant rethinking of the idea of death and its relation to the survivors. In 1920, Freud formulated the concept of the death drive in complex opposition to his earlier theory of the pleasure principle, and by the time of The Ego and the Id (1923), and the construction of the fully formed ego and superego in melancholia, there is a complete shift in the centre of gravity in his work from sex to death. Where all was once the thirst of unresolved desire, all is now the morbid dread of annihilation, or as Secret puts it with brisk indecorum, 'coffins seem to pop up everywhere in the manner that phalluses did in his earlier work.’
There is an invisible line between the mourning brought on by the deaths of loved ones, and the melancholia into which mourning all too readily pathologically spills over. The common experience of mourning becomes the site of a state of traumatic self-antagonism, in which the individual might become obsessed with his or her loss of the protection of the mother as the founding moment of a lifelong anxiety of hopeless longing. For Freud, lamentation over death is in itself essentially irrational as a yearning towards what has gone and can never be restored, and the healthy psyche incorporates the loss as quickly and painlessly as possible, by subjecting it to a constructive amnesia.
Heidegger would have none of this. The ever-present certainty of death creates a framework for lived experience that can paradoxically become liberating, because of its combined attributes of being both inevitable and unknowable. It is the great overwhelming motive force that is not to be outstripped by anything else, to the extent that the existence of sentient creatures – human beings, not dogs or snakes or stones – is a Being-towards-death, a notion that has come to obsess contemporary philosophy to a degree that Freud would have found pathological. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Being-towards-death is that it is non-relational, which is to say it only makes sense in the context of the individual's 'ownmost' death, which is all he really needs to worry about. The deaths of others will happen, but that's their business.
Pop philosophy's version of Being-towards-death would be the cheery nostrum that says you might as well go for it now because you're a long time dead. If we were properly immortal, we might be tempted to live our present lives out in monastic cells, scourging ourselves raw while enunciating the catechism, but grim mortality, by imposing on us what Heidegger calls 'the possibility of impossibility', brings about the imperatives of action of which an existential freedom ought to be composed. Only when the indeterminate aspect of death was removed – say, in the extermination camps established throughout Europe by Heidegger's political colleagues – can existential freedom be seen to falter, but then death being non-relational, what do they matter?
The work of Emmanuel Levinas was an extended presumption to differ with the non-relationality of death. It is precisely the deaths of others that teach human beings what death is, and that call forth the properly ethical question of what the living owe to the dead. What the encounter with the dead comprises is a relation not just to the Other, but to another Other, one who now relies on the living for justice. In what Secret calls an ‘ethics of vulnerability,’ the living must find a way to compensate for the fact that the departed can no longer express themselves. What remains of their articulacy is now an incumbency on those they have left behind. Levinasian ethics is what phenomenology looks like when it comes to address the very thing it hadn't previously noticed – that which isn't before our eyes.
Secret momentarily considers the objection to Levinasian otherness that Zizek raised in Organs Without Bodies (2004), that it is strictly an abstract ethical imperative, but that, when it comes to concrete political circumstances, such as the plight of the Palestinian people in Israel, one is as entitled to decide which others deserve our respect, and which don't, as everyday prejudice has always insisted. Zizek, Secret thinks, has missed the point, which is that ethics is not a single continuum, but is always a matter of the engagement of a third who, in looking on, is often called on to adjudicate between the rightness and wrongness of two contending parties, and establish where justice lies. But that is exactly what undermines the project of an unconditional ethical alterity, which once it has decided in favour of one side, doesn't give a rat's ass for otherness.
The consideration of a handful of Derrida's eulogies in the final chapter of this study is in many ways its richest source of insights, and the book would undoubtedly have benefited from allowing itself the space to study these in greater depth. Secret is a sensitive and illuminating reader of Derrida, and although the earlier chapter explaining some of Derrida's key concepts seems hardly essential in an academic world steeped in them for at least the last thirty years, he does notice an often overlooked aspect of what might paradoxically be called classical deconstruction, which was that it was initially conceived as something like an ideological critique. Secret may insist that it doesn't set out to 'destroy, reject or even devalue' its critical objects, but from the horse's mouth comes the assertion that 'what has made it possible for philosophers to effect a system is nothing other than a certain dysfunction or ‘disadjustment,’ a certain incapacity to close the system … [D]econstruction … is an attempt to train the beam of analysis on to this disjointing link’.
The central ethical dilemma posed by death remains. If mourning mandates the quest to do justice to the dead, on which every ethics worthy of the name concurs, the challenge is to find ways of bestowing it that do not turn out to involve the further postponement of justice for the living. If the universe is construed as doing nothing other than absorbing the dead indifferently, then as Secret nicely puts it, 'we must do better than the universe', but inasmuch there is such a thing as eulogy, and a continual engagement with its contradictions and dilemmas, we are already doing better.
Contemporary experience is curiously conflicted about the question of death. On the one hand, nobody wants to think about it, and those who do are enjoined to ‘lighten up,’ as though we had all internalised Freud's teaching on the subject. On the other, acts of extravagant public mourning over the departures of certain culture-heroes, and the yearning for meaningful acts of symbolic memorisation, such as the national minute's silence for the murdered tourists of Tunisia, speak of an urgent desire to engage with it. Somewhere between these, the relentless persistence of the justice campaign for the Hillsborough dead serves notice that the unique injustice that every death represents – albeit some more acutely than others – can still be confronted by a human solidarity that will not dispense with the idea of defeating injustice altogether.