Abstract
In this article I rethink death and mortality on the basis of birth and natality, drawing on the work of the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero. She understands birth to be the corporeal event whereby a unique person emerges from the mother’s body into the common world. On this basis Cavarero reconceives death as consisting in bodily dissolution and re-integration into cosmic life. This impersonal conception of death coheres badly with her view that birth is never exclusively material but always has ontological significance as the appearance of someone new and singular in the world of relations with others. This view of birth calls for a relational conception of death, which I develop in this article. On this conception, death is always collective, affecting all those with whom the one who dies has maintained relations: As such, our different deaths shade into one another. Moreover, because each person is unique in virtue of consisting of a unique web of relations with others, death always happens to persons as webs of relations. Death is relational in this way as a corporeal, and specifically biological, phenomenon, to which we are subject as bodily beings and as interdependent living organisms. I explore this with reference to Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir of her mother’s death from cancer. Finally I argue that, on this relational conception, death is something to be feared.
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Notes
Cavarero (2008, p. 148).
Arendt (1958, p. 211).
Arendt (1958, p. 211).
Arendt (1958, p. 178).
See Birmingham (2005).
See inter alia Honig (1995). The contributors to this volume discuss this feminist criticism of Arendt, but they also complicate it and put forward productive feminist rereadings of Arendt’s work.
Cavarero (1995, p. 6).
Cavarero (2005, p. 2).
Cavarero (2008, p. 137).
Guenther (2006).
See for instance Baraitser (2009).
Cavarero (1995, p. 60).
Cavarero (1995, p. 59).
I lack space to ask how this picture accommodates genealogies that are social rather than biological—adoptive families, surrogacy, sperm donation—where the biological and social parents come apart. We might ask, too, why Cavarero assigns ontological significance to birth (thus mothers primarily) and not conception (thus mothers and fathers). This is, I think, because birth marks the entrance into the common world alongside plural others. One might object that the developing foetus already begins to participate in this world in a form mediated by the mother—hearing sounds, tasting tastes, detecting changes in light. But perhaps we only understand this to be participation in a shared world by extrapolating from the existing-in-common with which we are familiar post-natally, so that such understandings of pre-natal existence would already presuppose the ontological centrality of birth.
Cavarero (1995, p. 114).
Cavarero (1995, pp. 115–117).
Lispector (1988, p. 57).
Cavarero (1995, p. 116).
Cavarero (1995, pp. 99–100, 105).
Cavarero (1995, pp. 114, 119).
Lispector (1988, p. 59).
Cavarero (2009, p. 12; my emphasis).
Heidegger (1962, p. 308).
Moreover, Cavarero’s philosophy of birth conflicts with Heidegger’s philosophical privileging of Dasein’s being-towards-death as the ground of its orientation towards its birth. See Heidegger (1962, pp. 425–427, 442–443). Whereas Heidegger makes mortality the ground of natality, Cavarero (following Arendt) reverses this ordering.
Cavarero (2000, p. 43).
Cavarero (2000, p. 38).
Cavarero (2000, p. 73).
Cavarero (2000, pp. 38–39).
Cavarero (2000, p. 21).
Cavarero (2000, p. 34).
Cavarero (2000, p. 90; my emphasis).
For a similar strongly relational reading of Cavarero, see Perpich (2003).
Heidegger (1962, p. 308; my emphasis).
Cavarero (2000, p. 36).
Cavarero (2000, p. 28).
Cavarero (2000, p. 38).
For Heidegger, in contrast, it makes no sense to say that a bereaved person exists less than they did. Rather, for Heidegger, the bereaved person is still in the world, but as a world from which the other has gone, or in which the bereaved is with that dead other only as-dead. But the bereaved person has not herself died at all; she hasn’t died with the dead person, who necessarily died alone. Heidegger’s views here reflect the ultimate priority that he gives to (individual) being-there over being-with: After all, for him, ‘The world of Dasein is a with-world’ (1962, p. 155; my emphasis)—the world is primarily of Dasein. Having said this, there is a question about how it is possible for someone bereaved to exist less than they did before. I address this in Sects. 5 and 6.
Freud (1984, p. 368).
Derrida (1993, p. 76). Derrida says this partly with reference to Freud’s view of the personality as a precipitate of relations with others. But Derrida also means that I can only anticipate my death (from within my life) as an occurrence of the order of the deaths of others. This is because, necessarily, my death as my constitutive limit is not something I can anticipate or bring within my compass at all. Thus here Derrida wishes to turn Heidegger’s distinction between my own death and those of others against his account of anticipatory resoluteness and authenticity. In doing so, though, Derrida still operates within Heidegger’s conceptual framework, whereas Cavarero follows Arendt in building a positive philosophical alternative to Heidegger, an alternative that prioritizes natality and sociality over mortality and individuation.
For a version of this argument see Guenther (2008).
de Beauvoir (2004, p. 114).
In Pyrrhus and Cineas Beauvoir does not reject that distinction as such (indeed, she does not mention it). Rather, what she rejects in Heidegger’s account of death is his view that authenticity must be grounded in the assumption of one’s mortality, for (anticipating Derrida) she denies that one can have any anticipatory relation to one’s death as such. She instead grounds the possibility of authenticity in our ambiguous transcendence. See de Beauvoir (2004, pp. 113–115).
de Beauvoir (1966, p. 87).
de Beauvoir (1966, p. 10).
de Beauvoir (1966, p. 50).
de Beauvoir (1966, p. 89).
de Beauvoir (1966, pp. 14, 17).
de Beauvoir (1966, pp. 71, 73).
de Beauvoir (1966, p. 91).
de Beauvoir (1966, p. 28).
de Beauvoir (1988, pp. 66–67).
de Beauvoir (1966, p. 91).
I say ‘fear’ (contrary to Heidegger’s distinction of fear from anxiety) because from my perspective, it is death as a phenomenon with corporeal and biological dimensions that we as living beings have reason to fear.
I thank the anonymous referees for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions, and those (including Rachel Jones, Beth Lord, John Mullarkey, and James Williams) who responded to this paper at the University of Dundee Philosophy Research Seminar.
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