3
… “adieu” tu m’abandonnes, pourquoi m’as tu abandonné, reviens, mais tu ne revient pas, tu ne peux pas revenir, revenant …
—Jacques Derrida, Idiomes, nationalités, déconstructions
Death
Death, the most inscrutable torment that afflicts human beings or a brute fact whose enormity refuses comparison with anything else, is that “unthinkable” whose reality is totally impenetrable.1 The impossibility of adequately answering the question “What is death?” perhaps indicates the folly of raising it. It exposes us to the total “immeasurability” of something that we can never have an experience of (Dastur 5/4). It is not for no reason that Levinas described it as an “enigma,” “a pure question mark,” nay a “scandal.” Death is “absence par excellence” and the dead disappear “absolutely” and “irreplaceably” (9/9).
The medical establishment and institutions in modern Western societies view death as the end of an organic existence. It is treated as a natural phenomenon that is organically observable, physiologically describable, and biologically explainable. Historians who have noted the transformation of views of death in Western societies explain that death has become demystified and medicalized, in order to mollify it and its effects, while mourning has been psychologized and individualized. Since Plato, philosophers have pondered this daunting subject, yet they have done so with a view to neutralizing and conquering it. If philosophical discourse has been a discourse on mortality, on the fact that we are mortal creatures who are finite and who die, it has been at once a recognition of mortality as well as a denial of death. If philosophy has presented itself to itself as that discipline that prepares one for and accepts death,2 it has done so in order to ultimately overcome it and gain access to immortality.3 Philosophy’s intimate relation to death, accepting the separation of the body from the soul, is parallel to the foundational role of death in Christianity, which instituted a conception of temporality and human existence oriented toward the “End Time” and the Last Judgment. An eschatology (eschaton, extreme, last) as well as a teleology, Christianity, with the invention of the “afterworld,” has as its ultimate goal triumph over death and gaining access to another life in another realm. At the “end time,” also known as “end times,” “end of time,” “end of days,” “last days,” or “final days,” world events are said to achieve a final climax. The significance of death in Christianity, which owes its prominence to the pivotal role played by the death of Christ, is of a piece with the unconditional affirmation of life and disdain for death in Christian societies. The expected attitude toward death is heroic fortitude and what is admired is serenity, equanimity, self-control, and stoicism in the face of it.4
In reflections on death from Plato to Seneca and Montaigne, from Spinoza to Hegel and Heidegger, philosophy has not unsurprisingly placed an emphasis on the death of the individual, on what Heidegger termed my “own,” proper death. It is not until Levinas urged a change of focus from viewing death as my death or the concept of death to the death of the other that philosophy specifically turned its attention to and considered the other’s death as a singular death distinctive from that of the self.5 Yet, adhering to the adage made famous by Montaigne, philosophy has maintained its self-definition as the best preparation for learning how to live by learning how to die.6 Philosophers have steadfastly affirmed the “virile” ideal of the philosophical death—teaching us how to die while facing death without searching for or being comforted by a thought of the afterlife.
Giving priority to the existential interpretation of death in Being and Time, Heidegger argues that the cultural, historical, and anthropological interpretations of death are insufficient not only because they all assume a precomprehension of death—as Derrida comments, these approaches “must already know what death means” (A 57/45)—but because they do not think death fundamentally enough. Thus, Heidegger argues for the priority of an ontological account of death that precedes all the ontic accounts. Levinas brings a novel approach to this perennial question in God, Death, and Time, drawing inspiration from the writings of Bergson, Fink, and Bloch.7 In two lecture courses that were taught in 1975–1976 but were published as one text in 1993, Levinas seeks to counter the dominance of the Heideggerian interpretation of death. He describes death as “the non-response [sans-réponse]” (17), calling it “an irreversible” (16) that “exceeds thought” (130). For Levinas, death is “not of the world,” is not somewhere in time, but belongs to a time beyond consciousness (129). In contrast to the tradition and opposed to Heidegger, Levinas wants to think death starting from time, as a function or modality of time (129). Drawing on Bergson and Bloch, Levinas is interested in the meaning that death confers on the future. Time as duration means that the future is open and nothing is definitive (65). Most notably, referring to Eugen Fink’s less well-known Metaphysik und Tod, Levinas writes that “there is no genre of death”; each death is “a first death [première mort]” (105).
Derrida’s approach to the question of death, in comparison to the philosophical tradition, has been absolutely singular. Even though there are many references to death in his writings, there exists no “concept” of death as such or a univocal meaning of death in his work. There are deaths—multiple deaths—yet each death remains singularly unique. There has been a resistance in Derrida’s work to the notion of “death itself,” for death is not one. If, as Geoffrey Bennington claims in “R.I.P.,” “death is the only subject of philosophy” (62) and “philosophy is organized around or towards death,” then Derrida’s work is “the death of death,” death as the engine that has driven philosophy, death as the crutch it relies on to uphold its virility, self-importance, and pathos (64). As Bennington writes of Derrida in the same place, “one evaluation of his early work,” which may also be said of his later work, is “the simultaneous confirmation and displacement of the philosophical thinking of death or of philosophy as a thinking of death” (64).
In Aporias, the text in which Derrida broaches the question of death more “directly” than elsewhere, he declares, as if he were throwing his hands in the air, that “one knows perhaps neither the meaning nor the referent of this word” (A 49/22). Throughout his work, death has been associated with, among other things, irrevocable absence (without any pathos); disappearance (the relation to death as a relation to my disappearance in general is discussed in Voice and Phenomenon); technology, technicity, and the machine (the space of death is related to repeatability, the automatic, to technique, and to the machine); the image (OG 100), and so on. While Derrida has shown that every use of a proper name or the pronoun “I” entails death, this “death” is indifferent to “real” death. Death has been variously described as the name of a secret, as only possible as impossible (like the gift, love, friendship, the other, etc.) and designated as a shibboleth, an awaiting (oneself and each other), a nonpassive endurance, an experience of nonpassage, an aporia, and an event. Derrida has equated the purity of life or purity in general with death. Absolute safety, absolute immunity, and that which desires to be perfectly intact, thus being closed off from the outside, are all linked with death. So is the lack of any risk-taking, which leads to no future. Death—that which is nonphenomenal, in other words, what cannot be phenomenalized or come to appear—radically escapes all presence. In its coming, death, like the ghost, is without horizon (for a horizon is a limit, a border, a boundary). It “names the very irreplaceability of absolute singularity [l’irremplacable même de la singularité absolue]” (A 49/22). However, the “complication” or paradox about death is that “everyone’s death […] is irreplaceable,” yet “nothing is more substitutable” than death (49/22). It is said only “one time each time [une fois chaque fois], indefinitely only one time [une seule fois]” (49/22).
The Proper Is Stronger than Life and Death
It is not until the penultimate section of “To Speculate—on ‘Freud’ ” from The Post Card: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond, his reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that Derrida comes to the question of death. And it is not until late in Freud’s text, Derrida comments in the section entitled “Paralysis,” that Freud mentions death, for there has been “dead silence about death [silence de mort sur la mort]” (PC 376/353). It is also starting from Beyond the Pleasure Principle that Freud employs Eros to inscribe his new theory of drives within the philosophical tradition of Plato’s Symposium and the Aristophanes myth. Freud employs Eros in his last writings to connote the whole of the life drives in opposition to the death drives.8 In the course of his reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle Derrida zeros in on “the strange relation to oneself that is called the relation to the proper [rapport au propre]” and determines that “the law of the proper,” “the law of oneself as proper,” seeks its own, proper propriation. Derrida’s reading demonstrates that, for Freud, the proper only wants to die in its own manner and arrives at death at its own pace (381/359).
In the subsection entitled “Couriers of Death” of “Paralysis,” Derrida explains, Freud “advances a hypothesis about the nature of the drive in general and perhaps even about organic life in general” (PC 376/354). There is an “attribute [charactère],” he goes on, “inscribed in every drive and perhaps in all organic life.” Freud defines this trait, this attribute, as follows: “It seems, then, that a drive [Trieb] is an urge [poussée, Drang] inherent in the organism [habitant au-dedans de l’organisme] aiming to the restoration [Wiederherstellung] of an earlier state of things … it is a kind of organic elasticity [or] the expression of an inertia inherent in organic life (36, mod.)” (376/354). In Freud’s hypothesis “the programmatic writing, the writing which formulates the ‘attribute,’ is confounded [se confond] with the hypothesis of a force, an urge, a driving power [puissance pulsionelle]” (376/354). “This force of the attribute is written” as force in opposition to another force from the outside, “a counter-force” (376/354). “The force of inscription organizes the field in a network of differences of forces. The living,” Derrida surmises, “is nothing other than this differential [of forces]” (376–377/354). This “external” force is what is commonly called nature.
The Umweg, the detour (initially encountered in the first chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle when the reality principle, in a never certain return to itself, imposes a detour in order to defer enjoyment), here “would defer/differ not with the aim of pleasure or of conservation … but with the aim of death, or of the return to the inorganic state” (PC 377/354). For Freud, it is a matter of return to the organic state, always leading back, going back, coming back (revenir) to death. Derrida notes that the detour is “not a derivative type of path or step. … a narrower or stricter definition of the passage, it is the passage” (377/354, emphasis added). In other words, the Umweg, the detour, différance, is the passage. “(The) Weg (is) Umweg” (377/354).
So, in Freud’s judgment, “The end of the living [la fin du vivant], its aim [but] and term [terme], is return to the inorganic state” (PC 377/355). We could say “the evolution of life” constitutes nothing but “a detour of the inorganic aiming for itself,” what Derrida calls “a race to the death” (377/355). This death is “inscribed as an internal law and not as an accident of life” (377/355). Thus, it is life that “resembles an accident of death or an excess of death, in the extent to which it ‘dies for internal reasons [aus inneren Gründen]’ ” (377/355).
Freudian speculation results in two observations: “The driving detour in its conservative form, the conserver of the drive, is a partial process” (PC 378/355). There are “component drives [Partialtriebe].” The final sense of these “component drives” of conservation is that their movement tends to insure that the path (Weg-Umweg) toward death, the path of death, corresponds to internal, “immanent” possibilities. “The component drives are destined to insure that the organism dies of its own, proper death [sa propre mort], that it follows its own, proper path toward death. That it arrives by its own step at death [eigenen Todesweg]” (378/355). What the component drives do is to help dying one’s own death, to help “that for which death is a return to the most proper [à ce que la mort soit un retour au plus propre]” (378/355, trans. mod.). “The organism (or every living organization, every ‘corpus,’ every ‘movement’) conserves itself, spares itself, maintains itself via every kind of differentiated relay, intermediary destination […] Not in order,” Derrida explains, “to keep oneself from death [se garder de la mort], or to maintain oneself against death [ou contre la mort], but only in order to avoid a death which would not return to itself [qui ne lui reviendrait pas], in order to cut off a death that would not be its own or that of its own” (378/356, trans. mod.).
The drive of the proper, then, proves to be the most significant drive. As Derrida explains, “The drive of the proper would be stronger than life and stronger than death,” because “neither living nor dead, its force does not qualify it otherwise than by its own, proper drivenness [propre pulsivité], and this drivenness would be the strange relation to oneself that is called the relation to the proper [rapport au propre]: the most driven drive [la pulsion la plus pulsive] is the drive of the proper, in other words the one that tends to reappropriate itself” (PC 379/356). Ultimately the movement of reappropriation is the most elementary, the most forceful, the strongest: “The movement of reappropriation is the most driven drive. The proper of drivenness is the movement or the force of reappropriation” (379/356). What the proper demonstrates is “the tendency to appropriate oneself” (379/356). Yet, it is worth noting, the “expropriating structure” prevents reappropriation from closing on itself—“the proper is not the proper, and if it appropriates itself [s’approprie] it is because it disappropriates itself [se désapproprie]” (379/357). “Life death,” Derrida remarks, “are no longer opposed in it” (379/357).
We have seen that for Freud the organism wills to be in charge of its own death, to die its own death. The proper dies at its own pace, tempo, rate, and speed—in its own way. The organism “wishes to die only in its own fashion [nur auf seine Weise sterben will]” and the component drives are there to assist it to die properly (PC 381/358). In Derrida’s view, Heidegger’s Eigentlichkeit, “a certain quality of the relation to the proper” alongside Freud’s thinking of Todestrieb (381/358) is “pronouncing the law of life-death [la-vie-la-mort] as the law of the proper” (381/359). Rather than life and death or life or death, Derrida comments, a law of the proper seeks its “own, proper propriation” (381/359). “One must auto-affect oneself with one’s proper death (and the oneself [le soi-même] does not exist before all else, before this movement of auto-affection), make certain [faire que] that death is the auto-affection of life or life the auto-affection of death” (382/359, trans. mod.).
Aporias
Is death an end? Is life, confined to its finite limits, restricted within its borders, a border that must not be exceeded? In Aporias Derrida famously examines the various ways of conceiving a border or a frontier while attending to views of death as crossing a line, stepping over or across a limit. Death “takes a figure,” Derrida writes, “it has a privileged form [schème], the crossing of a line (between existence and non-existence)” (107/58). In fact, it seems impossible to think about death otherwise. English words signifying death, such as “decease” and “parting,” convey the idea of departure and separation, while in French trépas (from the twelfth-century trespas, passage, trépasser) has a sense of passing away (dépassement) or transgression.9 It would be impossible to give an account of or to summarize all the strands weaving through Aporias, Derrida’s condensed, intense engagement with the philosophical (or ontological understanding) and “bio-anthropo-thanato-theological” notions of death. Each needs to be explored in scrupulous detail. In this chapter, especial attention will be paid to “the end” and “the experience of the aporia.”
At the beginning of Aporias, a talk first delivered in 1992 at the third Cerisy conference devoted to his work, Derrida writes that death has very often been represented as a limit, an end (finis), a frontier, but also as a voyage, a departure, or the passage through a frontier or the crossing of a border, a line, a voyage between the here and the beyond. But, he asks, can death be reduced to crossing a line, “to a departure, to a separation, to a step, and therefore to a decease?” (A 22/6). He chooses as his point of entry accounts by Diderot and classical authors such as Seneca and Cicero, while attending to the terminology being used by Seneca and Cicero to refer to death. Derrida begins “by the end,” “by the ends or confines [fini],” that is “the term, the edge, limit, the border, most often that of a territory or of a country” (22/5). In the little-known essay “Essai sur la vie de Sénèque le philosophe,” Diderot praises Seneca for bringing to light how human beings forget their own mortality by wasting so much of their time on mediocre tasks. In De brevitate vitae Seneca urges humans to order their life properly and to not give their time away.10 In what, according to Derrida, amounts to “a rhetoric of borders” what is in question in Seneca’s text is the property of one’s life, especially the lines that delimit the right of property to one’s life (18/3). De brevitate vitae is “a treatise about the tracing of traits as the borderly edges” of what belongs to one (18/3). In his De finibus Cicero, always attentive to Greek and Latin and justifying his translations, having originally translated the word for “the border” as “the extreme,” “the ultimate,” or “the supreme,” now renders it as “the end [la fin]” (21/5).11 Derrida notes that all the propositions about death that he has discussed involve a certain pas [step, not]: “Il y va d’un certain pas,” it is the matter of a certain step, a certain not (23/6). What the pas involves is “the line that terminates all determination, the final or definitional line—peras” (24/7). The Greek word peras—term (terme), synonym of the Greek word terma, end or limit, extremity—leads us to peran, beyond, on the other side, which, in turn, take us to peraō, I traverse by penetrating, I cross through, I cross over life’s term (in Aeschylus), and passing the final limit (in Sophocles) (25/7).
But what is “to pass the term of one’s life [passer le terme d’une vie] (terma tou biou) (Sophocles, Oedipus the King)?” With this “ ‘I pass [je passe]’ (peraō)” we are placed on “the path [voie],” Derrida writes, “of the aporos or the aporia, the impracticable or refused, denied passage, what can be something else, the non-passage” (A 25/8). How are we to interpret this nonpassage, Derrida wonders, if we are to not read it, like the common interpretation does, as barred or impossible passage? The “non-passage,” Derrida notes, can be something else: “the event of a coming or of a future advent [venue ou d’avenir]” does not any longer have “the form of the movement that consists in passing, traversing, or transiting. It would be the ‘coming to pass [se passer]’ of an event that would not have the form or the appearance of a pas: in sum, a coming without pas [une venue sans pas]” (25/8). The untranslatable Il y va d’un certain pas can be received in more than one way. Once the figure of the step is refused, “the edge-line [le passage de la ligne] is threatened,” the indivisibility of the line and the identity of the two sides become problematic. One could argue, of course, that they have always been problematic (30/11).
The aporia, a “not knowing where to go” is “the experience of nonpassage” (A 31/12). Drawing an analogy to the questions he posed about Heidegger’s vulgar concept of time in “Ousia and Grammē,” Derrida says that the aporia he is presently examining is an experience other than opposing from both sides of an invisible line a nonvulgar concept to the so-called vulgar concept. More accurately, the aporia is “a traversal without line and without a divisible border” (35/15). Faced with the aporia, Derrida’s intention is to try “to move [me mouvoir] not against or out of the impasse but, in another way, according to another thinking of the aporia, one perhaps more enduring” (32/13). The experience of the aporia (yoking together in one phrase two words that speak of the passage and the nonpassage) is to be thought of “as endurance or as passion, as interminable resistance or remaining [restance]” (42/19, trans. mod.). Among “the multiple figures of aporia” (44/20) that Derrida examines (for example, the impermeable nonpassage, the impasse without limit, the impossible, etc.), what is at stake with death is “not the crossing of a given border” but rather “the double concept of the border” (40/18). This way of approaching the aporia of death does not allow for a passage or step. “There is no more path […] no more movement or trajectory,” no more a passage across (47/21). “Not even the non-pas,” this aporia would be “the deprivation of the pas (the privative form would be a kind of a-pas)” (50/23).
Is it possible to experience the aporia? (65/33). Derrida asks: “What takes place [ce qui arrive], what comes to pass [ce qui se passe] with the aporia?” (65/32). Is it to undergo it, pass through it, to be immobilized before it? (65/33). What is being questioned here concerning what takes place also involves “the event as that which arrives [ce qui arrive]” at the edge, the border, or threshold (65/33). “What is the event that most arrives [l’événement le plus arrivant]?” (66/33). “What is the arrivant that makes an event arrive [fait arriver un événement]?” (66/33). Does death happen or arrive at the threshold? What is the arrivant? (66/33). That which makes the event arrive, the arrivant is what “does not cross a threshold separating two identifiable places” (67/34, italics mine) but “affects the very experience of the threshold itself” (66/33). What is a threshold? A threshold is that which is supposed to mark the indivisible limit between two identities, concepts, or territories or to demarcate the limit between an inside and an outside.
Since the arrivant has no identity yet, “its place of arrival is also de-identified” (A 68/34). It is on this “essentially most difficult to delineate border [au fond la plus difficile à tracer]” that Derrida “is tempted to read Heidegger” (68/35, trans. mod.). This border “will always keep one from discriminating among the figures of the arrivant, the dead [du mort], and the revenant” (68/35). Without a frontier that can be clearly delineated, where identity is called into question, it is impossible to differentiate between the figures of the one arriving, the dead, and the returning ghost.
Among the outcomes of Derrida’s analysis in Aporias we can list the following two features: 1) Originary mourning limits the preference for any priority to be given to either “my death” (Heidegger) or “the death of the other” (Levinas) (111/61). As Derrida writes, the contamination of the proper results in the death of the other thus becoming again “first.” For, the death of the other, that is, the death of the other in “me” is the only death referred to in the syntagma “my death” (133/76); 2) Parallels can be drawn between death and the event: both are unpredictable, radically other, lack a horizon, and come as an absolute surprise. As Derrida had already written in Of Grammatology, “The relation to the other and the relation with death are one and the same opening” (OG 265/187).
Marranos
“Death is always the name of a secret, since it signs the irreplaceable singularity,” Derrida declares (A 130/74). It is toward the end of Aporias that Derrida makes this association between death and the secret. Death names what is recognizable, publicly known, with a common name. It “puts forth the public name, the common name of a secret, the common name of the proper name without name” (130/174). Death, the name of an all too common event, not hidden but out in the open, nonetheless names a secret. It is a secret because what it refers to is always an absolutely singular event that cannot be phenomenalized, brought to presence, unveiled, or revealed. “It is therefore always a shibboleth”—a custom, principle, belief, or behavior distinctive of a particular class or group of people, the use of or inability to use which reveals one’s party, nationality, orthodoxy—“for the manifest name of a secret is from the beginning a private name, so that [faisant] language about death is nothing but a great history, great story of a secret society [une grande histoire de société secret], neither public nor private, semi-private, semi-public, on the border between the two; thus also a hidden religion of the awaiting [s’attendre] (oneself as well as each other), with its ceremonies, cults, liturgy, or its Marranolike rituals”(130/74). A secret society, then, but this (not so) secret society, this “hidden religion,” would be the society of those marked by, touched by death. Derrida refers to the awaiting one as a Marrano, a Marrano not as historically defined by belonging to a distinctive cultural heritage but “a universal Marrano.” Death would then be the story of all those awaiting “Marranos” telling a secret that cannot be told.
Derrida further links death with the secret in A Taste for the Secret (1997), his series of conversations with Maurizio Ferraris, when he notes, “Clearly, the most tempting figure for this absolute/secret [quest’altro segreto] is death, that which has a relation to death, that which is carried off by death [la morte porta con sé]” (TS 52/58). For death is that which is, like the secret, nonthematizable and nonsharable, resistant to the daylight of phenomenality. The secret disrupts all transparency and consensus. There can be no consensus on the subject of death except that the singular is the singular, the other is the other. As secret, it is absolute—ab-solutum, detached from every bond. And like the secret, what can be shared is not a content. Derrida remarks that even though “the relation to death is a privileged dimension of this experience of the secret, but I imagine that an immortal would have the same experience” (58). Even for an immortal, this secret—death or the experience of death—would be “sealed” and “concealed” (58).12
Side
There is no other side, Derrida writes in H. C. for Life, That Is to Say … his wide-ranging reading of the work of Hélène Cixous. Commenting on “the strange and insistent use” that Cixous “makes, on her side, of the word ‘side’ ” (H. C. 35/29) and finding a proliferation of references to the word “side [côté]” in her work, Derrida asserts that if pressed as to where he locates her work, he would always find her on the side of life. As for himself, he “will not be on her side” (28/20). “I, who always feel turned toward death [tourné du côté de la mort],” he writes wistfully, “I am not on her side [je ne suis pas de son côté]” (40/36). From the beginning of the text he asks himself what a “side [côté]” is or what a side means (33/27). Not only does he no longer know which side he is on, he admits he no longer knows “what a side is” (28–29/21). Yet Derrida nonetheless finds himself always on her side, “too much on her side” (28/21). Reflecting on questions of life and death raised in Cixous’s writings, Derrida writes that in her work he can only find one side. For Cixous, Derrida remarks, “there is only one side and not two, and that side is that of life” (40/36). This is because she does not consider death to be a “side”: “death is not a side, it is a nonside [n’est pas un côté, c’est un non-côté]” (40/36).
The term “side” suggests the taking of sides, taking up a position, one side in relation to or opposed to another. Yet going counter to the popular phrase in the American vernacular—“there are two sides to everything”—which affirms a certain belief in the homegrown variety of democracy, Derrida observes, “Life has no other side [n’a pas d’autre côté], if there is only one side [qu’un seul côté] […] then the latter remains undecidable” (H. C. 50/47). Since this undecidable is necessarily the place of decision, this “can only be for life [pour la vie]” (50/48). “Because it is undecidable, one can only decide and settle only for life. But life, which is undecidable, is also, in its very finitude, infinite. What has only one side—a single edge without an opposite edge [un seul bord sans bord opposé]—is in-finite [in-fini]. Finite because it has an edge on one side [bordé d’un côté], but infinite because it has no opposable edge” (50/48).
Derrida refers to it as “this strange logic of the edge without an opposite edge, a unique side [étrange logique du bord sans bord opposé, d’un côté unique]” (H. C. 53/52). This unique side “is certainly the side that is dissymetrically turned toward the other, oriented, exposed, or held to the other [tenu à l’autre]” (53–54/52). “This remains a unique side without another side, and this would be life itself” (54/52). Derrida adds that death is in no way denied, “but it is not a side, it is a nonside” (54/52). “No more edge [bord] for me,” Derrida bemoans. “No more death, maybe, since life has no opposite edge, but no more edge at all [plus de bord du tout]” (51/48). Thus, he is left to contend with the fact that he “would have no side at all” and that he does “not know where to put” himself (51/49). If “there are not two sides, Derrida writes, then, consonant with a differential thinking without opposition, “there is no side, and that is the undecidable” (72/75). “Life for life (and not a Heideggerian being-for-life),” then, “is therefore nothing else than a living of death [vivre la mort], but yes, still living, death, living it for oneself, for the other, and for life” (83/89). He notes that later he will call it “living for the sake of living [vivre pour vivre]” (83/89).
We die in the end, too quickly (H. C.).
I promise you in me to carry you in me. If you ever were to hear this promise, “it will only be in me, in my heart,” in my heart of heart.13 (BSI, 2).