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Introduction Today, one may be tempted to say that there were times, long gone, in which death loomed larger than life and that now, with medical science, technological optimism , the ethic of global progress, and so on, life looms larger than death: even with terror and wars factored in, death has become remote and episodic, one might be tempted to say. Yet at the same time, none has escaped the ultimate mastery of death, which at every epoch manifests itself in new and unexpected facets. In an age of disease and conformity, death appears as it always has: as the outer limit to all power, all designs, all optimism, all heroism, all projects at transcending the given limits of action. If political life includes projects and games oriented toward transcendence , death, as a thoroughly nonpolitical, exterior, and uniform force, continues its eternal vigilance as the guarantor of forced exit from all levels of hierarchy . The starting premise must then be that death is decisively and primarily the opposite of power, not of life. In this volume, I seek to offer a philosophical history of the constitutive role of death in political consciousness. My general argument is that in some form or another, the orientation toward death has had an unbroken grip on the foundational character of the philosophy of governance. Obviously, this is not to say that such an orientation is always explicit, or that it always takes the same form and function, or that it possesses some universal and transhistorical consistency in the manner of its incorporation into designs of political power. Rather, the twin elementary propositions that the will to power is a foundational element in political life and that such a will is naturally and unfailingly conquered by death lead us to expect the will to power to produce on a continuous basis ways to address this superiority of death. A simple resignation to fate is not a political act; as an act, it exists only outside of politics proper. When one abandons the fight, one moves away from the tedious struggle of mortals for power, and thus away from political life as such, and into more serene spheres of reflective life. To be party to games of power, one cannot—however unconsciously—escape cognizance of all given restrictions on power and transcendence. Death thus acquires its foundational status to political life because it operates as the upper and uniform limit to conceivable human hierarchies. But even if polit3 ical life is not oriented toward hierarchy, death remains at its unconscious center for a different and more ancient reason. In the same way that human beings entertain a sense of community through observing the commonality of their own fate with that of others, they sense that death—as the most universal common—is the ground of a universal community of which oneself is an ineluctable member. A person thus becomes a political animal not simply because one does not live alone, as Aristotle suggests when he describes the origins of politics in man. More primarily, one becomes so because one does not die alone. As one scrutinizes this commonality of fate, the political animal begins to contemplate ways to transcend the fate one shares with others. This is why the story of civilization begins with Gilgamesh and no one else. And it is in this sense that politics becomes no longer simply politics—that is, an art of negotiations, games, tricks, and compromises among those who regard themselves to be equal to each other and who have nothing else but each other to refer to. Rather, the orientation toward death, however inarticulate, also propels into motion a move away from politics proper and into governance. While like politics governance has its own rules of play and arts of maneuver, governance is not politics in its communal sense. The conceptual difference between politics and governance consists in the former being the arena of everyday negotiations aimed at dividing up the spoils among relative equals who either cannot ignore each other or cannot live without each other. Governance, on the other hand, is the art of transcending that ordinary and eternal political game of constant negotiations and adjustments. While the art of politics is oriented toward tangible benefits, the art of governance is oriented toward more idealistic pursuits and ultimate ends. In this volume, the emphasis will therefore be on the trials and tribulations of governance proper in its relation to death rather than on “politics” as such. The...

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