The Thought of Death and the Memory of War

5. The Imaginary of Death

For Paul Ricœur, as for Sartre, Levinas, Patočka, and Derrida, sections 46 through 53 of Being and Time, on the existential analytic of Beingtoward -death, constitute one of the most acutely confrontational passages of Heidegger’s formidable book. Bearing spirited witness to this is a long passage in part 3 of Memory, History, Forgetting, devoted to “the historical condition,” in which the philosopher of memory and history considers in his turn the identification of death with “the intimatepossibilityofone ’sownmostpotentialityofbeing,”andopposes to it “an alternative reading of the potentiality of dying.”1 However, as Ricœur was writing this book, he was also sketching the outlines of a text titled Living Up to Death, each line of which, without taking up Heidegger’s analyses explicitly, bears the trace of an engagement with them.2 The present chapter will focus on these several pages for at leastthreereasons.First,theyforegroundwhattheHeideggeriananalytic had discarded from the outset: the tenuous yet forbidding link between the thought of death and the imaginary of death. Second, this link and the attitude toward death that emerges from it invoke a responsibility,bothethicalandpolitical,thatisincommensurablewith the injunction or existential project of an “authentic Being-towarddeath .” The third reason to examine this text closely is that the ethical and political responsibility invoked cannot be thought without referencetothewarsofthetwentiethcentury .Thespecteroftotalitarianism 79 5 The Imaginary of Death  Paul Ricœur and the extermination of the millions upon millions of people in the concentrationcampshauntsthistext,thememoriesofwhichitsimultaneously cultivates and orients. The existential analytic takes no notice of, and expects nothing from, the imaginary of death, of those images of death that grip us or are inflicted on us—any more than it does of those scholarly disciplines that treat such images as their object. At most it presupposes a conceptualization of death that can be elaborated independently of such images. In the worst case it dresses a screen or obstacle before such a conceptualization. This is why such images escape analysis in Being and Time—as if it sufficed to show their inauthenticity to reveal the limits of their power, even though we have been exposed, from time immemorial, to their recurrent appearances (some would say to their apparitions [revenance])—and even though their unfathomable origins constitute the most mysterious, the most obscure part of what we are. All things having a bearing on this imaginary, and the images that compose it have been passed over in silence—not merely the role they might play in the way we envisage our own death as well as that of others, but also the many ways that they were once, and will yet again be put to political use. Unlike Heidegger, Ricœur begins his meditation on death by commentingonthisimaginary .Nodoubtitisonlyanoutline,thesketchof a book that will forever remain unwritten. But in its pages three kinds ofimagebegintorevealthemselvestoourdiscernment,againstwhich, each and every one, Ricœur will declare himself to be at war. By this very fact these images engage our ethical and political responsibility.  The image of the survivor grips us every time that, as we reflect on death, we imagine the death that we shall become for others. We project ourselves (we survive ourselves) in the gaze and speech of our survivors, like the characters of No Exit who are condemned to hear 80 The Imaginary of Death the commentaries of those who have survived them. We anticipate with a kind of vertigo the announcement of our dying, the sadness and the mourning of others, in the hope of “living” as long as possible in their memory, and in anguished expectation of the day when any trace of our life will have faded away. We wonder what becomes of us after death, where we will be, what will remain of us in a time that no longer belongs to us. Death is declined in the future perfect tense—or, in other words, in the short-circuiting or disregard of the time that remains to be lived: It is tomorrow’s death, in the future perfect tense, so to speak, that I imagine. And it is this image of the dead person I will be for others that takes up all the room, with its load of questions: what are, where are, how are the dead? My struggle is with and against this image of tomorrow’s dead, this dead person that I shall be for the survivors. With and against that make-believe where death is in...