Death and Texts: Finitude before Form

This article examines the various limits of knowledge in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale as a critique of finitude in object-oriented philosophy and speculative realism. The phrase "death shall be dead" is the form of the receding limits that emerge when finitude is revoked, the lack of content that is a sign of a finitude still to come. The materialisms of the Tale assert a limit that does not arrive because they begin with the inexhaustible limitations of form.