Mourning Dastur

Mourning as the Origin of Humanity
Author(s): FRANÇOISE DASTUR

Source: Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Vol. 48, No. 3, a special proceedings
issue: A MATTER OF LIFEDEATH II (September 2015), pp. 1-13
Published by: University of Manitoba
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In this essay, I suggest that the most original manner of defining humans might be simply to say that they are
strange animals who bury their dead, since that which characterizes humanity as such is the refusal to submit
to the natural order, this cycle of life and death that rules over all living beings. This explains the importance in
all cultures of the practice of funeral rites. The death with which we are confronted is the death of others, and
in particular of those who are close to us. Mourning can therefore be defined as the human capacity of having
a relation to those who are no longer present in the world. Seen in this light, mourning can be considered as the
fundamental mode of being human.
Mourning as the
Origin of Humanity
FRANÇOISE DASTUR
human beings have always been conscious of the difference that separates them
Since human fromfromtheotherotherlivingbeings
beings,beginning
as shown forlivingexample
havebybeings,
the merealways
fact ofofwearing
human as been shown history conscious for and example of even the difference in by the the most mere that archaic fact separates of societies, wearing them
clothes or painting and sometimes deforming their bodies in accordance with specific
rituals. In Greek philosophy man has been defined as a zoon logon ekhon , as an animal
possessing logos , a word that should not be immediately translated as "reason," as was
the case in the standard definition classical metaphysics has given of the human being
as animal rationale. The Latin word ratio means calculation, whereas logos comes
from the verb legein , which means to gather, to put together, and, consequently, to
speak, to utter sentences which are as such a gathering of different elements. It could
therefore seem that speech and not reason constitutes the specific difference attrib-
uted to this living being that is the human. However, in both cases, as Heidegger
Mosaic 48/3 0027-1 276-07/00 1 0 1 4$02.00©Mosaic
2 Mosaic 48/3 (September 2015)
rightly underlines in his Letter on Humanism , "metaphysics thinks of man on the basis
of animalitas and does not think in the direction of his humanitas " ( Basic 227). This
metaphysical definition is still the basis of Aristotle's more concrete definition of man
as zoon politikon , political animal, as an animal who needs the presence and help of
its congeners in order to develop itself and to survive. We find indeed in Aristotle
many precious indications of what distinguishes man from all other animals, such as
the standing position and the possession of this very special organ which is the hand,
indications which will give the basis of the modern definition of man, which is no
longer considered merely as homo sapiens , as possessing knowledge, but as homo faber ,
as a maker of tools. But even with this last definition, which puts the emphasis not so
much on the mental, but on the practical capacities of man, we have still to do with the
same pattern of thought, which consists in adding a specific difference to the general
species to which man is considered to belong, i.e., to animality.
Against such a pattern of thought, which results in defining the human being as
an animal plus something else, as a "superior" animal, I would like to argue that what
distinguishes the human is rather something negative, which is its relation to this
nothingness which is death, making of the human, as Heidegger says in Being and
Time , a being-toward-death. This is the reason why the human cannot be said to
"live," but rather "to exist," existence meaning here, as Heidegger explains in What is
Metaphysics ?, "being held out into the nothing" ( Basic 103-04) and thus exposed to
anxiety, this fundamental affective disposition in which "the nothing is originally dis-
closed." What is thus revealed in anxiety is the fact that the human being "exists as
thrown being-toward-its-end," in other words, as "thrownness into death" ( Being
232), which explains that he knows with certainty that he must die. We cannot deny
that this knowledge accompanies the human being in a more or less patent manner
throughout his existence. There are indeed different ways in which the human being
may relate to its own mortality, in confronting it in anxiety, or in taking flight from it
in letting itself be absorbed in everyday tasks. But even then, the human being con-
tinues to face death in the mode of flight. This is why Heidegger can legitimately say
that the human being is dying in fact as long as it exists (233).
We are here far from the humanistic discourse which puts the emphasis on the
"greatness" of man, since his being-toward-death is the revelation of the fact that the
human is not the "lord of beings" ( Basic 245), an allusive reference to Descartes s say-
ing that man has to become the master and possessor of nature, but rather, as
Heidegger says again in What is Metaphysics ?, the "place-holder of the nothing," a noth-
ing which is not in the human 's power to bring before itself and in which it finds itself
held (106). In the same way, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in In Praise of Philosophy, his
Françoise Dastur 3
inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, declares that, in opposition to Promethean

humanism, "one explains nothing by man, since he is not a force, but a weakness at
the heart of being" (44). In fact, man's weakness has been at the centre of pre-
philosophical Greek thought, as shows the true story of the titan Prometheus and of
his brother Epimetheus, whose prototypes can be found in the Bhagavata Purana , a
famous Sanskrit epic, which was orally transmitted since at least the fifth century
BCE. Prometheus, whose name means "the one who thinks in advance and shows
forethought," assigned his brother Epimetheus the task of giving creatures of the earth
their various qualities, such as swiftness, cunning, strength, fur, and wings, so that
each species could survive the mutual destruction and war of all against all which is
the law of nature. Unfortunately, by the time he got to man, Epimetheus, "the one who
thinks after," had given all the good qualities out and there were none left for man,
who remained thus devoid of all protection and in a state of total vulnerability. So
Prometheus decided to make man stand upright as the gods did and to give him fire.
Prometheus, who had thus defied the gods, was subjected by Zeus to eternal punish-
ment and suffering.
This is the theme of Aeschylus s tragedy, written in the fifth century BCE,
Prometheus Bound , in which it is said that technè , the knowledge and technology given
by Prometheus to human beings, is much weaker than anankè , the destiny, necessity,
and fate, to which the gods themselves are compelled to obey.1 In this pre-philosophical
and pre-metaphysical Greece, the name of man is not yet derived from his mental
capacities; he is merely called a "mortal." This is confirmed by a famous passage from
Sophocles's tragedy Antigone, quoted by Heidegger in his 1935 course An Introduction
to Metaphysics , in which the chorus celebrates by using the double meaning of the
Greek word deinon , this terrifying wonder that is man who is endowed with many skills
but can establish the human reign of the polis only by violating the natural order.
However, that against which the human being must recognize that it has failed to
invent a cure is death, which escapes all of his ruses (Sophocles v. 333 sq.). The fact that
there is no cure against death, that mortality is the lot of the human being, who is
thereby radically distinguished from the immortal, who knows neither birth nor death
and for that very reason no longer dwells in the world - that is what in Sophocles's
tragedies paves the way for the advent of philosophy, where the human being, left
alone, has to find by himself the means of his survival and the meaning of his life.
But the question can nevertheless be raised: is it really possible to say that the
awareness of his own mortality is what is proper to the human? Is not the feeling of a
fundamental vulnerability shared by all living beings? We can in fact easily imagine
that animals are, like us, afraid of dying, since they spend their lives trying desperately
4 ! Mosaic 48/3 (September 2015 )
to survive. But, unlike us, they cannot have a representation of their own death to
come and they have no clear awareness of the ephemeral character of their lives. It
seems therefore possible to argue that humanity does not achieve consciousness of
itself except through confrontation with death. This is what is confirmed by one
of the most ancient testimonies of human history, the Mesopotamian Epic of
Gilgamesh , written at the beginning of the second millennium BCE, and which can
be considered as the very beginning of literature. It is the story of Gilgamesh, a leg-
endary king of the city of Uruk and a demigod, and his discovery of his own mor-
tality at the time of the death of his friend Enkidu, who himself has the intermediary
status of a man-animal. It tells of the dangerous journey Gilgamesh then undertakes
in search of a remedy capable of saving himself from death. But such a remedy can-
not be found, and Gilgamesh must finally accept that there is no possible way to
escape the universal law of death, which the gods have laid down for human beings
while reserving immortal life for themselves. What is most interesting in this epic is
the fact that Gilgamesh s first experience of death is the death of the other, as if the
humanity of man could be constituted only within the context of social life, of a fun-
damental being with others, which is symbolized here by the friendship shared by
Gilgamesh and Enkidu.
For of ofbirth
birththere as isBirth
as such. in such.
and fact
deathBirth
are theno extreme
experience andofdeath
limits of are death
our existence the extreme as such limits exactly of as our there existence is no experience and there
and there
is for us no possibility of trespassing them. They are events that happen in the world
only for others, not for those who actually undergo them and thus have no control
over them. We have not chosen to be born and if we have the possibility of accelerat-
ing death in provoking it by suicide we cannot choose whether or not to die. There is
nevertheless a difference between birth and death. The possibility of not having come
into the world remains in a sense unthinkable for each of us, but because we have
been told about it by our parents or relatives, we may imagine that our birth could
have not taken place, so that we have the possibility of considering the beginning of
our existence from the point of view of a stranger. This is next to impossible as far as
our own death is concerned. It is of course possible to imagine a world in which we
are no longer present, but this is sheer fantasy because for us death can only mean the
end of the world. Birth and death are not external limits of life; they are rather fun-
damental dimensions of existing that have to be taken in charge by each individual,
which means that each of us has, on the one hand, to assume the determinations of
the being he or she has inherited and, on the other, to confront the perspective of his
or her own death, which remains unimaginable.
Françoise Dasîur , 5
There is indeed no experience of death as such. This is the reason why the Greek
philosopher Epicurus could claim that "death is no concern to us, for while we exist,
death is not present, and when death is present, we no longer exist" (125). Epicurus is
right in the sense that the only death with which we are directly confronted is the
death of others, so that what we can experience in the first place is mourning. The
death of the other, and in particular the death of those who are close to us, awakens
in us, as was the case for Gilgamesh, the latent consciousness of our own mortality, a
consciousness that is put aside in the everyday life. But such a consciousness of our
own mortality, such a knowledge that we have to die someday, is not experienced in a
rational manner. And there we encounter the limits of Epicurus's discourse on death.
Epicurus wants to free the human being from the fear of death in proposing a rational
argument. But rationality is powerless because the very idea of our own death awak-
ens in us the feeling of anxiety - anxiety and not only fear, as Heidegger explains,
because fear is always the fear of something definite, that I can imagine happening,
whereas anxiety is the feeling of having lost all one's bearings, the feeling of being
totally disoriented. Gilgamesh becomes really human only after having gone through
such an experience of anxiety and it is the same for us, who have to confront death in
order to have access to our real selves as humans. But because death is an object of
anxiety and even horror, it seems that we can confront it in thought only to the extent
that we are able to relativize it. The human being does not accept to submit himself
in a passive manner to the natural course of life, which involves death. This struggle
against death, without which human existence is apparently not possible, implies the
production of various techniques which are all defence mechanisms against death,
barriers erected against death, and arms destined to keep it at bay.
It is this will not to submit oneself to the universal law of nature that explains the
importance of funeral rites from an anthropological point of view. We have until now
assumed that the knowledge of one's own mortality is that which constitutes the essen-
tial characteristic of the human being since he is able, as soon as he can think, to have
a representation of his own death to come. But instead of defining the human in terms
of the purely private knowledge he has of himself as mortal, we should rather define
him in terms of these public practices of mourning. Whereas most animals disregard
the corpses of their congeners, humans have buried their dead since time immemorial.
We could thus legitimately consider that the practice of funeral rites - more than the
invention of language or the use of tools - is what characterizes the very advent of the
human being. These rites are not limited solely to inhumation and burial, but include
also mummification, cremation, and even the exposing of the dead to wild animals,
which is not merely the abandonment of the corpse to the work of nature, since in the
6 Mosaic 48/3 (September 2015)
rare cultures which have adopted the practice, it involves a very complex ritual, as is the
case for the Zoroastrians, who expose their dead to the vultures atop the famous "tow-
ers of silence."2 What is most important in this respect is the fact that these funeral
rites, no matter how different they may be, have a marked ceremonial or formal char-
acter and can sometimes include a long preparation extended over several days. One
can of course object that funeral rites are necessary because it is important to get rid
of the corpses of the dead, which can be a dangerous source of pollution for the living.
And it is true that in some societies, the persons who are in charge of the dead are seen
as impure. But it is not only for hygienic reasons that it is necessary to bury the dead.
A dead body is not a mere thing, but it is also no longer a person. This strange inter-
mediary place occupied by the corpse arouses feelings of horror and anxiety, which can
become unbearable. The true goal of funeral rites is a symbolic one. They are per-
formed in order to allow for the relatives of the deceased as well as for the whole com-
munity to which he or she belongs the institution of a new relationship with him or
her that no longer needs the mediation of the bodily presence.
A funeral rite is first a way of notifying to the others the death of a person. But
at the same time it is the institution of a new mode of relationship with the one who
has passed away and continues to exist in some indeterminate kind of the "beyond."
This new mode of relationship, which is solely spiritual, is the proof that the deceased
has not completely disappeared and that he or she remains in the memory of the liv-
ing. This invisible presence of the dead is what was at the origin of the notion of
"spirit," which means "breath," since this word comes from the Latin verb spirare , to
breathe; the Greek words for spirit, pneuma , and for soul, psyche , have the same ety-
mological meaning. When a person dies, we also say that it expires , meaning that its
breath goes out of its body and becomes independent from it. We know now, thanks
to the work of anthropologists, that even in archaic societies humans refuse to con-
sider death as a complete disappearance and continue to live in a world in which the
dead are invisibly present. It is therefore not possible to consider, as it is done in
modernity, that the invention of the beyond has only a religious origin. It is true that
the very notion of the "beyond," which was first developed in Mazdeism, where we
find the first representations of an end of time in the form of a last judgment as well
as the notions of "heaven" or "paradise" (a word of Persian origin meaning at first
"garden") and "hell," and which became a central ideal in Christianity, was radically
questioned in the period of the Enlightenment. This period was characterized by the
rise of an atheism for which some philosophers from the nineteenth century, like
Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche, were the spokesmen. But the belief that death is
not the final end for everything nevertheless remains still alive and compelling, so that
Françoise Dastur 7
it is necessary to try to understand what constitutes its deep motivation. This is what
an examination of the practices of mourning can help us do.
The deceased,
deceased,purpose
which iswhich
a wayoftoallacknowledge,
is a funeraryin way
a moreto oracknowledge,
less consciousrites is to establish
manner, that in a more a spiritual or less conscious relationship manner, with that the
the being of this person was not limited to the portion of time she or he spent on
earth. This is not just a matter of irrational belief, but can also be attested by all of
those who try to imagine their own death. It is quite possible to imagine a world with-
out the empirical individual that each of us is. But what seems to resist death is not
my empirical singularity, which is made of factual determinations that I share with
many others, like sex, ethnic origin, particular physical features, date and place of
birth, etc., but this anonymous field of consciousness that I am also, without which
no world could ever appear. Once the empirical ego has been disintegrated, some-
thing seems still to remain: a self that is not empirical and therefore not submitted to
death, which is the basis of the belief in the immortality of the soul, as well as the basis
of metaphysics as such, whose name means that there is something beyond the phys-
ical and sensible world. This is what is said not only in Western metaphysics, but even
earlier in Indian philosophy, where we find in the Upanishads , which were composed
between the eighth and fifth century BCE, the idea of an absolute and non-temporal
self, the Atman , which is the goal of transcendental meditation. The same affirmation
of the non-temporal character of the soul is what we find also in Plato, as well as in
modern idealism, from Kant to Fichte, with the idea of the transcendental subject,
which is something else than the empirical ego, and even in Husserl's transcendental
phenomenology, in which it is explicitly said that the transcendental ego can neither
be born nor die. The famous phenomenological reduction which is the Husserlian
method by which one can discover in oneself, by suspending all beliefs to the sensible
world and the empirical ego, the transcendental field of the pure ego, is in this respect
quite similar to the Socratic method, by which Socrates tried to awaken in each per-
son he encountered the capacity of thinking by itself. As he explained, the method of
questioning others is similar to the maieutic method of his mother who, as a midwife,
had the task of helping give birth to bodies, whereas he himself has the task of help-
ing to give birth to souls. Almost all the Western philosophers have insisted on the fact
that philosophy consists of criticizing in a radical manner all the opinions that gov-
ern the everyday life in order to find an access to truth, a truth that seems to be
beyond time and space. Metaphysical thinking distinguishes not only opinions from
truth, but also what belongs to the bodily experience from what belongs to the spiri-
tual experience. Philosophical thinking, in opposition to mythological or poetic
8 Mosaic 48/3 (September 2015 )
thinking, makes no use of sensible images and is merely conceptual and rational. This
is the reason why the philosopher has the feeling that he or she has overcome the level
of bodily experience. When one manipulates pure concepts, one has the impression
of being a pure spirit; it seems then that one has left aside one's own body, which has
remained in the sensible world, whereas ones own spirit can evolve in a free manner.
This explains why, after Plato himself, many philosophers have been led to despise the
body and to glorify the spirit.
This brings us to another issue. For humans there is not only one possibility of
surviving, namely through biological or spiritual "fatherhood" or "motherhood," but
there is also another one, which consists in the transmission of their works. Leaving a
trace in the memory of generations to come, surviving in spirit, is for them as impor-
tant as surviving in the flesh in their descendants. This kind of spectral survival in col-
lective memory was highly valued by the Greeks because they attributed a great
importance to what they called "fame," doxa , a word which means "opinion," in oppo-
sition to episteme , "knowledge" or "science," but also "reputation," "good name."
Rumour has it that Achilles, the hero of the Trojan War, preferred a short but famous
life to a long one without fame. For the Greeks, what was important was not eternal
life after death, because for them the beyond was not the realm of the resuscitated,
those who enjoy the eternal joy promised to the just in Paradise, as is the case for the
Christians, but merely the realm of shadows, of spectres, so that when Ulysses visits
Achilles there, Achilles tells him that rather than reign over those shadows he would
prefer to see himself reduced here below to the wretched estate of a poor ploughman's
servant. What counted for the Greeks was not the life in the beyond, but the collective
life in the city and the living memory of the citizens. This explains the Aristotelian
definition of the human being as a political animal. The institution of the polis , the
city, goes back to a mythological past that gives to every political act a political value
far exceeding the individual who performs it. Human life is therefore understood as a
life with the dead as well as with the not yet born. This virtual community of life with
the spirit of the dead and the not yet born is in fact the basis of all cultures, for there
is no culture except where a certain mastery over the irreversible flow of time has
become possible, and this implies the use of various kinds of techniques in order to
overcome absence. And absent are in the first place the dead, who have disappeared
not momentarily, but absolutely and irreplaceably. This is why it is not illegitimate to
see in mourning the origin of culture itself. There is therefore a tight relationship
between culture and death, which we have to acknowledge without however seeing in
it the expression of the superiority of man over animals. On the contrary, we could
think that the need for culture, on the part of man, is rooted in a kind of weakness that
Françoise Dastur 9
is unknown to animals. The human being needs culture because, unlike animals, the
human has no natural weapons allowing him to survive; it has, as said Marx, to give
to itself, to invent, the means of its survival.
For the experience of mourning, whether the experience of the death to oneself
that is remembering, or the experience of the death of the other in being in spirit with
the deceased, is already in itself an Aufhebung , a "sublation" of death and a strategy
destined to fill that lacuna, that caesura, that absolute discontinuity of temporality of
which death consists. In the experience of re-membering, a word that has to be heard
in its literal meaning, one has at the same time the experience of one's own death as
the one who is no longer there and the experience of one's own survival as the one
who remembers. One is therefore at the same time dead and the survivor of one's own
death, which expresses itself now in remembrance. In the experience of the death of
the other, one has likewise at the same time the experience of the absence of the
deceased, who no longer responds, and the experience of a co-presence with him in
this "spiritual incorporation" that is mourning. It is significant that Freud spoke in
this context of the "work" of mourning, stressing thus the profoundly "dialectical"
character of mourning, which consists altogether of keeping the departed alive by
incorporating him into one's own interiority and of putting him effectively to death
by agreeing to be his survivor.3 According to Freud's own terms, there is a mysterious
"economy" of mourning which drives the ego, faced with the question of knowing
whether it wants to share the same fate as the deceased, to decide, in adding up its nar-
cissistic satisfactions, to renounce the lost "object" of its love in order to be able to
remain alive. One may think, as does Lévinas, that one could decide to die "for"
another, but this cannot mean to die "in his or her place," since it is strictly impossi-
ble to deliver the other from his or her own mortality. One can only ever give to the
other a little more time, but not immortality, as Derrida underlines in The Gift of
Death (43), so that, even in the case of a self-sacrifice performed out of love, it is not
the question of the death of the other, but rather of the irreparable loss this would be
for oneself who prefers not to live on after it. The death of the other can never coin-
cide with my own, since, as Derrida says in Aporias , one knows "a priori , and
absolutely undeniably," that "the one and the other never arrive there together, at this
rendez-vous," so that "death is ultimately the name of impossible simultaneity" (65).
This is what turns every death into a scandal, a first death, as Lévinas himself says,
recalling that Eugen Fink, in his book on Metaphysik und Tod , explained that there is
no genus of "'the' death under which the death of the other and my own death could
be ranged as species" (Lévinas 105). 4 But if death is thus the name for an impossible
simultaneity, either with the other or with oneself, is it really possible to then assume
10 I Mosaic 48/3 (September 2015 )
the radical lacuna of temporality in which it consists without "sublating" it in "sur-

viving" to oneself or to the other?
If no one can take over the burden of another's death and in the strict sense die for
him, it means that the relation the human being entertains with death is prior to all its
other properties. This is what Heidegger asserts, in a course in which for the first time
he analyzes being-toward-death: that it is not the Cogito, sum , the "I think, I am," that
constitutes the true definition of the being of man, but rather sum moribundus , "I am
dying," where only moribundus , destined for death, is what gives the sum , "I am," its
meaning ( History 316-17). The human being is therefore a being so inseparable from
this nothingness that is death that it can only be continuously dying, i.e., continuously
mourning, if mourning is understood in a broad sense as relation to nothingness and
absence - a relation which is itself based on the temporal and ecstatic character of the
being of man. As Heidegger shows in Being and Time , man is essentially defined as exis-
tence, as being outside itself, as having an ecstatic structure. Far from constituting
the "inner sense" or the "interiority" of a "subject," temporality is rather the " ekstatikon
par excellence," "the primordial outside of itself" (329), so that far from presupposing
the timelessness of a "subject" or a "self," it makes self-constancy possible.
It would therefore be possible to speak, as Derrida does, of an "originary mourn-
ing," but by giving to it a different meaning. For Derrida, it is because "the self-relation
welcomes or supposes the other within its being-itself as different from the self" that
it is possible to say that the being of man "is constituted in its ipseity in terms of an
originary mourning" ( Aporias 61). But the relation to oneself must already be there in
order for the self to "welcome" the other, so that selfhood cannot be derived from an
otherness which would remain "different" from it. What comes first is not the alterity
of the other as different from oneself or, as Lévinas says, "heterogeneous" to oneself,
but the alterity of time itself, through which the human being is originally open to
absence and nothingness. Here it is necessary to properly understand what Heidegger
calls Jemeinigkeit , "mineness"; more exactly, that which is "each time mine," this dis-
tributive structure of existence which is at the basis of all possible relation to the other
and consequently cannot be derived from it. Being-toward-death is what gives the
human being its selfhood, in the sense that it individuates in such a way that it makes
everyone equal. It means that which "I" share with the others is precisely that which
separates me from them. This explains why Jemeinigkeit and Being-with the others are
not at all incompatible, alterity being fundamentally understood as temporal alterity
insofar as each existence consists in a quite inexchangeable portion of time, or a
moira , a destiny, as the ancient Greeks said. Being-toward-death, which is the basis of
the radical impossibility of any simultaneity not only with the other but also with
Françoise Dasîur 1 1
oneself, has therefore to be understood as the manner of being of the human being,
insofar as being human means to have a relation to absence and nothingness.
Originary mourning would then be the name of the self-relation as such, insofar as it
is a temporal and therefore ecstatic relation to otherness.
It stood
stoodhasbroadly
alreadyasbroadly
coming been
to terms
as coming
with absence,
emphasized
the toorigin
termsofthat
culture
withitself.
it is not
Everyabsence, illegitimate the origin to see of in culture mourning, itself. under- Every
culture is then, in a broad sense, a culture of death, death being thus the true agent of
all cultural productions, as is equally shown by funeral rites and the conservation of
the living word in writing, by the cult of ancestors and mythological stories, and by
literature in general. But this is precisely the reason why this radical caesura that is
death has to be assumed, which means at the same time accepted and denied. A his-
torical anthropology of death demonstrates that members of archaic societies are
repelled by the idea of a final and total destruction and that they believe that the dead
continue living with them as their unseen companions, constantly intervening in their
ongoing existence, so that the line between the dead and the living is not clear-cut
there. Thanks to the examples thus offered to us, we become aware of the fact that
what essentially characterizes the life of humans is coexistence with other humans,
not only with our contemporaries who share the same period of time, but also and
above all with those who have come before and those who will come after us. The
shadows of the dead, like the shadows of those not yet born, accompany the human
being in an invisible manner throughout its existence. And it is this virtual commu-
nity that is the true ground of all cultures and the origin of human history, since the
feeling of the brevity of life pushes humans to transmit their knowledge to the subse-
quent generations, in the sense that what the defunct did not have the time to com-
plete, his descendants can take up again and bring to completion. In all kinds of
cultures it is necessary to make room for the dead because there is human life only
where there is a possibility of sharing a common memory. In this regard, humanity is
constituted of more dead members than living ones, as declared Auguste Comte, the
French philosopher who was the founder of "positivism" and developed the idea of a
"religion of humanity" in order to fulfil the cohesive function formerly held by
churches. Human culture is thus the result of this dialectical process which is mourn-
ing, consisting of both affirmation and denial of death.
This is what has been shown in the most powerful way by Hegel when he
explains, in his preface to the Phenomenology of Spirity that human life - for him, spir-
itual life - rather than opposing itself to death, must come to terms with it, so that, as
he says, "The life of spirit is not the life that shrinks in horror from death and keeps
12 Mosaic 48/3 (September 2015 )
I
itselfuntochedbydevast ion,butraherthelif tha enduresitandmaint sitelf

in t.Spirtwins t ruthonlywheni absolutedisme brmenti fndsitelf"(19).
Itisamteroflokingdeathintheface,ofntrunigawyfromit,ofdweling
itsnegativ y,but his onlyposible f,bythemagicofspirt, hengativegtscon-
vertdintobeing.Themagicofthisdalectialdiscourseonlyrepoducesthedialec-
ticwhic satworkinal cutres.Butcltureandtransmi oni al formsareonly
atemporayforeswaringofdeath.Tis akindofstraegyb whic the uman
specistries ucesfulytoper tuaeitslf,but hisper tuaion sbynomeansthe
aces toim ortaliyas uch,asComteblievd.Suchastraegyisvalidonlyonthe
coletivelve and otfrtheindviual.Foreachofus,death lwaysfinshe bywin-
nigat he nd.
ThisexplainswhyHeidgercould efin theauthenticbeing-toward-eath s
"fredomtoward eath"(Being245).Fort makeonself re fordeathimplesfre-
ingdeathofal thestra gemsbywhic the umanbeingatempts odmesticae,
cirumvent,and eutralize tinorde tole itrule ndiv edoverone'sownexistenc.
Itis n uchanexistenc underthe oriznofdeath,sub peci mortis,tha isrevaled
theabsolutemagnitudeofdeathofwhic Heglhad presntimentwhen caled
it he"absolutemaster."
NOTES
1/ Verse 514: "Technè d'anankès asthenestera macro."

2/ See Sarosh F. Dastur's "Le corps livré aux vautours" ("The Body Thrown to the Vultures").
3/ Freud himself coined the expression Trauerarbeit ("work of mourning"), which is constantly used today.
But mourning is less a "work," something to be done, than a sufferance which one has to go through,
according to the original meaning of the German word Arbeit , which is "toil" or "labour."
4/ My translation.
WORKS CITED
Dastur, Sarosh F. "Le corps livré aux vautours. Les rites funéraires dans le zoroastrisme." La mort et Vi
mortalité: Encyclopédie des savoirs et des croyances. Ed. F. Lenoir and Jean Philippe de Tonnac. Par
Bayard, 2004. 357-68. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993. Print.
The Epic of Gilgamesh. Trans. N.K. Sandars. London: Penguin, 1960. Print.
Epicurus. "Letter to Menoeceus." Letters, Principal Doctrines, and Vatican Say

Greer. New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1964. Print.
Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Har
Françoise Dastur 1 3
Print.
Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977. Print.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. Dieu , la mort, le temps. Paris: Poche, 1993. Print.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. J. Wild, J. Eddie, and J. O'Neill.
Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988. Print.
Sophocles. Antigone. Trans. Reginald Gibbons and Charles Segal. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Print.
FRANÇOISE DASTUR is Professor Emeritus at the University of Nice Sophia- Antipolis and is
affiliated with the Husserl Archives in Paris. She has written on and taught such subjects as phe-
nomenology, German philosophy, philosophy of language, poetics, and Daseinanalysis.

Mourning Dastur

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Mourning as the Origin of Humanity

Author(s): FRANÇOISE DASTUR

fundamental mode of being human.

Mosaic 48/3 0027-1 276-07/00 1 0 1 4$02.00©Mosaic

inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, declares that, in opposition to Promethean

the radical lacuna of temporality in which it consists without "sublating" it in "sur-

itselfuntochedbydevast ion,butraherthelif tha enduresitandmaint sitelf

1/ Verse 514: "Technè d'anankès asthenestera macro."

Epicurus. "Letter to Menoeceus." Letters, Principal Doctrines, and Vatican Say

Lévinas, Emmanuel. Dieu , la mort, le temps. Paris: Poche, 1993. Print.

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