The Aesthetic Imperative of Death, pt. 1

Death is a singular event: no one can die my death in my place. As an event that is unrepeatable, essentially unknowable, all that we might say about it is rhetorical or speculative. It is, more than anything, that which is one’s own, about which only the one whose death is in question can speculate. With what certainty can we speak about death? If we consider Heidegger’s conclusion that “Death is the Dasein’s ownmost possibility” (Heidegger 307), the answer is obvious: none. Even the possibility of death, the possibility opened up by death, exceeds potential or imagination. It is a possibility that is non-actual, the “possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all.” (306) Death is possibility set free, approached only by speculative fictions, which by absconding from the reality in which their force is expressed, mirror the very structure of death.

However, the possibility of death is not given. “Being-towards-death,” Heidegger writes, “as anticipation of possibility, is what first makes the possibility possible.” (307) The possibility, it would seem, condenses as we look towards that deathly horizon and wait, and death, then, must be contingent upon that Being that steadily approaches it, the being that, by his forward glance, purports to make it possible. And yet, we must reconcile this element of contingency with the inevitable necessity of death, both the actual death to come and the death that is always-already a part of Being. After all, if the being is oriented towards his own death, if it resides in him like as a trace, his death must precede him, must exist synchronously with Being, waiting until the two converge again. As we advance towards this pre-existing terminus, perhaps we find that it all looks familiar. Perhaps we have been here before. Perhaps this was here from which we departed.

Death is the telos of seduction. With each desire we are seduced by death: its promise, its possibility furnishes the goal of life. As Freud postulates in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, life takes the form of the pursuit of pleasure where pleasure consists in the fulfilling of wishes, the quieting of tension, the end to a mad pursuit. When the frenzied searching stops, energies are emptied out and there is a serene and easeful calm whose character cannot be isolated, neither theoretically nor practically, from that of death. Pleasure, then, is that moment of stillness in which we savor the faint taste of our own death.

Through pleasure, then, we invoke our own death in order to forestall it. We forestall it only so that we may invoke it yet again. Death would annul the possibility of seeking pleasure, foreclosing the return of death’s ghostly presence, its restful nature – it would abolish the tendency that prompts it. The death-drive thereby plays a role left vacant by death: where death destroys, the drive preserves. And yet, what it seeks to preserve is the bare minimum, the ecstasy of near-nothingness, a less-than-being that is, even so, more than nothing. To live a life of pleasure, then, is to postpone death by dying.


Heidegger, M. Being and Time. (Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson) Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962.