BEING TOWARD DEATH (THAT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED)

Abstract

The article addresses the Heideggerian notion of being-towards-death and the specific role anxiety plays in Dasein’s transformation from inauthenticity to authenticity vis-à-vis Lacan’s conception of anxiety. Heidegger’s presentation of everyday Dasein’s attitude towards death is mainly focused on Dasein’s inauthentic denial of its possibility of dying, and the tranquility it takes in Das Man’s idle talk which shifts the attention from one’s own possibility of death to the death of the other. Heidegger locates a shift in Dasein’s attitude toward death when Dasein is struck by anxiety which facilitates Dasein’s shift from inauthenticity to authenticity. Yet Heidegger’s account of anxiety raises a lot of difficulties. Is everyday Dasein truly exposed to the radical circumstances which Heidegger outlines in the context of death-anxiety, such as the discovery of one’s own existential singularity in the case of the impossibility of sacrifice? What are the conditions under which such anxiety takes place? In this article I propose a further development of the relation between Dasein and death, based on the psychoanalytic theory of Freud and Lacan. Following Lacan, I argue that death-anxiety could be understood with respect to a prior loss, the loss of the subject or its own signifying disappearance, and hence being-towards-death is first and foremost a relation to the subject’s own division, to what “has already taken place” so to speak, rather than to what is “not yet.” Hence I argue that a subjective relation to death is a relation to one’s lack of being (manque-à-être) rather than to what is yet to come. The article proposes the following claims: (1) being-towards-death is a relation to what has already happened, rather than to a future event; (2) anxiety in the face of death assumes a “familiarity” with a moment of prior loss, which the subject interprets as death, i.e., a signifying disappearance; (3) “what happened” is not an event in the empirical sense, but a void or a lack constitutive of being.