Imagination dead imagine: Diogenes Laertius' work of mourning

Abstract

Mourning: not a crushing oppression, a jamming (which would suppose a ‘refill’), but a painful availability: I am vigilant , expectant, awaiting the onset of a ‘sense of life’. The deaths of Roland Barthes: his deaths, that is, those of his relatives, those deaths that must have inhabited him, situating places and solemn moments, orienting tombs in his inner space (ending – and probably even beginning – with his mother's death). His deaths, those he lived in the plural, those he must have linked together, trying in vain to ‘dialectize’ them before the ‘total’ and ‘undialectical’ death; those deaths that always form in our lives a terrifying and endless series. Diogenes Laertius’ Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers shares something vital with both Roland Barthes’ mourning diary and Jacques Derrida's work of mourning. These texts all dwell on how the singular reaction to and narrative account of a singular death (of mother, friend or philosopher) is inevitably part of a series of deaths (of relatives, friends or philosophers). Furthermore, the challenge for Diogenes, Barthes and Derrida is to explain how death in its singular and plural forms is an intrinsic part of a life and living. Yet what separates Diogenes’ work of mourning from that of Barthes and Derrida is his uncannily deadpan humour when facing the dying philosophers he writes about, specifically employed through the medium of the poetic form of the epigram as epitaph . It is precisely this conception of the work of mourning that I want to explore in my reading of the ill-fated poetic output of Diogenes Laertius, which consists in the selections from his collection (or collections) called Epigrammata or Pammetros (‘Epigrams or In Various Metres’), interspersed throughout his monumental Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers . It has been well-documented that Diogenes’ work emphasizes the deaths, as much as the lives, of Greek philosophers. Central to any discussion of Diogenes and death is the role played by his poetic works scattered throughout his biographical narratives, works which I will dub his biographical death-poems. Since the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, these poems have been generally criticized, either as bad poetry or tasteless or, perhaps worst of all, as a flimsy rationale for the composition of the work as a whole. Nietzsche also called them ‘burial inscriptions’ ( Sepucralinschriften ) and dubbed Diogenes the clumsy night watchman of philosophy.