Nearing Death: Anticipation and Survival in Gorz, Derrida, and Ricœur

Abstract

Nearing Death:Anticipation and Survival in Gorz, Derrida, and Ricœur Enda McCaffrey "La mort est maintenant si effacée de nos mœurs que nous avons peine à l'imaginer et à la comprendre."1 I WANT TO BEGIN THIS ARTICLE by referring to a four-minute clip from Xavier Beauvois's film Des hommes et des dieux.2 The film tells the story of an order of Trappist monks living within a Muslim population in Algeria during the civil war in the 1990s. Relations between the two communities deteriorate as a result of an upsurge in fundamentalist terrorism. The monks have to decide whether they should leave the community whose residents they have nurtured and supported or stay in the knowledge that they will inevitably be killed. In this particular scene (their Last Supper), they toast their decision to stay in Algeria and accept their imminent death. The scene is accompanied by the "Swan Theme" from Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake, the final act of which sees Odette and Siegfried accepting their fate by drowning together rather than face, in Odette's case life forever as a swan (and the ensuing loss of love, freedom, and happiness), and for Siegfried a life consumed by guilt over his unwitting betrayal of Odette. The ballet's final apotheosis has the lovers ascend united and deified into the heavens. In both film and ballet, death is anticipated, accepted, embraced, and overcome. I will return to the significance of this scene later. Drawing on an understanding of thanatology as a practice in writing death and dying,3 I want to explore the reflections on death—or more precisely on nearing death—of three French thinkers who composed their final works on this theme. For André Gorz, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Ricœur, death was an experience that they captured in their last writings: death by suicide for Gorz three years after his love letter to his wife in Lettre à D.: Histoire d'un amour;4 death from pancreatic cancer in the case of Derrida a year after his last publication, Apprendre à vivre enfin;5 and death from old age two months after the publication of Ricœur's unfinished work Vivant jusqu'à la mort, suivi de fragments.6 These texts reveal how each writer 'imagined' (thought, forethought, anticipated) their deaths as memento mori. Central to this practice of reflection is its focus on the anticipation of death and how this anticipation reshapes their respective thinking on life and the desire to survive. I want to show how these memento mori can be thought of as memento vivere. [End Page 26] Theory and context This article first came to life as a keynote address at a conference on the theme of the medical and religious imaginary in French literature.7 At the time the focus of my paper was on anticipatory grief. We usually think of grief as that which follows rather than that which awaits. I wanted to explore this understanding of grief further and demonstrate how in the future temporality that is anticipation there exists a continuous present, ethical and religious, that is an imminence and an immanence. In addition, one of the aims of that paper, to be developed further in this article, is that in defining the axis of the medicoreligious imaginary it was helpful for me to think in terms of texts of reparation and a very specific type of reparation in Lazarean textuality where the dying writer is reborn through language. Nearing death invites these writers to question the role of writing: why write, whom to write for, and where lies the value in the act of writing. I also aim to link the experience of anticipation to immanence. Immanence comes from the Latin immanens meaning to "remain in." It is the quality of being contained within or remaining within the boundaries of a person or the mind. This meaning is common within Christian and monotheist theologies. In his Ethics, Spinoza's immanent God was the creator of the world in the same way that an essence creates its own properties.8 The history of immanence is also linked to Christology, the field within Christian theology that deals with...