To Die a Living Death: Phantasms of Burial and Cremation in Derrida’s Final Seminar

Michael Naas

doi:10.3390/soc2040317

Abstract

In the Third Session of his seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 2, Jacques Derrida turns from a close reading of Heidegger’s 1929–1930 seminar on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe—the two books at the center of the seminar—to the question of what it means for a large and growing number of people in the Western world to have to decide, in a seemingly sovereign fashion, about how their bodies are to be treated after their deaths, that is, whether they are to be buried or cremated. This question marks a rather surprising turn to the present—even the autobiographical—in the seminar. This essay follows Derrida’s treatment of the question in the rest of the seminar. It considers, first, what Derrida calls the phantasms attendant upon all speculations regarding this supposedly binary alternative between inhumation and creation and then what this alternative might tell us about Greco-European modernity and certain modern conceptions of the subject and the subject’s putative autonomy and sovereignty over its life, its body, and its remains.

Highlights

The second year of The Beast and the Sovereign seminar is full of surprises and unexpected turns, beginning with the number and choice of texts to be studied, just two works in this second year rather than the many of the previous year, Heidegger’s seminar of 1929–1930, a seminar Derrida had already treated in some detail elsewhere, and Robinson Crusoe, an eighteenth century English novel that one is more apt to read in a US high school than in an advanced philosophy seminar at the École des Societies 2012, 2
To the question “What is modernity?” Derrida hazards the answer: “It was the opening of the alternative and the choice left by the state, in European and Greco-Abrahamic cultures, between cremation and inhumation” (BSII 179/255)
I’ll let you dream of a death that would no longer leave us in the hands of these itinerant sects of cremators or inhumers, and would definitively put out of a job these arrogant sects that pass for the religions to which they appeal for their authority, or the secularizing laity to which they lay claim... (BSII 233/326)

Summary

Introduction

The second year of The Beast and the Sovereign seminar is full of surprises and unexpected turns, beginning with the number and choice of texts to be studied, just two works in this second year rather than the many of the previous year, Heidegger’s seminar of 1929–1930, a seminar Derrida had already treated in some detail elsewhere, and Robinson Crusoe, an eighteenth century English novel that one is more apt to read in a US high school than in an advanced philosophy seminar at the École des Societies 2012, 2. Crusoe’s speculations regarding death but about our own, a turn to the present or to the personal that is surely not unprecedented in Derrida but that emerges in a rather unanticipated way This theme, as we will see, will come to haunt the rest of the seminar, as Derrida at the end of the session and in just about every session thereafter asks and sometimes considers at some length the question of what it means for a large and growing number of people in the Western or developed world to be given the choice, to be allowed or made to choose, to have to decide, between two ways of having their corpses disposed of: burial or cremation. Crusoe’s and I assume it was not really Heidegger’s, though it had certainly become an alternative for many in 2003 and it is an alternative for even more of us today

The Choice of the Other

The Choice of Modernity

The Phantasm of Choice

The Choice between Burial and Cremation

Conclusions