Existential Significance Research Articles

The existential significance of social support: patients’ experiences after MI

This article presents findings from a study focusing on how myocardial infarction (MI) patients undergoing rehabilitation in an outpatient clinic view the role of family relationships in their daily lives. With a relational, person-oriented perspective on patients’ suffering and coping, the aim is to explore the existential significance of social support. The project design is qualitative, inspired by Ricoeur's reflective phenomenological approach, involving a naïve reading, a structural analysis, and a critical interpretation. The study shows that the patients try to keep their worries to themselves and they avoid talking to their close family about everyday existential life phenomena such as anxiety, loneliness and the balance between security and insecurity. Achieving harmony after MI involves a balance between feeling safe and insecure in order to satisfy the needs of their close family. This places the cardiac nurse as a catalyst for existential communication between the patient and the close family.

Reflections on Public Health : principles for a person-centred promotion of mental and physical health

Recent public health data, especially those generated in countries in dramatic societal transition and collected in the WHO European “Health for all” database, show clearly that physical and mental health are indivisibly linked and exist in continuous interaction. The parallelism of societal stress and figures of premature mortality show that individual health is interrelated to public health. Therefore, health promotion has to address healthcare at both the individual as well as at the aggregate level. Public health development over years and clarified by health surveys in especially eastern European countries in dramatic societal transition and the collected research evidence on the psychosocial determinants of health presented by the World Health Organisation have identified the determinants of health as including a sense of existential cohesion, social connectedness and significance, self governance and the absence of helplessness, as well as individual dignity and integrity. In order to promote culturally and individually these determinants of health, a person-centred approach is demanded, both on an individual level as well as aggregated on a societal level with a focus on at-risk populations. Concrete strategies have to be developed in order to address these identified health determinants differently in different stressful and potentially pathogenic individual or societal environments. Even at-risk populations have to be supported differently, e.g. immigrants, elderly, males in one type of society, females in another, adolescents, mentally vulnerable or unemployed persons. Thus, a person-centred way of salutogenic and health promoting action is of incontrovertible significance. A person-centred and societally-engaged psychiatry has here an important role to play – as a pool of expertise and a knowledge base for impact awareness and consequence analysis provided to and needed by political and other decision makers in a society. A person-centred individual psychiatry and an aggregated societal and community focused mental health approach to health promotion appears here to be a human right.

‘Public Reason’, Judicial Deference and the Right to Freedom of Religion and Belief under the Human Rights Act 1998

Human rights claims are often motivated by weighty considerations. But few motivating factors are arguably as powerful as those which typically underpin claims involving the right to freedom of religion and belief under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). In such cases litigants often consider that they have a sacred duty to act (or refrain from acting) in a particular way, believing that failure to do so may displease a supreme being or even lead to dire consequences in an afterlife, perhaps for all eternity. To date the courts have acknowledged, in express terms, the unparalleled and existential significance of particular manifestations of religious belief to believers themselves. British judges have made a number of statements in which they have accepted the centrality of faith in the lives of those bringing such claims before them, recognising that in view of religion's association with the transcendental, the divine and the eternal, it is the most important thing for many people.

Monstrous faces and a world transformed: Merleau-Ponty, Dolezal, and the enactive approach on vision without inversion of the retinal image

The world perceived by a person undergoing vision without inversion of the retinal image has traditionally been described as inverted. Drawing on the philosophical work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the empirical research of Hubert Dolezal, I argue that this description is more reflective of a representationist conception of vision than of actual visual experience. The world initially perceived in vision without inversion of the retinal image is better described as lacking in lived significance rather than inverted; vision without inversion of the retinal image affects the very content of the perceived world, including, importantly, its expressions and conducts, and not merely the orientation of this content. Moreover, I argue that the enactive approach, rather than a representationist approach, is best able to account for the perception of the world, after prolonged vision without inversion of the retinal image, as both normal and upright, yet still different from the world seen previously. Finally, in their attention to the perception of other people’s facial expressions, I argue that Merleau-Ponty and Dolezal draw out the existential significance of the enactive approach. In encountering another person, the most pressing task is generally not to observe this person’s features but, instead, to engage with this person’s expressions.

Powers of War: Fighting, Knowledge, and Critique1

This paper approaches the ontology of war by asking why, despite its constitutive function for politics and society, has war never been made the object of an academic discipline? Through an analysis of the relationship between war and knowledge about war, we argue that the ontology of war is such that it disrupts foundational claims of the kind necessary for conventional forms of academic disciplinarity. At the center of the ontology of war is fighting, an idea we recover from Clausewitz. A moment of radical contingency, fighting both compromises knowledge about war and forces the unmaking and remaking of social and political orders. These generative powers of war operate through the production of systems of knowledge and their institutionalization in the academy, the state and wider society. Although of existential significance for political authority, these knowledges are vulnerable to the very contingency of war that produces them. This complex of relations between war, knowledge, and power we term War/Truth. As such, an analytical framework adequate to war requires a reflexive relation to truth claims. We clear the ground for such a “critical war studies.”

Heterolocal Identities? Counter‐Urbanisation, Second Homes, and Rural Consumption in the Era of Mobilities

ABSTRACTThis paper forms part of a critical engagement with the aspects of the core population geography concept of ‘counterurbanisation’. It argues that contextualising counterurbanisation within the ‘era of mobilities’ has profound consequences for the concept. After introducing the era of mobilities and its implications for social science, migration's central and multiple places within this discourse are outlined. The paper then examines one set of ideas, ‘dynamic heterolocalism’, that facilitates the understanding of the existential significance today of the circulatory expressions of migration. Returning to counterurbanisation, the paper draws into its orbit the consumers of rural second homes, understanding of which has also increasingly adopted a quasi‐heterolocal tone. An inclusive model of what is then recast terminologically as ‘counter‐urbanisation’ posits it as an extremely heterodox concept, potentially embracing not only second‐home owners but also diverse other consumers of rural space or rural sojourners. The paper concludes by reiterating the sustained centrality of ‘rurality’ to counterurbanisation, second‐home consumption, and other expressions of identity within the era of mobilities. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Appropriation of the Hegemonic Bookcase as a Cultural Rite of Passage and Right of Admission into the Israeli Poetry Club

This essay discusses the poetical works of three Israeli women writers: Rebecca Rass, Ronit Yochel Hittin and Michal Govrin. All three master the "Father Language" and patriarchal cultural assets, thus defying hegemonic traditional assumptions about women and writing as defined by modern Hebrew literature's founding fathers. In the spirit of Patricia Yaeger's description of the "emancipatory strategies" used by women writers for whom language is a source of power and pleasure, and inspired by Alicia Ostriker's characterization of women poets as "the thieves of language" engaging in "revisionist mythmaking," this discussion will demonstrate Rass's, Yochel Hittin's and Govrin's skilful use of language and intertextuality. Rebecca Rass recasts the rebirth myth that shapes T.S. Eliot's Wasteland and repositions it in the local Land of Flowering Bones , charging the ancient myth with present-day Israeli overtones. Eliot's wanderings across the territories of language inspire Michal Govrin in her Chronicle of Exegesis of the heavy Jewish bookcase. Likewise, Ronit Yochel Hittin sets the ancient myth of the Phoenix rising from its ashes in the context of Jewish history, thus sharpening its existential significance.

No Man’s Land: a Variation on Harold Pinter’s Theme of “Menace”

Though being one of the representative works in the second phase of Pinter’s writing in the 1970s, No Man's Land is more an extension of than a departure from his early comedies of menace. To a certain degree, the central motif of the play is still a variation on the theme of territory fight explored in such plays as The Caretaker. What makes his play unique is that the major conflict is no longer a fight for the “room in the sense of existential significance, but for a much more private “territory” of the innermost soul embodied by the past and memory.

The Inherent Limitations on Human Freedom

The Inherent Limitations on Human Freedom James M. Jacobs (bio) That the essence of human nature is to be free is a common theme of many otherwise disparate philosophical traditions. From Augustine to Sartre, the fact of human freedom has been the point of departure for the consideration of humanity’s essence. If philosophers are correct about the centrality of freedom, then every action humans undertake ought to be characterized by freedom in some way. This fact is made intelligible in light of the Thomistic doctrine, agere sequitur esse, or action follows from being.1 Indeed, St. Thomas argues that the very purpose of a substance’s existence is the characteristic operations by which it manifests its actuality. As he puts it, “All things created would seem, in a way, to be purposeless, if they lacked an operation proper to them; since the purpose of everything is its operation. For the less perfect is always for the sake of the more perfect: and consequently as the matter is for the sake of the form, so the form which is the first act is for the sake of its operation, which is the second act; and thus operation is the end of the creature.”2 If this is true, then it follows that the very existence of freedom in human nature is justified by the performance of free acts, since the substantial act of existence is necessarily fulfilled only [End Page 107] in the second act, the characteristic operations or activities that substance undertakes. In this article, therefore, I analyze the manifestation of human freedom in terms of the various activities proper to humans. This enables us to better grasp the existential significance of human freedom, for it is in these activities that freedom is fully realized. I base my analysis on the thought of Aquinas; moreover, I use many neo-Thomistic philosophers who have reflected critically on the idea of freedom in response to the Kantian notion of autonomy that has led modernity to define freedom in a radically different (and ultimately nihilistic) way. A true notion of freedom must recognize limits imposed by nature that are not acknowledged by the idea of autonomy. In the fundamental, natural act of existing, human are essentially free; however, it is the “second acts,” the characteristic operations, that bring this freedom to perfection. These operations fall into three main categories: man thinks, man does, and man makes.3 That is, man acts to know the world, he acts to fulfill desires, and he acts to impose perfection on objects for use and enjoyment. These acts, though, aim to achieve different kinds of objects: knowledge aims at the true, doing pursues the good, and making aspires to beauty. If man is free, freedom must be evident in each of these characteristic activities. Yet given that the nature and object of these activities differ, the way in which freedom is manifested must differ accordingly. That is, since the object of thought is truth, we must be able to exercise freedom in such a way that it does not obstruct the pursuit of truth; since the object of doing is the good that we desire, we must exercise that freedom so as to not obscure what is truly good; and since the goal of making is to produce things of beauty, we must not believe that our freedom entails the ability to define beauty itself. In other words, because humans act to attain some transcendental property, the nature of that property conditions the way in which human freedom is exercised. But is this a coherent picture where freedom is simultaneously constricted? Is not the essence of freedom the lack of natural constraints? [End Page 108] On the contrary, the inherent limitations of freedom are not only not contradictory, but are necessary for freedom to achieve its goal. Since action follows from being, the act itself must manifest freedom in order to fulfill the potential of our nature. However, if the operations are to achieve the true, the good, or the beautiful, then there are limits to what the human agent can do in order to be considered free. Moreover, these constrictions on freedom will vary according...

Philosophie des gartens. Zu Immanuel Kant kritik der urteilskraft

This essay will show, how the garden belonging to the house can be, at least since Plato's Phaidros especially reliant on the philosophical landscape-reflections of the 18th Century: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Friedrich Schiller and Immanuel Kant, then Ludwig Tieck and Jean Paul, and under the title of natural beauty (Lustgartnerei, Kant), the place of the reconciliation of man and nature, the place of retreat from the alienated world (Rousseau), the place of satisfaction with one's own existence (Kant), the self-presence of the human spirit (Voltaire). In addition, the garden is, particularly in the style of the English landscape-garden, contrary to the French garden a la Versailles, the expression of freedom opposed to the Political Absolutism; so far, he has political significance. Next, the garden presupposes a stable legal and political order of peace, without which he cannot be, because he is considered to be permanent. The garden is a place of justice. In analogy with language, Kant brings to the concept the deep existential significance of the garden: The garden is a symbol of the idea of beauty, of justice, of peace, of freedom becoming sensual, of the reconciliation of art, man and nature.

Making New Meanings of Being in the World After Treatment for Oral Cancer

When the mouth is affected by cancer, difficulties in satisfying basic human needs such as eating, tasting, swallowing, and speaking might arise, and the existential significance of the mouth might become obvious. How does it feel to live with these difficulties? What does it mean to be a human being living with the consequences of oral cancer? Five patients with oral cancer were interviewed a median time of 4 years after the beginning of treatment. A hermeneutic research approach was used to understand, explain, and interpret the transcribed interviews and showed how the consequences of oral cancer affected the being-in-the-world of the participants in three ways: existing as oneself, existing in the eyes of others, and existing with others. Against the background of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, these findings illuminate how essential the mouth is to a human being's identity and existence.

Introduction: Shakespeare and the Meaning of Life

The insinuation by the phrase “the meaning of life” of a transcendental human identity and purpose seems only to leave itself vulnerable, in an era of incredulity towards transcendental signifieds, to the derisory, deflationary treatment of comedy (Monty Python's The Meaning of Life and Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy being two conspicuous examples). Questions to do with the nature, meaning and purpose of human life nevertheless persist in popular culture, if not in academia, where explicit reference to such essentialist and large-scale concepts as “the human” and “the human condition” tend to be viewed with suspicion. There are signs, however, of a return to the human subject, not only in literary studies, but across a range of disciplines concerned with the possibility of a re-animated humanism. The pertinent question is, then, what version of “the human” literary studies in particular might return to. The introduction to this special issue will argue for a “soft essentialism” that is not a rigid blueprint but nevertheless affirms that human life unfolds within a definable number of possibilities. What we call “literature”, as conventionally epitomized by Shakespeare, may be seen as the complex elaboration of these possibilities in such as a way as to provoke, but not to answer, questions about the meaning of life. Thus defined, the “new humanism” within literary studies is a dialectical corrective to a hard-line disenchanted scepticism which converts areas of potentially significant human activity, such as literature itself, into “alienated objects” voided of existential significance.

Necessary and impossible: on spiritual questions in relation to early induced abortion

No matter how technically developed and medically sophisticated our society becomes, in the end we are all going to die. In other words, as human beings we are, from time to time, forced to deal with situations of existential significance. Existential and spiritual questions remain relevant—even in a country where most people­ have abandoned institutional forms of religion. But how do people­ deal with these questions? Sweden continues to uphold an extreme position, from a global perspective, when it comes to religiosity and traditional values. No other country in the world has, to such a great extent, left traditional and survival values on the behalf of those based on rationality and self expression. Religious and ethnic minorities have brought new forms of piety to the Swedish scene, but secularization and religious privatization dominate. In this situation, it is important to study people’s ways of dealing with existential life situations. What do people think, feel, believe and do in the presence of the ultimate questions—when there exists no common ground for meaning-making? This article begins with an outline of the state of religion in Sweden, against the backdrop of the contemporary climate in Western culture. This is followed by an introduction to abortion in Sweden, and to abortion research of interest for this paper. Ritual participation is the next topic, leading to concepts of importance for the pilot study: existential homelessness and individualized rituals. In the rest of the article the focus is on the pilot study and a discussion of its results in relation to the existential situation in Sweden at large.

Structuring German postwar ideologies: review of A. Dirk Moses, German intellectuals and the Nazi past

It is not only because much of the ideological landscape of postwar West Germany remains to borrow one historian's metaphor uncharted intellectual territory that German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past comes as such a key contribution to the historiography of twentieth-century thought. To be sure, while certain canonized figures, such as Jurgen Habermas, Gunter Grass, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Jaspers, and even the psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich have received adequate attention in Anglophone scholarship, we have precious few studies in English on many of the thinkers examined here by Moses. These are the lesser-known postwar historians, philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, and educationalists (p. 10) who served on government advisory committees, became ministers of culture and education, or in other ways decisively shaped the political discourse of the Federal Republic. For that reason alone Moses was guaranteed to cover new ground. But it is ultimately the innovative way in which he has mapped his subject matter that makes this work stand out, not only as an indispensable guide to early debates about Nazism and West German democracy, but more generally as a distinctively original model for writing about intellectuals and their ideas. This book is not a conventional intellectual history, we are told in the introduction (p. 10). Part of what makes that statement true is the attention Moses pays to fields that is all too often terra incognita for intellectual historians namely, structural anthropology and the voluminous but neglected literature on German social psychology. His case for integrating research on family life, transgenerational transmission, and the like into a history of intellectuals rests on the deceptively profound insight that political ideas and ideologies, arguably nowhere more so than in postwar Germany, often possess existential significance for their articulators. Drawing on Erving Goffman's theories of social drama, Moses presents the political

‘How far down can you go? Can you get reincarnated as a floorboard?’ Religious education pedagogy, pupil motivation and teacher intelligence

A doctoral study is reported, of action research on the motivation of 12–14‐year‐old religious education pupils in England. An earlier master's dissertation gives the basis and cues a developed conceptual framework including adolescence, creativity, ethnography, pedagogy and iterativity. Four cycles of praxis are traced. The emergent factors in pupil motivation are dialogue with difference, existential and ethical interest and personal significance. Recommendations for religious education pedagogy are advanced but their epistemological status as possibilities for change, subject to assessment and refinement in successive contexts, is kept in view. A critical discussion integrates the recommendations with elements of current religious education debate and then reviews the study's methodology in the light of current discussions of the nature of action research. The article concludes with remarks on the power of action research as a teacher development tool.

Criticism at the Crossroads

Page 14 American Book Review Grotz continued from previous page This is only problematic because Edwards, with her recurring epigraphs from Clare, invites the reader to look for such a connection. Indeed, several of these poems would resonate more fully if the shadow of Clare were removed. Further, by braiding all of these series of poems together instead of separating them into individual sections, Edwards likewise inherently suggests a connection or coherence to the book overall that the reader is hard-pressed to find. None of these poems or series, however, have much to do with the sequence of highwayman sonnets , the heart of the Edwards’s book and the poems, along with the final section, that deserve the most attention. Comprised of twelve sonnets, including a prelude “Sonnet for the Highwayman” that opens the collection, the sequence explores the interior life of highwaymen and those around them and achieves a coherence and complexity that is missing elsewhere in the book. The most successful of these capitalize on the sonnet form and make the perspective of the highwayman and his vocation take on existential significance: [H]e hears the rafters and the hinges hissing go No road is calling, no lover taunting, no unmade fortune pulls him from his house to abandon favorite chair, faithful hound, just the shutters and the windows mouthing go And yet with all of the attention Edwards gives to this sequence and the other series in the book, by far the most resonant and successful poems are the ones that exist singly and seem to come directly from Edwards’s warm and imaginative observations of contemporary life. The first section of “Alabama Interlude,” for example, describes how a crawling baby interrupts a game of Monopoly, letting the reader momentarily see the baby in the delightful paradox of being huge and destructive: [T]he baby now sits flailing at the center of the game, insisting in its right to be the baby, the owner of all properties, the arbiter of wealth, the last great family tycoon making all the rules, chewing up the fragile sibling contracts in its toothless baby mouth, compounding all the debt in its ferocious baby fists. If many of the mythical female persona poems early in the collection fail to convince the reader, Edwards shows her strength in inhabiting the male persona in “Bargain, Spent,” a poem that follows a retired man shopping for the best buys in the supermarket. An epigraph from Randall Jarrell’s “Next Day,” one of many Jarrell poems that speak through a female persona, alerts the reader to Edwards’s play with persona and gender, and like Jarrell’s, Edwards’s poem is a lovely instance of human empathy and universal expression. While being somewhat obscured by the variety of projects and sheer quantity of poems in the book, there are nevertheless some real keepers in The Highwayman’s Wife. Jennifer Grotz is the author of Cusp (2003) and teaches at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Detail from cover Criticism at the Crossroads Chad Parmenter With Parnassus: Poetry in Review folding up shop, poetry criticism faces a possible vacuum. Contemporary journals of criticism can be depended on for new readings of older and classic poets. Web venues like choriamb, the page.name, and the everthriving blogosphere, offer space for commentary on emerging work. For discussion tying the older and the emerging together, which is essential for either to really show its importance, a reader can visit sites like Boston Comment, look through book reviews in journals like Pleiades or American Book Review, or parse the critical discussions in collections of essays like Radiant Lyre (2007). While all of the above contribute wonderfully to our understanding of contemporary poetry, they offer material that’s widely dispersed across the postmodern media, and it’s up to the reader to tie it all together. That job is taken on by Jerry Harp and Jan Weissmiller, making their A Poetry Criticism Reader a vital contribution to current poetry criticism. The first of what will hopefully be many volumes, it brings together some key explications, reviews, and articulations of poetics from the 1990s to offer any reader a grasp on...

Spænding, samspil og frisættelse: En undersøgelse af forholdet mellem inkarnation og eskatologi i Grundtvigs salme “Midt iblandt os er Guds Rige”

Spænding, samspil ogfrisættelse: En undersøgelse afforholdet mellem inkarnation og eskatologi i Grundtvigs salme “Midt iblandt os er Guds Rige”, 1853 (GSVlIV, 344-345)[Tension, interplay, and release: An analysis of the relation between incarnation and eschatology in Grundtvig 's hymn “Midt iblandt os er Guds Rige” (The Kingdom of God is in our midst)]By Aage SchiølerThe article analyses the hymn’s composition and its vocabulary with special reference to its biblical background and its relation to Christian traditions. Its distinctive character is determined as a suspenseful interplay between a dynamic way of thinking and a meditative mode of expression. In consequence of this interplay, even the hymn’s final statement is marked by openness, not termination.A comparison between the composition of the hymn and the structure of examples from Japanese Haiku-poetry reveals that, although invisible, the Kingdom of God, the hymn’s main topic, is not to be perceived as a mere figment of the brain, the content of which would depend on the reader’s fortuitous ideas or personal preferences. It stands forth as the coordinating fellow player within the total context of the hymn, and as such it is defined as a liberating intervention in human life that opens its basic qualities: faith, hope, and charity, towards the future, as well in communal life as in individual existences. The force and contents of this authentic human existence, as it could be called, are the life and destiny of Jesus from Nazareth. It is seen as carried down through history by means of the preaching of the Gospel, Baptism, and Holy Communion in Christian congregations, exerting influence within communal life, and being accepted by the individual through faith.As the essence of this freedom and openness, The Kingdom of God forms the connexion between incarnation, seen as the crucial, liberating event in history in day-to-day matters in the present time, and eschatology, seen as an incessant, new opening towards the future both in chronological meaning, ‘earthly’, and in existential significance, ‘eternally’.

Feeling is believing, or landscape as a way of being in the world

.This article is work‐in‐progress, an orientation of thought towards possibilities for individual human beings to diminish the distance between outer and inner landscapes imposed by cultural norms and happenstances such as exile. The dominance of visual landscapes and visual perceptions is seen as a pivotal problem, to be solved by the engagement of all the senses in landscape discourse and formation. All the senses are engaged in earliest childhood, as they have been in ‘primitive’ societies. While returning to either a state of childhood or primitivism is an impossible dream, it is possible to edge closer to human nature by engaging and honing all the senses, especially the ‘earth‐bound senses’ of feel, smell and taste. Cultivating those senses and developing discourse about them, and incorporating them into landscape formation and enjoyment, is much more difficult than having a discourse about sight and hearing, for which there is a rich and well‐developed symbolic language and which can be shared through various types of media. The way towards a deeper discourse about the earth‐bound senses, and the way out of the tyranny of the visual, is to be found in stories, as several thinkers suggest.The story told is autobiographical and literary – a mode of geographic writing that I developed in a 2004 book (Bunkše 2004a), in which the complex dilemmas of home and road were explored. This article shows how in the early 1970s I defined the individual's landscape as ‘a unity in one's surroundings perceived through all the senses’, with imagination as the key human faculty. And I tell the story of how through complex circumstances, a visually and emotionally repugnant landscape became emotionally and intellectually attractive, with a scent, not a picture or image causing the initial attraction. The external and internal landscapes are thus unified, resulting in a sense of timelessness and placelessness of deep existential significance for the person.

KARL RAHNER AND THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE QUESTION

The prospect of extra-terrestrial intelligence has become a central topic of scientific investigation and popular speculation. This has generated questions of ethical and theological significance that now receive growing coverage. Throughout his writings, Karl Rahner remained open to the prospect that the process of cosmic evolution had yielded sentient life form in other galaxies. He argued against any theological veto on this notion, while also distinguishing the existential significance of such life forms from that of angels. Furthermore, the possibility of multiple incarnations is raised though not affirmed. With its christological intensity, his theology seems to militate against any repetition of the incarnation. This essay examines some of the arguments for and against the possibility of multiple incarnations, before assessing the current state of the extra-terrestrial intelligence debate. In the light of inconclusive scientific findings, the cautionary position of Rahner is re-affirmed.

Organizing Death: Remembrance and Re-collection

Much writing on death contrasts its existential significance with our strategies of avoidance. These strategies, it is argued, are manifested in the practices and institutions of modern life and have led to the sequestration of death. This is felt to have separated us from something vital, a belief that seems to, implicitly or explicitly, rest upon claims of (lost) authenticity. But this seems a rather cool account that somewhat conveniently disposes of the dreadful effects of death and is at odds with our sense of its lurking inevitability. The tension between death as both sequestered and shattering is therefore the focus of this paper. It recognizes that death is both absent and present and that this condition is inadequately conveyed by its disposal in the modern organizations of sequestration. Rather, it sees death as being temporarily dispersed through a network of different relations. However, this network is unstable; what was (re)collected may be disturbed. Consequently, I show how our engagement with death is affected by this organization; death ‘moves’ us because of movement in this network. Therefore, I have two propositions: (i) that controlling and concealing death involves a process of organization and (ii) that death erupts when this organizing breaks down.