Broken Prams
Death is the scariest thing you could dream about. For other people, it’s falling or being chased. But I hate dreaming about death. And I’ve dreamed of the worst kind - children dying, in the most violent ways. They get run over by trains or cars. I never see blood or their bodies properly. But there was one time when I saw a broken pram getting picked up from the side of the road and you could tell it was run over. It was goddamn awful.
Every beginning knows its own end. According to Sigmund Freud, without death, there wouldn’t be growth; the same growth principle which allows the organism to break out of the constancy principle must eventually resolve its ontological contradiction and die.
With that sentiment in mind, this essay will be discuss about death and what it means, inversely, for life. Discussions on death have taken place in a lot of quarters; while this essay will approach it through mainly a psychoanalytic lens, it will also borrow voices from philosophy and religion to add a more nuanced perspective.
Firstly, death is tied into long-held views about our mortality, impermanence and transitional status as human beings on earth. Whatever views we have on the after-life, it’s clear in our modern day, secular society such views do not hold traction for a lot of people.
Schopenhauer provides a modern perspective on death, through his transcendental metaphysical theory called, ‘will-and-representation’. Arthur Schopenhauer argued that everything in the world could be divided into subjects and objects, but that they were byproducts of an anonymous force called the ‘will’. This creates an active/passive binary, where ‘representations’ are byproducts of a ‘will’ which drives us as subjects; we feel this in our passions, desires and emotions.
As a result of will, we desire and suffer when our will is frustrated. Schopenhauer compared human beings to blind mole rats, digging underground without vision or directionality. This pointless suffering can drive us to despair, disappoint our expectations and leave our desires unfulfilled.
Schopenhauer argues instead we should accept the dissatisfaction of our will; instead of the temperamental and fickle nature of our will, we should accept pain as a constant and practise life through non-attachment. Only through aesthetic experience, in arts or music, could we temporarily transcend our direct experience of space and time towards a more perfect, timeless universe.
Schopenhauer must be understood for our next theoretical steps. To really understand Nietzsche’s work, he must be read in conversation with Schopenhauer. Friedrich Nietzsche followed Schopenhauer in his early 20s but then quickly abandoned him - he cried when he learned he had been living his youth like he was already old.
Nietzsche disagreed with Schopenhauer. He thought he was too pessimistic and neglected questions about power and self-transcendence. For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer was another example of a philosophical ascetic: self-denying the potential for human beings to live self-generative and flourishing lives through the will-to-power. According to Nietzsche then, our understanding of death shouldn’t be understood as just as certainty - this was true, as ‘God is dead’. But Nietzsche understood that it was a greater fault to live our lives as if we were already dead and deny our living potential; instead, we should embrace our heroic drives and attain the Superman status which exceeds previous horizons of outstanding achievement. Thus, through the transvaluation of all values, we can create new values.
The discussion between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche reveals several things about death. Firstly, we should be concerned about what it means for our phenomenological existence and selfhood; it can be self-defining and constructive of wider life missions. Furthermore, it could be understood as a self-transformative process, where the self achieves spiritual enlightenment (for Schopenhauer) or self-transcendence into Superman (for Nietzsche).
So far, the subject/object binary and notions of the self have been taken for granted.
Lacanian psychoanalysis can help to deconstruct these notions. Jean-Jacques Lacan introduced ‘mirror theory’ as a type of mimicry; Lacan argues that the self is introduced to the child during the ‘mirror stage’ between the age of six to 18 months, as an image or signifier which stabilises their notion of personal identity. The self therefore cannot be understood in isolation, but as a construct which must be stabilised within a wider language context of signified chains of meaning.
Julia Kristeva was interested in stages of child development prior to the mirror stage. Kristeva introduced the notion of the ‘semiotic’, of meaning as continuous, undemarcated and fluid - similar to the fluidity of a child being in the mother’s womb.
Both provide contrasting perspectives on death. Lacan argues that death should be accepted and internalised as the No-Thing; later on, Lacan replaced the ‘No-Thing’ with petit objet a (or the ‘object of desire’) and argued that jouissance helps us to overcome transitional, changing desires with permanent drive towards jouissance. For Lacan, drive is the horizon which already anticipates its death but envelops everything into a single plane.
Kristeva however suggests that death is one of many meaning-making exercises. We should be more interested in how the Other is constructed in opposition to the Self. The Self already recognises its death because it sees it in the Other and rejects the Other for that reason; the Abject Other suggests a fear of death is needed to stabilise a symbolic hierarchy of meaning. We could escape this instead by inverting, destabilising and playing with the meanings of things like death which would otherwise indicate notions of permanence and prescribe strict, disciplined action.
Lee Edelman helps us to understand how death can be queered. Death is an affront to heteronormative society, which builds a teleological narrative of families and future generations, who inherit what has been accumulated and preserved for the future. Edelman criticises the heteronormative assumptions of this narrative, which depend on the bio-power, reproductive force of straight, monogamous couples to perpetuate their lifestyles, at the exclusion and Otherising of alternative queer relationships.
Queer experience and identity can be constructed on alternative readings of death. Instead of death fitting into a linear timeline of marriage and having children, queerness means to explore alternative metonymies which can frame our identity: our creative pursuits can be our most powerful voices, but to also fundamentally retain our critical engagement skills to critique a heteronormative society which systematically excludes or assimilates us. Like Adonis, we are born through cycles of life and death and know no generation to inherit our legacy onto; our stories are tragic and beautiful.
But we could find an alternative understanding of death without pandering to pessimism. An an analogy in psychoanalysis on death runs like this: death is the bones which frames the flesh it upholds; without the hardness of death, our lives are supple, docile and lack self-definition.
Ernest Becker discusses this in his thoughts on heroism, as response to (and denial of) death. Becker argues for the need for genuine heroism where the individual is led, through self-acceptance and non-attachment, to accepting the reality of death but feeling inspired by the awe and opportunity of living even temporarily in the wide expanse of the universe and the mystery of the cosmos. We are not driven by the conformity of cultural heroism or the excess of personal heroism, but simultaneously humbled and driven to make the most of our time here.
Thus, this essay has touched on multiple perspectives on death. We could understand it as an elaboration of contradictions in our phenomenological experience; as a semiotic interplay between semantic systems of meaning; contrast desires and drives which arise from death; which lead ultimately to maturity, spiritual enlightenment and acceptance which opens our abilities to self-flourish and be responsible towards others.
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I’ve had moments when I’ve been too scared to say anything or do anything.
I just feel so self-conscious, like my face is burning and my palms creasing with sweat.
I feel like I’m always being judged and I’m scared I won’t be good enough. It’s moments like that when I don’t want to do anything at all; I just want to feel invisible and hide. Maybe it’s because it feels like I’ve already died inside. Everything now is just the excess you want to scrap off your plate and pretend you never asked for. Actually, I didn’t ask for any of this.
I want to escape from all my responsibilities.
