Death

Every human action is motivated by the fear of death. Not love.

However we theorise about our mortal motivations, it is the fear of death that spurs us to do what we do. Death in its many synonyms found in modernity: loss, departure, end, passing, demise, doom, decease... Whichever word one chooses to use the materiality of the phenomenon that comes to all mortal beings cannot be erased.

We are surrounded by (a condition of) death.

Lacan locates the Real in the realm of death. It is only in death that we experience the Real for in existence we are bound to the Imaginary and the Symbolic. We can never truly mean what we say and say what we mean for language is locked in the space of the symbolic. We create Art in all it's plethora to mimick life but they abound only in the realm of the imaginary. Death is then the Real and the Real is found in Death.

Freud theorises about 'Fort-Da', the Oedipal Complex, repression and guilt - these resultant from loss, from the child's loss of a connection with the mother, of the child's lack of a phallus and a desire for one. From the condition of birth and separation from the womb we are thrown into a condition of loss. Life is an attempt at recovering the impossible loss... And so there is psychosis and neurosis for we have 'died' from birth.

Zizek locates the Thing as the Space in which the Symbolic and the Real is closed - a Zone where Kant's transcendental idealism is effected. The Zone is that which is Death.

Derrida considers mortals as they who can experience death with death unlike animals. Language makes death real to one. The Impossible, the realm where there is no fracture and deconstruction of text, language, meaning, is that state possible only in death. It is the space of aporia.

However we theorise, death is a crossing of a border. Yet is an impossible experience for we cannot live to experience death and when we cease to live we cease to experience. Death, as Derrida notes, can be conceived of as the impossible crossing of a border. We arrive at a border we cannot cross, an aporia, an impossible passage; or rather, the experience of a non-passage, an experience other than that consisting of opposing an other concept. A relation to an non-opposable other, that is, an other that is no longer its other. We are engaged in a certain possibility of the impossible.

The impossible is death and that is certain. It is what defines us as human, as Asimov shows in 'The Bicentennial Man'. We are the specie that can recognise death linguistically yet language falls in the face of death. No word nor expression can describe the experience of death - literal or metaphorical (and for us who have experienced death, literal or figurative, of someone/thing close to us that rings with transcendental truth).

What does it all mean? Death. Life. Death as a permanent sleep, disease. Death as the culminating act of life, as part of life, or transition from this to the next. Yet what is the 'next'? Void, nothingness, heaven, hell, nirvana? How do we begin to describe much less comprehend these 'Spaces'?

To understand life, we need to recognise death. Life and all that is contained within happens but once. What we lose is lost, and will never be.

Die so you might live.

Dying is easy, living is hard.