The Dead and Dying Body from Hume to Now

Abstract

Let me acknowledge right from the start that my chapter title does—as some of you no doubt fear—suggest megalomaniac pretensions; let me also acknowledge that I do understand that historians are wise to stick to their lasts and leave the really big picture—the sort of grand pronouncements about death or the dead body that I seem to promise—to others. These are the domain of philosophers, or writers, or artists who have been occupied with the subject since the very beginning. What had occupied Socrates, and Aristotle, and Epicurus, and Seneca now occupies, although in a different register, Heidegger, Agamben, Foucault, and Derrida. I will not take up the challenge that Derrida offers to the greatest of the historians of death—Philippe Ariès: that he (Ariès) assumes that we understand what death is or what it is to be dead is and that only through this philosophical naiveté is he able to produce his narrative. I cannot pretend to be more sophisticated than Ariès in this regard.