Can I Die? Derrida on Heidegger on Death

In this open ing prov o ca tion, Freud and Heidegger make as ser tions which stand, prima fa cie, in ex treme op po si tion to one an other—with Derrida sit u ated, not sur pris ingly, some where in-be tween. But be tween what? What is the philo soph i cal sig nif i cance of the cog ni tive re la tion one stands in with re spect to one’s own death? Be tween (1) Heidegger’s as ser tion that hold ing onto the truth of death re veals the pri mor dial cer tainty of be ing-in-the-world and (2) the uni ver sal, al beit un con scious con vic tion that I will not die which Freud di ag no ses as a com mon fea ture of the hu man psy che, the skep ti cism Derrida’s ques tion ex presses ini tially strikes one as very strange. But is it unheimlich? Is it ca pa ble of driv ing us from our home in the fa mil iar? This re mains to be seen. Can we be cer tain of death? Not of what might hap pen af ter death, but of the brute “fact” [Faktum] that each of us will meet with his or her own death? For Freud, none of us has such cer tainty. We all say “I know I am go ing to die,” but deep down, be hind the one-way mir ror of the un con scious, the ar chi val re pos i tory of the re pressed, none of us be lieves it. (As though “bear ing wit ness” to Freud’s claim, An tony Flew’s A Dic tio nary of Phi los o phy con tains un der the head ing “death” only the fol low ing en try: “See sur vival and im mor tal ity.”) For Heidegger, on the other hand, death is more cer tain—or better, is cer tain in a more “pri mor dial” [ursprüngliche] way—than epistemic cer tainty (know ing that there is a com puter in front of me, or even that, to para phrase Moore, “this is a hand”) or even cog ni tive cer tainty (that, for ex am ple, the sum of the in te rior an gles of a tri an gle equals one hun dred and eighty de grees). Heidegger is no skep tic; for him, “hold ing to the truth of death”—which as we will see means main tain ing our selves in the unconcealedness of the phe nom e non of our own death—re veals a cer tainty which is ab so lutely ba sic to the to tal ity of lived con texts con sti tut ing worldly in tel li gi bil ity. As a be ing-in-the-world, Dasein dies; there is noth ing more cer tain: “More orig i nal than man is the fini tude of the Dasein within him.” If, ac cord ingly, Heidegger and Freud are taken as pro vid ing two ex treme char ac ter iza tions of the cog ni tive re la tion one stands in with re spect to one’s own death, then it be comes eas ier to imag ine why Derrida might ask such a strange—per haps unheimlich—ques tion; for this seems to be an ir rec on cil able op po si tion, an ei ther/or of the type no to ri ously most vul ner a ble to Derrida’s deconstructions. Thus, when Derrida asks, “Is my death pos si ble?” he is not sim ply spec u lat ing as to whether one can be cer tain of death’s ob tain ing; his is a more rad i cal ques tion ing: Can I die? Is it even pos si ble for me to die? Can I meet with death? In what sense can death hap pen to me—can “it” “hap pen” to “me” at all?