1202021, issue 2
Rattled
Samir Gandesha
Dedicated to the memory of Rosemary Bechler
In being seen as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social
combine, death has been nally domesticated: dying merely conrms the
absolute irrelevance of the natural organism in face of the social absolute.
(§ 148)
Fascism, it is said, is a death cult. National Socialism incubated within the habitus of
the thinkers of the so-called Conservative Revolution, in particular,Ernst Jünger, Carl
Schmitt and Martin Heidegger. In each of these writers, one nds an undeniable glo-
rication of death and what Adorno mockingly calls the “soldierly man” (der soldatische
Mensch). For Jünger, death formed the core of the Fronterlebnis or “experience of the
trenches.” For Schmitt, the essence of politics, “the political,” is disclosed the moment
the enemy––the one who threatens “our” very existence––comes into view as such.
And, nally,in Heidegger’s Being and Time, the “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit) of the situ-
ated human being (Dasein) is dened explicitly as being-towards-death (Sein-sum-Tode).
In the awareness of this––its “ownmost possibility”––Dasein experiences an “ecstatic”
standing-out from a leveling, abstract everydayness. In response to a young female
student rather besotted with Heidegger who, as Adorno wryly notes in his Jargon of
Authenticity, remarked that “Heidegger had nally, at least, once again placed men before
death, Horkheimer replied that Ludendor had taken care of that much better.”
Against the fascist cult of death is counterposed the fetishization of human life
in liberalism. This means that life, dened and understood abstractly as mere duration, is
to be valued above everything else. Liberalism’s motto is simply: The more the better.
Yet, paradoxically, it fervently hides the aged, the inrm, the dying and the dead ever
further from the gaze of the living, as in Beckett’s Endgame, in which Hamm’s parents
are conned to trash cans, and therefore anticipate the fate of contemporary nursing
homes which became like morgues during the early stages of the unfolding Corona-
virus pandemic.
The drive for a mythic “fountain ofyouth,”as hinted at, for example, by
Herodotus in Book III: 23 of his Histories, is pursued with unparalleled zeal by liberalism
via the most advanced forms of biotechnology and genetic engineering. Pharmaceutical
companies invest massive sums in tiny pills designed to forestall the detumescence
of that most universally archaic symbol of youthful potency—the phallus. While the
multi-million-dollar tness and diet industries, drawing upon the best available medical
science, aim to abolish the nitude of the body, technicians of the soul such as Ray
Kurzweil take aim at the mortality of the mind by treating it as software, as so many
digital les to be transferred into endlessly replaceable, fungible machines, mimicking
the reduction of individuals to scarcely more than the empty social roles and functions
they mechanically perform.
If liberalism wages war on death in pursuit of the banal, routinized, and
1212021, issue 2
comfortable life of Nietzsche’s “Last Man,” then, in opposition, fascism aggressively
embraces the heroic cult of death as the means of accessing “concrete” and hence
meaningful experience. Can there be any more noble an act than to lay down one’s life
in service of the community? In their respective projects to embrace and repudiate death,
however, it escapes the noticeof fascists and liberals alike that the sharp line that once
separated death and life had already been erased, to the further embarrassment of both.
Damaged life is life that has ceased living. Capital is, as Marx teaches, nothing if
not dead labour, and, in the form of the exchange relation, itdominatesliving labour.
Capitalism always, therefore, had something of the monstrous about it in the sense
that the dead dominate the living. The death camps––whose ghosts haunt Minima
Moralia––reveal in extremis the logic of wage slavery. Particularly unfortunate inmates
referred to as Musselmänner were reduced to the condition of a living death. Perhaps
this is what explains our morbid fascination with Zombies.In the halting, aimless yet
persistent shuing of the “walking dead,” we see reected our own impoverished lives
as if pathetically parodying Odysseus’ heroic homecoming. The only possible way for
the subject to survive in capitalism in its late stage is to mimic the deathly state to
which it compulsively reduces sensuous nature. To preserve its life, the subject must
enervate itself. The unfolding ecological catastrophe tells the story, allegorically, of
the human species’ own eventual extinction: De te fabula narratur. What may once have
been possible as an emancipatory promise understood as the negation of all forms
of human negativity or alienation, becomes, itself, the teleology of a catastrophic
history––species-being-towards-death.
If life is lifeless, death loses its substance and therefore sense. Consequently,
understood as the event that once gave shape and meaning to the life of an individual,
death is no longer possible. As Weber put it with reference to Tolstoy, while in the past
it might have been possible to die, having felt “satiated by life,” on the disenchanted
landscape of the “steel-hard shell” (con?) (stahlhartes Gehäuse) we grow “tired of life,”
we seize up and keel over, when, as the saying goes, “our number is up.”
The primal origin of human meaning lies in the attempt to make the event of
death speak in eloquent terms. The earliest origin of hominid sense-making lies pre-
cisely here. As the conceptual renement of such a response to life’s end––understood
as both simple cessation and what Aristotle called nal cause or purpose––Socratic,
Epicurean and Stoic philosophy was understood as preparation for death. Recall, here,
Socrates’ nal words to Crito: “We owe a cock to Asclepius; pay it and don’t forget.”
Facing death with equanimity was amongst the highest ancient ideals and
informs the image of the redeemed condition: a life without fear. Today, such an ideal
has withered. It now seems impossible to die a meaningful death because it is not
possible to live life rightly, though, in truth, it never really has been possible to do so.
Perhaps the word “nihilism” signies not the inherent nothingness or meaninglessness
of an indierent universe, as was once suggested by Turgenev’s famous protagonist,
Bazarov, but rather the fact the death has, itself, died.
1222021, issue 2
Samir Gandesha has been a post-doctoral fellow at
the University of California at Berkeley (1995–97)
and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow
at the Universität Potsdam (2001–2002). He is
currently Associate Professor in the Department
of Humanities and the Director of the Institute
for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University.
He specializes in modern European thought and
culture, with a particular emphasis on the relation
between politics, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis.
He is the author of numerous refereed articles and
book chapters and is co-editor with Lars Rensmann
of Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical
Investigations (Stanford, 2012). He is co-editor
with Johan Hartle of Spell of Capital: Reification
and Spectacle (University of Amsterdam Press, 2017)
and Aesthetic Marx (Bloomsbury Press, 2017). He is
editor of the recently-published Spectres of Fascism:
Historical, Theoretical and Contemporary Perspectives
(Pluto, 2020). In the Spring of 2017, he was the
Liu Boming Visiting Scholar in Philosophy at the
University of Nanjing and Visiting Lecturer at
Suzhou University of Science and Technology in
China. In January 2019, he was Visiting Fellow at the
Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe.
Biography
