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.