Contemporary Japanese Thought

Understood as the greatest violence or disaster that can befall us, death has long been man’s greatest source of anxiety and fear. We implicitly resign ourselves to death as an absurd yet unavoidable fate, and precisely because this deprivation or extinguishing of existence is our inevitable lot, we seek to assuage our anxiety through belief in the immortality of the soul. Often we envision an eternal afterlife that offers salvation from the misery of a life tormented by anxiety. In regarding such an afterlife as truly immortal life, we turn the pain of death into a condition for salvation. Alternatively, we may not depend upon such a desire for eternal life or the afterlife, but try to work out a kind of wisdom that excludes from life’s reality any worry over death as utterly meaningless. Either way, death is the manifestation of a power that peremptorily outstrips human will and authority. Because it transcends human force, man is all the more tightly caught in its grip and thus cherishes a deep desire to be released from it.

Yet when we can no longer believe either in the immortality of the soul or in God’s salvation—that there exists an external authority upon which to rely—death paradoxically becomes the most important aspect of human existence. Death concludes life, so that life without death remains unfinished. Death is brought into life as the ultimate possibility, and through this, human autonomy and the completion of life are first guaranteed. Unless death, which completes life, becomes human, human autonomy does not arise as absolute subjectivity. In other words, as Dostoevsky’s Kirilov believed, death must become “my life” since transcendence, or “God,” is done away with. If death isn’t “mine” and something “I” control, then what begins at birth and ends in “my death” can never become “mine.” Death is thus not an external accident that befalls “me” as fate or simply extinguishes “me”; rather, it must be something that, through a certain dialectics, inheres within “me.” Rilke, for example, wonders if death is not the fruit of life that has grown to maturity within his body, and he assiduously tries to observe it. Death is that which has not yet been realized but inexorably comes ever closer to belonging to “me”: it is “my death” which must complete “me.” For moderns such as Rilke, death is the final and primordial possibility of one’s life; it is that which grounds the irreplaceable propriety of “my” existence.

The philosophers and writers who spoke of “existence” believed that it was the relationship to death—considered as one’s own death—that made existence “authentic” or “true.” Bataille set out on the “journey to the limits of the possible,” and created a project that rendered impossible the very “project” (pro-ject) of shaping existence as possibility. Blanchot exposed himself without reservation to the inoperable act of “writing,” which is an act devoted to nonreality rather than an activity of presence that produces and serves reality (in the Hegelian sense), and then reflected upon this experience. Levinas attempted to rethink existence by passing through the “night of insomnia” that extinguishes the “I” and destroys the “world” in the fire of history. No matter how much strength I show in drawing death to me, it can never become “mine.” Indeed, the final act in which I try to make death my own forever throws me into the impossibility of “my death.” In this sense, death is a deception, a trap into which human beings fall. Unable to die one’s own death, man’s inescapable fear is not that of dying but rather that he cannot die. Death can never be the goal of an act. Man is not truly related to death in his status as subject. Losing the power to form a proper “I,” that is, losing the power to maintain death as “my death,” man is in the dissolution of this propriety consumed within death and enfolded by its radical foreignness. In the end, man disappears without possessing death and without completing it as subject. Thus the thinkers of “existence” taught both the impossibility of death and the incompleteness of existence.

Let me simply add that, as goes without saying, this impossibility of death and the incompleteness of existence do not come to again subordinate man to “God.” Rather, such a mode of existence is disclosed precisely because of the absence of any God. It is not that the individual’s finitude can be compensated only by “God’s” infinity; rather the conditions of human existence are disclosed as finite in themselves. The death that is therein disclosed spreads throughout as unrecoverable. This is a death that is ultimately unrelated to man and into which he vanishes. Thus it can also be described as the death of God himself. Yet this death is not something that belongs to God; rather it is the death of God himself, the extinction of all transcendent and universal authority. In this absence of an authority that governs itself through “death,” man is returned to his own finite life. With nothing to possess it, this anonymous “death” envelops the world as something “public” that belongs to no one. It spreads imperceptibly throughout, surrounding near and far.

It is said that with the death of God, “man” also died. That may very well be the case. But if this means the extinction of the autonomous and subjective human being, it would actually imply that man has become dispersed and has lost the power to die, that is to say, lost the power to fulfill or complete himself. In fact, this would expose man to a situation in which he cannot die his own death—such an unknown situation must be called something like the “loss of death.” However, the most incisive response to this situation came from a thinking that, with a sense of crisis, braced itself against the “unknown” through recourse to a notion of “homeland.” Such thinking regarded this “loss of death” in terms of “falling” (Verfallen), as brought about by man’s depersonalization in the “mass” age and the neutralization of communality that is “publicness” (Öffentlichkeit). This thinking sought a way to restore the propriety of “death” in this superficial “falling.” After the “disaster” which presently ensued, all humanity stood amidst the ruins, and the phrase “being towards death” (Sein zum Tode) spread throughout as the tritest of catchwords. People became intoxicated with reckless thoughts about “freedom,” as brought about by the sense of their “own death.” Somewhat removed from the commotion of that age, several strands of radical thought confronted a kind of “limit situation” in their attempt to transform “humanism.” They gave themselves over to this unknown situation and sought out the most appropriate words to describe it. For such thinkers, the relation to “death” that they experienced and came to express represented the basic condition of existence that subtly but unmistakably surrounds contemporary man.

Since the emergence of nuclear weapons, a technology that is the literal embodiment of “useless negativity,” the death of mankind has been collectively secured. Just as the sky envelops the earth, this “death” completely enfolds our environment as foreign and unknown, out of the hands of individuals. “Death” is here unrelated to individual will or action, and is reserved equally for all. On the one hand, technology, which makes possible death’s universal reserve, also substantially suspends “war,” restricting future wars to limited warfare in the form of “test sites.” On the other hand, technology creates massive opportunities for such localized deaths as those resulting from airplane or nuclear powerplant accidents. Depriving men of the propriety of their individual deaths, technology everywhere and in every way makes death increasingly foreign and contingent. In this respect, our daily environment is surrounded by isolated “death” in a remote, alienated manner. Regardless of our greater chances of accidental death (which are always announced as “numbers”), on balance the rewards outweigh the risks, for human life spans have gradually increased with improved living conditions and advances in medical technology. While the average life span was once fifty years, many people now exceed eighty. Moreover, the enormous productivity of today’s world has increased the time spent on living itself rather than that spent on acquiring the means to live. There has been a significant expansion in the possibilities and conditions for those activities and pleasures that fill the time of “living.” Indeed, the question of how idly surplus time is spent has even become a social topic. “Life” has thus come to assume an aspect of utter amusement and the world has been transformed into a bustling playground. We enjoy our “eternal Sundays” in this insipid space, as if obliged to do so.

It seems that “war” has been suspended indefinitely, thus eliminating the violent deaths that it causes. For the time being, people are able to live oblivious to the likelihood of death. “Death”-related issues now take the form of an “inability to die,” as though the universal reserve of “death” and solidification of the sphere of “life” had robbed man of death. It was once said that the anxiety of death constricts life, or that the readiness to die brings fulfillment to life, but now, within a life made easy, “death” has become so diluted that, uncannily, it reigns only as something external to “life.” If technology makes possible the universal reserve of death, it also increases our life span. In either case, technology distances man from death. Strictly speaking, it distances man from, or tries to rob him of, a proper death. The fact that “death” in many ways remains an issue today is due to the endless dilution of its meaning, even if “dying” has by no means disappeared. “Death” has become something “public” over which the state has authority, such that the dying no longer have any relation to their own “death.”

In this era of nuclear-deterrent “peace,” the “making-public of death” now appears in a different form. Medical technology has pushed death ever further away, delaying and deterring it. This technology seeks only to deter death provisionally, but that sometimes creates what are considered useless psychological and economic burdens for individuals and societies. Hence people have come up with the notion of “death with dignity.” The intent here is to return death to those who have lost sight of life and would otherwise be robbed of death, to end the delaying of death and remove its deterrence—as when life-support machines are disconnected. In this way, “death” seems to be returned to the dying. But it is not always certain if he who must accept “death” actually has the ability to do so. Rather “death” here becomes an object to be manipulated, one that is unrelated to the dying; it occurs only among “others” as an abstract event apart from the dying person. As goes without saying, the return of “death” to the dying is effected by “public approval,” that is, this “death” is a “public death.” (A desirable death! some might claim. But I hasten to add that one must consider for whom it is desirable, whose “comfort”—anraku—and “dignity” are at stake here? Such terms as “euthanasia”—anrakushi—and “death with dignity” are questionable in that they definitely make things out to be self-evident. This death is of course not self-evident for the person in question, nor is it undertaken for the “public good.” When man becomes just “anyone” and death something public, there arises within this publicness a “someone” as subject of responsibility—not a subject of rights. Then once again this “anyone” becomes a subject who is able to say “I.” Doesn’t “ethics” lie in the acceptance of being this “I”? Therein resides the possibility of the subject as “ethicality”).

Now the more difficult and dangerous issue of “brain death” no longer even concerns the event of “death.” In order for medicine, in its self-development, to obtain “corpses” as its necessary material resources, death must be redefined. This is not simply to manipulate or manage “death” externally, entirely apart from the dying person. Rather death, which was once the all-powerful ground of human authority, is now in the unprecedented position of being determined by man and applied to various ends. “Death” has finally become something “artificial,” such as to deny it as such. In this way, the dying lose “death,” and this lost death is managed as something denied or negated, something foreign to the dying. Even if the old truth that we all die someday still holds true for now, man’s “death” can nevertheless no longer be proper to him.

No one can die in place of another. Even if this were possible, however, that other could still not escape his own death. Because of this self-evident truth, death is seen as man’s “ownmost possibility” (Heidegger), that which he can never dispose of or hand over. Now, however, all death is at least potentially “accidental death,” that is, contingent death, such that no one’s relation to death is proper. On the contrary, “death” has become an object to be manipulated without regard for the dying. Although once seen as the absolute authority in the sense of an ultimate event that determines everything, death has now been transformed into a relative phenomenon determined for other ends. This is precisely why there are debates about death: it is not that death has become an urgent question for man, one whose meaning is now increasingly important, but rather that “death” in its ubiquitousness has become diluted and estranged (it is through its quantification that “death” most clearly reveals its own ubiquitous and diluted nature), and its meaning grown increasingly empty. Confronted with death’s dispersal and the “inability to die,” however, we grasp these negatively as loss or deprivation. Rather than retrospectively wish for a restoration of “proper death,” what if we were to see in this loss of death a surfacing of “immortality”?

Technology now envisions “immortality” as within its range, at least in principle. While protein synthesis and genetic engineering manipulate the origins of life, death is gradually pushed back through various life-preservation methods as well as by organ exchange in cases of impaired functioning (whether artificial organs or organ transplants). This gradual delaying of death brings the cyborg dream (or nightmare) ever closer to reality. Of course this is not to say that death simply vanishes. Rather several “deaths” are necessary for every “prolongation of life.” These deaths are in any case unavoidable, however, and through their utilization—that is, through the use of the corpses left behind (or produced?) by “death” as material resources—other deaths can be delayed. Thus even if “death” is already present, there still remains the merit of prolonging life in view of “immortality.” On balance, this will be seen as an increase in life span, as such utilization of death contributes to the “benefit of mankind.” It can be said that man has advanced one step toward “immortality” by making the utilization of death possible. Yet despite the fact that this “prolongation of life” brings about an extension of individual life, it is possible only by introducing “parts” that do not belong to the individual and are essentially exchangeable. Thus the decisive nature of “immortality” is already announced.

To say that man has an afterlife, as has long been believed, is not the same thing as saying that he has “immortality.” The continuation of life after death is envisioned through the finitude of life in this world in a kind of springboard effect. Because this life is finite, its negation is envisioned as eternal life after death or as eternal life that continues from past lives to future lives. Time is often regarded as a sign that accompanies a falling or loss, and the finitude of this world is seen as a result of a fall within time. Eternity is imagined to exist outside of this world, that is, outside of the world of time; it represents the nullity of that time with which it alternates (as if, just as light erases darkness, either this world has no past lives or future lives, or eternal life returns to erase this world). Thus the finitude of this world comes to be relativized.

Such “belief” cannot simply be described as an irrational illusion. Advances in technology do not eliminate fantasies of the “world beyond.” Notions of a four-dimensional world, theories of antiprotons and antimatter, black holes, the big bang, new scientific conceptions of the universe, or even actual human experiences of outer space that go beyond laboratory research and theoretical inquiry—none of these in any way turns the notion of a “world beyond” into an outdated illusion. On the contrary, they increasingly provide theoretical and sensory material for this notion. The experience of a universe without light or darkness, front or back, left or right, or up or down (to say nothing of the fact that this vast universe is not uniform, or that time and space are mutually interchangeable) illuminates in inverse fashion the claim that “this world” in which we live is a temporal world sealed within an extremely delimited space, or that it is a world within the capsule of “time.” This experience has provided a sensory ground for that fantasy which seeks to understand the world from the perspective of the dark, timeless expanse of infinity. By looking at photographs of Earth rising up out of the darkness of space, we sense that our sphere of life occupies no more than this terra firma and a few kilometers of air. At the same time, our sensory ground is such that we gaze out at the dark sea of “nothingness” that swallows the real world like a drop of water, and view it as a higher dimension. We can set out for this dark sea only by leaving land, or “this world.” Although lacking any experiential knowledge of this immeasurably vast sea, we sense anew that we are within it, and that the land at our feet is but a speck in its midst. It is not that there exists a horizon that limits the sea, but rather that man’s impoverished sight creates that horizon. The world of “illusion” becomes more real the more “scientific” it becomes.

A “world beyond” unquestionably opens up before man. If “this world” is man’s real world, then the “world beyond” (hi-gense) represents an inhuman (hiningenteki) “otherworld.” At that time in the past when death was clear and obvious to man, the contours of “this world” were also obvious. For the world then ended or was marked off by death. Death was the lot of all men. However, if all deaths come to be universally reserved and individual deaths managed such that the death one should die no longer belongs to oneself, then “immortality” has filtered into the world of the dying and the other world has filtered into this world. Such infiltration turns what had hitherto been the certain real world into something permeable. For example, it is as if one could now suddenly see through the everyday walls and furniture, although these do not disappear. In other words, the ground of human or rather humanistic reality—that concrete reality which had hitherto been unconditionally enjoyed—is now made slightly transparent.

Hence we are no longer faced with the question of whether to believe in “immortality” or the “otherworld.” As goes without saying, people can enjoy without in any way believing the tale of Daireikai [The great spirit world] as the thrilling and foolish performance of a peculiar actor (assuming that the film is worth enjoying).¹ For while this “otherworld” which transcends man’s horizon is still very much told by human (all too human) imagination in a narrative language that gives form to the “human,” people can nevertheless somehow perceive the absurdity of this human caprice. The atemporal world of “eternity” cannot be attained by human language, which unfolds as temporalization. But it is “narrative” that effortlessly temporalizes this world, and in so doing spatializes it. Human discourse generally invokes “immortality” as another life, a life that transcends life. If, however, “spirit world” discourse is narrated on the horizon of language (which gives form to that world which must be transcended by immortality), in other words, if this discourse is narrated as an extension of the everyday world, then clearly “the next world adjoins this world.” “Spirit world” discourse thus essentially reassures man in his confrontation with “immortality,” regardless of how uncanny it may be. For this “uncanniness” does not transgress the limits of the imaginary, whereas “immortality” is “uncanny” because of its transformation of the symbolic order itself. “Spirit world” discourse separates and joins the “next world” and “this world” within language, while “immortality” now spills over from “this world” in which language is born.

If “immortality” is truly uncanny and otherworldly, it is because “death,” which constitutes the transcendent instance as absolute and all-deciding power, diffuses without ever definitively vanishing, drifting about in an amorphous and indefinite form. As a result, the world of “immortality” is enveloped by a certain inauspiciousness. The diffusion of death loses its end (eschatos), which is thus given over to endless flux or floating. With the mark of a period, death concludes things and fixes being. In this way, it brings to the fore the contours of man and the human in the world. Through death, the human is fixed as the final, completed edition: it is in death that man gains place and determination, and “settles down.” Death, that is, guarantees the mode of a decisive “stop.” When death becomes diffused, however, there is nothing to guarantee what man’s authentic way of being is, regardless of where or how he is. Everything floats in indeterminacy. What appears temporarily to be fixed is only lingering. It is this floating and helplessness that is “uncanny.” In German, “uncanny” is unheimlich, meaning unhomely or unfamiliar—but of course this uncanniness might just be “wonder.”

“Immortality” deprives us of the possibility of “settling down.” Let us refuse to see this as “loss,” however, and say only that “immortality” becomes nomadized.

Freud regarded the “uncanny” as the “return from the external world of that which has been effaced in the inner world.” What was once familiar to the ego at its dawning comes in the course of its development to be forgotten and excluded from the psychic world as impossible. When this something suddenly appears in the external world, however, man encounters the “uncanny.” In this sense, the “uncanny” is at once strange and familiar. Freud invoked the doppelganger as exemplary of the “uncanny.” Here the profound relationship between the “uncanny” and “immortality” is thrown into relief. What makes the doppleganger uncanny is not simply the fact that it dilutes the self, but that through its disappearance it is reborn and appears in myriad forms. Freud explained that the first doppelganger is created in childhood as “security from the extinction of the ego,” and that the doppelganger represents the return of this “immortal” alter ego. The various traits that Freud noted of this “alter ego’s” “uncanniness” (“undifferentiation between self and other; an open communication, substitution, and division between them; as well as the resulting nullification of identity and repetition of a single entity”) accurately pinpoint the consequences of “immortality” as viewed by contemporary technology.

While these traits must be emphasized, I would like to affirm here that “immortality” is not simply a psychological matter of forgotten, irrational thoughts from childhood. Going back much further than childhood, “immortality” is the “return of the effaced” in the living body. Freud’s “uncanny” is a phenomenon that appears in the individual’s psychological process of development and change. Of course in Freud’s case, the historical development of individual psychology is analogously extended to that of all mankind. Thus the interpretation of the “uncanny” also takes into account the entire realm of man’s shared psychological makeup. This notion is at times even more boldly expressed, however, as when Freud traces back the origin of all psychic phenomena to somatic life. Freudian psychoanalysis acknowledges from the outset that psychic phenomena are not complete in and of themselves, but can function only through the introduction of an “outside.” Now if, on the one hand, such acknowledgment distinguishes psychoanalysis from other theories of psychology and physiology, and, on the other, the “uncanny” is not an internal psychological representation but that which the psyche experiences on the border between the inside and the outside, then perhaps “immortality” can be seen to have a privileged link with the “uncanny” as the return of a nonpsychic (that is, corporeal or material) event that is yet related to the formation of the psychic world itself.

Since “immortality” is “at once strange and familiar” as an illusion or wish, it is all the more so corporeally. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud boldly traces back our understanding of psychic mechanisms from their basis in ontogeny to that of phylogeny. Yet what is at issue here is “immortality,” albeit in a different form. If we understand “immortality” as the infinitization of “life,” then “infinity” must endlessly transcend its limits not only outwardly but also inwardly. Thus if the entire process of life is differentially contained in view of the origins of ontogeny, Freud traces the infinity of differential folds. “Immortality” glimpses its primordial form in a material, rather than a psychological, dimension. While Freud was by no means alone in seeing the repetition of phylogeny within ontogeny, he did regard the primordial form of human life as the composite repetition of the “life” of single-celled organisms.

When an individual (as we shall provisionally call it) single-celled organism divides to become two, there is clearly a material continuity between the original individual and the two newly created ones. And yet these latter differ from the original. It can be said that the original individual has been halved, and that through this division, each half is restored as one whole. The original individual (A) thus no longer exists; in its place are two new individuals (B1 and B2). In other words, A disappears and B1 and B2 appear. This does not mean that the material that produced the original cell has disappeared, but rather that propagation and division have resulted in the development of the same life in its material base. Now is such reproduction through division “death” or “birth”? What happens to “death” and “birth” in this reproduction?

No doubt there are those who would quite lucidly find these questions to be meaningless, for what is at issue here is neither “death” nor “birth” but simply division and propagation. It is certainly true that cells stop dividing at some point. This point represents the cessation of all life activities, that is to say, “death.” Yet exactly who is it that dies here? In observing a single cell countlessly dividing itself, several (or even all) of the cells will eventually cease dividing and stop activity—at this point who (or which) has “died”? Here “death” is no one’s. It has by chance overtaken several of the multiplied cells, in other words, “death” is, from the perspective of this “multiplicity,” nothing more than a partial and slight event that disappears within the propagating whole. In effect, this is literally the “immortal” world of the doppleganger. For all individuals are alter egos of others.

How then can one speak of “death”? It cannot be approached from the material standpoint of sustaining continuity through the process of propagation and division, but rather from the standpoint of “form,” which gives the cell its character as individual. It is this “form” that individuates cells and gives each its “propriety.” “Death” would thus be the death of that propriety. In other words, when a cell divides, the original proper cell (A) disappears to become two new proper cells (B1 and B2). This can be said to be the death of one cell and the birth of two new ones. Here “death” and “birth” are as yet undifferentiated, for they take place as the same event. “Birth” is already taking place when “death” takes place as disappearance. “Birth” overlaps with “death,” just as “death” is enveloped by “birth.” Or rather, “birth” occurs and bears the result of that occurrence, while “death” is eliminated in this event of “birth.”

Clearly single-celled organisms do not just divide and propagate, but they sometimes merge to form new life. At such times, of course, “death” and “birth” are one. This is why, for example, Bataille was able to see in the union of “death” and “birth” in single-cell reproduction the primordial connection between death and eroticism. Organisms become multicellular structures and then grow even more complex through sexual reproduction. In this way, “death” first comes to be separated or, as it were, made différant from “birth.” “Death” separates and becomes actualized as “death” when it leaves behind a result in the form of an event, that is to say, when it produces a corpse—as when multicellular reproductive organisms first leave behind a corpse following the birth of new individuals. In speaking of “death” in single-celled organisms, we must also speak of “immortality.” If given a suitable environment these organisms infinitely divide, then this is in principle “immortality.” Life develops continuously through division here, and there is no corpse that actualizes “death.” The transformation to multicellular organisms and sexual reproduction, however, separates “death” from “birth.” There is now a joint or juncture that at once divides and connects. This joint divides to create space as time and extension, and an interval is formed between “birth” and “death.” It is this interval that first leaves behind a “corpse” as material which actualizes death.

This interval between “birth” and “death” is really just the individual’s “life,” but let us consider what happens when this “life” expands to the point of overlapping with an adjacent interval. In such case, two (or several) individual “lives” as separated by “death” overlap with other individual “lives,” such that one “death” overlaps with another “life” and becomes transparent. Within this compositeness, it can be said that the individual once again recovers the continuity of “immortality.” Here the “part that can become a corpse” comes to be shared by these two (or several) individuals. Yet these individuals that gain the continuity of “immortality” essentially lose their “individuality,” that is, they lose the discontinuity that constitutes individuals as such and guarantees each a proper death. This continuity is not one of a primary life that flows directly between individuals, as in the case of reproduction through division, but rather a kind of secondary continuity in the form of a compositing of divided entities.

Yet this is not to say that man has never known of a continuity that mediates individual death in such a way. This continuity is language, culture, and history, as well as those ideas of communal being that embody these, such as “nation” and “humanity.” The most perfect of these ideas has been that of “man,” who creates himself and then completes himself as totality, and who represents the “absolute spirit” as self-identical synthesis of language, logic, and history (Hegel). In effect, it is “man” as “spirit” who is the secondary continuity that compensates for the spatiotemporal separation between individuals. Such ideal universality has embodied “immortality” within man. Yet this ideal “immortality” is a posthumous one. That is to say, the idea is made “immortal” since it remains even after the individual’s death (the idea transcends the individual’s spatiotemporal limitations). But what has now come within range is secondary continuity at the material, rather than the ideal, level. “Immortality” now is neither eternal life after death nor the life of spirit (or its development) as replacement for dead flesh. Even less does “immortality” resemble the dream of “eternal youth.” Rather it is a composite continuity that has reached the material level. Life resides in the flesh, not in the spirit. Continuity, understood here not as that which compensates for the finitude of finite individuals but rather as that which is lived as finitude, is about to arrive from the dimension of that material life of individuals in their preconditioned deaths.

The question of “redefining death” has been discussed for quite some time now. As is well known, the so-called brain-death debate has reexamined the traditional clinical standards of “death” as based upon respiratory and heart failure and the total dilation of the pupils, and instead focused on brain failure. As goes without saying, this does not simply involve adding scientific rigor to the clinical definition of “death.” Although organ transplantation has been made possible by medical technology, the transplanting of such specific organs as the heart and liver can take place only upon the death of the donor. In other words, the prolongation of life in one person requires the death of another, in addition to the fact that the donated organ must be as “fresh” as possible. Thus a “corpse” that is “new,” or not fully dead, becomes necessary. The “brain death” debate has arisen in response to this requirement. That is to say, when someone reaches the stage where he is considered dead by traditional standards, it is already too late to utilize his organs as live. It has thus become necessary to identify the “brain’s death” as the “person’s death.” If medicine normatively identifies this as “death,” then the body is hereafter a “corpse.” Removing organs from a dead body does not, however, make one a murderer. If undertaken with the consent of the proper “authorities” in order to save another person from death, then organ removal does not constitute defacement of the dead but rather becomes a legal act that serves humanity and the public welfare. The attempt to “redefine death” by determining human death as “brain death” has emerged in these circumstances.

Apart from the problem of securing the transplant organs, there have in fact been not a few occasions when technology has produced a “living corpse,” or “dead living body.” While technological changes in living conditions have increased the likelihood of accidents, there have also been technological advances in life support, such that a new “mode of life” has emerged known as living “corpses.” To be sure, by considering a person’s life as human (i.e., personal existence) to be governed by the brain, brain death may come in this sense to mean personal death, and brain failure to be seen as human death. It is often pointed out that the basis for this kind of thinking reflects the traditional mind-body dualism of the West. Yet such dualism has basically represented the position of idealism in its emphasis on the “mind,” or “spirit.” Human life essentially resides in the spirit, and the flesh is merely an appearance that rots when it dies. It is even believed that the death of the flesh releases the spirit. In the separation of the flesh from the personality in “brain death,” however, it is in fact the flesh that is saved from “death.” In order that the flesh be quickly rid of the spirit so as to obtain that material resource which is not restrained by personality, man must agree that the spirit’s death equals human death. Let us here set aside such questions as whether the spirit or mind is a function of the brain, or if personality is reducible to the brain’s activity. In any case, if one sees the shadow of a traditional mind-body dualism in this attempt to identify “brain death” as “anthropological death,” thus liberating the flesh from its limitation as “human,” then this is in fact nothing more than a caricature that intentionally reverses that dualism.

In modern medicine, the most extreme instance of which is surgery, the body is treated functionally at the material level. This medicine cannot be suddenly abandoned in favor of idealism, for even organ transplantation represents a recycling of human body parts informed entirely by materialism. This is in principle no different from the exchange of parts in other types of machinery. Even if there is of course some emotional resistance to viewing the body as a set of usable “parts,” this should not be singled out for reproach. Yet as these parts cannot be used after the body has completely died, one must artificially hasten the pronouncement of “death.” An idealistic dualism that has long been stored away must thus be taken out, reversed, and then grafted onto a theory of mechanism, such that man’s determination as spirit means that brain death equals human death. Herein lies the dubiousness of “redefining death.”

This phenomenon of course gains “humanitarian” (or “humanist”) legitimization through cases of universal good work, as when children or youths with incurable heart problems receive transplants from those with no hope of recovery. Here it is claimed that “brain death” must be socially recognized for the sake of “humanitarian acts of good work.” Yet when those who insist upon hastening the acceptance of “brain death” further generalize its “benefits” by speaking of the “immeasurable benefits to mankind” that will accrue in recognizing brain failure as human “death,” then it becomes abundantly clear what is urging on the demand for this general approval, and also what this implies. According to these people, approval of “brain death” would introduce great possibilities for medical practice.² They claim that it not only makes possible the harvesting of organs for those in need, but would also create general organ donors. Moreover, the “brain dead body” makes an “ideal storehouse” for organs, thus expanding the very possibilities of organ transplantation. This body would become a “(living!) factory for blood and hormones” that are difficult to manufacture artificially, and could be used as unparalleled “teaching material” in dissection and surgical training. Thus the general significance of “brain death” is that it opens the way for utilization of the human body as a material resource by sanctioning the disappearance of “personality.”

“Brain death” removes the human body’s “personality.” The “brain dead body” is, therefore, no longer anyone; it is not “human” since it lacks personality. The greatest benefit brought about by the sanctioning of “brain death” lies in utilizing this no one’s anonymous body as a “public material resource.” It is said that the importance of this “benefit” is far more comprehensive than the limited question of organ transplantation. Even if death is sanctioned, however, the body is still clearly living. If “living” is found here to be an inappropriate expression bound up with an outdated view of life, then we might say instead that the body still sustains fixed metabolic activity. In any case, however, it is clear that the “brain-dead body” cannot reveal any “benefits” unless its life functions are sustained even without the control of the brain. We must naturally ask, then, if there is no such thing as dispersed life without such control of the brain, or if scattered and dispersed existence—bodily existence as such, so to speak, or the existing body—is nothing more than a usable material resource.

It cannot be said that man has never been treated as a thing. Whether in the case of slaves, prisoners, or victims of violent rule, he has been treated inhumanely and driven like cattle, and not infrequently been placed in the position of losing his life. But what is here treated as a thing and transformed into a means is man understood as a single existence, rather than the human body (or its parts) as a material or physiological material resource. As revealed in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, the principle of man’s instrumentalization is essentially the ruler-ruled relation between existing beings, in which existence is made into a unit. In this relation, one single existence remains total (not a set of parts that can be separated and utilized) while being ruled by and transformed into a means for the other existence. To be sure, a world in which man’s being is completely instrumentalized has been created, as for example in the comic Kachikujin yapū [The domestic yapoo]. But even here, instrumentalization takes place with single existence as a unit, and its motif is not technology but rather man’s erotic bodily relations.

Above all, such relations of objectification or instrumentalization end everywhere with death. Death is the disappearance of existence, nullifying even the most extreme relations of subordination. The ruler loses everything in killing the ruled. It is precisely because of this that suicide may become the final means of resistance in dire situations. Yet such utilization of the human body is allowed with the sanctioning of “death.” It is too late for this utilization when death permeates the entire body. Death must be partial, such that the parts to be used survive its invasion. Even if partial “death” in a bodily sense is recognized as complete “death” in a human sense, this body is seen as a material resource from which the propriety of existence has been removed. Medical technology, which regards this body as now “dead,” then makes extensive use of it as “organ storehouse,” “hormone manufacturing plant” and “teaching material,” thereby using all manner of technology to preserve the “life activity” of its parts. Thus from the moment that the death of personal existence is pronounced in the case of “brain death,” the now ownerless, anonymous, and impersonal body comes for a time to continue its “undying” existence as an “intermediate” or “in-between” being excluded from life and deterred from death, even if it cannot in the end escape dismantling.

Here, of course, we are not questioning the rights and wrongs of organ transplantation. There is no turning back from the fact that organ transplantation is technologically possible under certain conditions. But what I would like to consider are the implications of the sanctioning of “brain death” as a countermeasure against the inevitable problems bound up with it. There is of course a tremendous gap between treating these problems through the introduction of “brain death” and recognizing “brain death” as death in general. In any case, “brain death” doubles death, or submits it to différance, and through this différance comes to determine the impersonal and spiritless “neutral” or “intermediate” body, which is neither alive nor dead. This body is thus “made into a material resource” as no longer “human.” Its inescapable demise is such that it releases its modicum of existence or life, which in its material dimension lacks “personality” and “spirit,” while at the same time interrupting death and giving itself over to artificial “dismantling.” Yet this mode of existence cannot but call to mind a significant motif it shares with several strands of contemporary philosophy.

The discourse on “existence” and emergence of “anxiety” as an important philosophical theme represented a protest against the philosophical framework of “man” as consolidated by “spirit” and determined as personal subject. The excentrism contained in the notion of “existence,” which inevitably led to such expressions as “I am what I am not,” reveals a complex relation in which “man” can be himself only in embracing his outside, which lacks a place within the subject that establishes itself as identical. The emphasis on “existence” also expresses the fact that man is not simply determined by spirit (essence). From this thinking of “existence” there emerged a thinking for which the subject is not formed by the awakening of consciousness, but rather first comes into being in positively taking his place as a sleeping body. This is achieved by virtue of his ability to “sleep,” that is, his power to interrupt wakened consciousness. As goes without saying, this thinking is that of Levinas. For Levinas, the mode of existence of “sleep,” understood here literally as the body that lacks spirit, is seen as a positive moment in the creation of the “subject.” This thinking is radically “materialist,” if one can say that, and extends the concept of “man” to a nearly thinglike impersonal mode of existence (however, this “materialism” is the exact opposite of mechanistic theory, which is essentially idealism). “Sleep,” which is merely a needless stoppage from the perspective of spirit, here becomes an indispensable moment that constitutes “spirit” as such.

If man had previously been regarded as a personal being in the sense of subject (spirit), then the radical thinking of “existence” invariably calls attention to the instant of the “subject’s demise.” Such thought reveals the “duality of death.” The death of the “subject” does not immediately mean the annihilation of existence. The situation man is thrown into upon this death has been explained in various ways, but at the very least subjectless “existence”—if this can even be called “existence”—is now isolated, depersonalized, and rendered powerless, given over to the vanishing darkness. This thinking attests to the fact that a possibly proper death can be experienced only by the “subject.” From the moment that the “subject” is exposed to death, it loses both death and its own status as “subject.” Subjectless, impersonal “existence” now loses proper death and is in fact given over to an indeterminate “non-time-space,” which is nothing other than death itself.

This is a thinking that, as it were, the dying “subject” delivers from within the midst of “death” to this side of it while suffering its own disappearance. It is through such thinking that the state of impersonal existence is disclosed. The appearance of the demand for “brain death” corresponds to the concrete appearance of this state of impersonal existence in real life, which the thinking of “existence” brought to light (if such expression can be applied to a lightless dimension). It is of course true that the irreversible failure of the brain as a functioning organ belongs to an entirely different discourse from that of philosophy’s “demise of the subject.” The legitimization of “brain death,” however, is strictly a matter for philosophy. From a functional standpoint, it is natural to utilize anything as “parts” so long as it is technologically feasible. “Brain death” must be publicly approved so as to “humanly” legitimize that which is already technologically and functionally obvious. Yet “brain death” has been presented as something that cancels out such “humanity.” In other words, the recognition of “brain death” as “human” death involves not so much changing the concept of death as changing the concept of “man.” The question of “brain death,” then, is first and foremost a matter for philosophy rather than physiology. What is at issue in this debate is less the physiological fact of brain failure than the thinking of “brain death” itself.

The thinking of “brain death” distinguishes between personal being, which has a determined identity, and impersonal being, which lacks a proper personality and barely exists. This thinking can be said to run parallel to the question of the “demise of the subject.” The body whose personality is erased in “brain death,” which sustains certain physiological functions for a certain period of time, corresponds to that impersonal existence revealed by the thinking of the “death of the subject.” However, the thought of existence, with its notion of the “death of the subject,” utterly differs from the thought of “brain death” in its manner of dealing with this mode of existence. In contrast to physiology, which understands the human body strictly as a functional object (physiology never engages the question of “spirit,” or at most sees it as just another function), the thinking of “existence” tries to grasp existence as already a total event. Confronted with the disclosure of impersonal existence as rendered by “brain death,” this thinking of “existence” grasps it as a state of existence rather than the discarded shell of “human” demise. Just as the thinking of “brain death” presents that death as “anthropological,” so too must the material conditions of this most scant of existences cross the horizon of “humanism and anthropology.” It is precisely these conditions that the radical thinking of “existence” takes as unknown, and to which the reexamined “humanism” remains blind. The thinking of “brain death” tries to unreflectively grasp this troublesome reality in its “human, all too human” intent to make use of it.

The problem here is not that a certain state is called “brain death,” but rather why the thinking of “brain death” seeks to make this notion generally effective. As I have stated, this thinking aims at using the (assumed) personality-less human body as a material resource. It is therefore not unreasonable if the “brain death” debate calls to mind “Auschwitz.” While the “brain-dead body” is of course not intentionally produced by violence, it is still a creation of advanced technology. The Nazi concentration camps stripped man of the propriety of his personality and transformed him into a depersonalized, abstract “mass,” thus achieving the most destitute conditions of existence surrounded by “death.” The camps must represent the “outside” of any lived world, in which the death of man as “man” is pronounced the moment he is sent there. With the “death of man,” bare existence no longer contains a “self,” much less the ability to determine its fate. In other words, this “closed time-space” surrounded by “death” was for the prisoners of the camps an “undying” time-space decisively robbed of death. The “undying” human body was resolutely treated as a material resource, or a perfectly expendable object. In its exposure to the “impossibility of death,” the radical thinking of “existence” must have been shaped by this historical experience. This idea appears as the “outside of the human,” and would refuse to separate from human “existence” even that barest, depersonalized existence which the notion of “brain death” determines as “inhuman” material, for this represents the (most elemental) dimension of material existence without which even the “human” would be impossible. Otherwise, one could not think of the experience of the “concentration camps” in which people existed as strictly “inhuman,” thus depriving all human meaning to the struggle to live and survive under such conditions.

Man has certainly exploited and developed nature in forming the human world. Thus he forms himself as the world’s master, and it has been a long time since he first proclaimed, “I am the world.” However, the forms of those practices that generally carve out what appears before us have not changed (if nothing appears, we search for it regardless). Going beyond everyday earthly matters, the human world now infinitely extends from outer space to quarks, from DNA to satellite communications. Heidegger saw in this extension the domination of technology throughout human activity. Yet technology bypasses “death,” for it is seen as transcending “man,” who lives and dies. This perhaps explains why Heidegger was in a sense blind to modern “death.” In Hegel, however, human activity is from the beginning bound up with “death.” For “negativity” is the power of “life” to withstand “death” and the power to rule the “other” through force of “death.” “Negativity” begins and ends with “death,” and is as life-sized as “man.” It negates the being of things as they are, and changes those things which are not necessarily for man into human things. Hegel considered negativity the “magical power” in the formation of the human world. What light does this logic shed on modern “death”?

In a sense, negativity is like a windshield wiper that slowly turns around the axis of the subject, clearing away the surrounding darkness (nature). With each turning, the darkness is cleared away and the light of civilization floods in. Thus the world is humanized throughout. Hegel believed that negativity would dissolve itself upon this humanization, for the now-perfected human world represents the fulfillment of negativity (man) itself, and the real world is nothing other than self-realized negativity. In other words, even if the windshield wiper continues turning in the same manner, all subsequent motion is simply routinized and no longer productive of new change; rather it dutifully preserves the world in its unbroken everydayness. This point was contested by such people as Bataille, however, who claimed that history does not end and negativity is not dissolved even after completing all its duties, but drifts on as “useless negativity.” For Bataille, the question of history’s end appeared as a serious joke that reveals the absurdity of philosophy. In a word, negativity does not disappear (that is, man does not yet die), but only fundamentally changes its nature and continues working. Determined as action, or “labor,” negativity is absolutely useful in bringing about meaning and utility, but after completing its duties and negating everything to be negated, it now becomes useless and meaningless. Nonetheless, negativity still continues working as meaningless. This is basically Bataille’s objection to Hegel.

For Hegel, the windshield wiper is an entity whose duty is to sweep clean, and it is meaningless to sweep what has already been cleaned. Meaninglessness cannot be regarded as being, moreover, since real being is that which realizes its own meaning in action. But for Bataille, what is is, regardless of whether it is meaningless or useless. Indeed, it is all the more incorrigibly because of this meaninglessness. Negativity continues working, in fact, and comes to sweep clean the very human world created by the windshield wiper’s first turning. It can be said that the “world wars,” which both materially and spiritually destroyed the civilized world, represented an unnecessary, meaningless, and futile sweeping away of such “needless negativity.” The expression “useless negativity” contains Bataille’s recognition of Hegel’s logic, according to which man is the once-completed negativity. Negativity does not end there, however, as it is completed only once. Bataille believed that the quality of negativity thenceforth decisively changes. He called himself “useless negativity,” which is to say that “meaninglessness” exists as that which is irreducible to human meaning. This confirms that the relation between man and the world has now entered an entirely different and unknown stage, for that relation is humanly meaningless; that is, it transcends the framework of “man.” It is in this world that man exists.

There yet remained something else to be “negated.” While Hegelian man is essentially formed as “spirit,” his corporeality (which thus comes to take negativity upon itself) is barred from the “spiritual reality” of the human world and floats like a ghost (the ghost of spirit?) with nowhere to go. Post-Hegelian thought has come to be haunted by the theme of “corporeality,” but the ongoing windshield wiper that is negativity delivers an indiscriminate stroke both to the just-completed human world and to this “corporeality.” As that which is irreducible to meaning, “corporeality” is excluded from “spiritual reality” and, if we can say this, is positively meaningless. This “corporeality” is once again exposed to the act of negativity as surplus labor. Since it was produced as useless waste in the first cycle of negativity that created the “instrumental world,” “corporeality” can no longer be an “instrument,” and instead becomes a “material resource” in the form of a usable, expendable object. In short, this second cycle is literally the process of “recycling.” As a matter of fact, “waste-disposal sites” have been built on the margins of the “spiritual world” which treated the body as reusables and final disposals—human fat was made into soap, hair was used for carpets, etc. With astonishing ingenuity, the transformation of the human body into material resources was achieved. Even if we condemn this transformation as a “dehumanizing” deviation and take shelter in “humanitarianism,” we can no longer escape such “recycling.” This is not an exception that arose from a blending of the particular conditions of Nazism and war, but rather a situation that penetrates within the development of normal social activities. Organ transplantation is but a direct expression of this. “Recycling” is a condition of man’s modern world. If man is even now seen as negativity that produces meaning and the world, then negativity must not only create “man,” it must also then go on to ceaselessly negate him.

As Bataille remarked, Hegel was entirely correct, even in his mistakes. If there has been one crucial moment in the Western world, one which we could agree in principle has guided and shaped Western civilization (of course the West itself has never been unitary, but a hybridization of diverse elements), then that moment could be described as “negativity.” Hegel showed that language, meaning, action, love, spirit, and history—that is, all life and death and the formation of man’s modern world—develop as negativity. Even the world “after the end,” of which Hegel never spoke, can be understood by this word “negativity.”

In this respect, it can be said that history ends twice (twice in the sense of multiplication rather than addition), the world is realized twice, and the world’s humanization is achieved twice. The “human world” is negated when negativity again cuts down the world, but perhaps “man’s death” as the essence of negativity is then also negated and placed beyond his reach. In which case, “death with dignity” would be discussed according to the logic of returning human death to the dying, while human death would again be artificially determined as brain death. Human death is now not one in which the dying person dies as human. When the dying can no longer die in this manner, death becomes for the first time something publicly sanctioned and given. “Death” would then finally become artificial, losing its meaning as a force of beginnings and ends.

Whether “brain death” is considered human death, whether “organ transplantation” is to some extent possible, or whether life support of the “personality-less” body is a viable possibility—these are all separate issues. As I have discussed, the latter two questions show that we have reached a certain level of complex medical technology, while the first involves thinking about man’s spirit, body, and death. In other words, this is a condition of human existence to which thought must respond, whether we like it or not. The thinking on “brain death” represents one such response. And yet, despite the fact that advances in technology have fundamentally changed the conditions of human existence, this thinking readily recycles a very traditional view of man, thus ultimately concealing the meaning of these changes. What Heidegger quite justifiably calls “uncanny thoughtlessness” is revealed here as a shameful and grotesque “knowledge.” For Heidegger fully knew that the situation man confronts goes beyond the framework of “humanist” thought. This is not to say, however, that Heidegger capably dealt with this situation.

Medicine has sought to distance man from illness and, in its turn, death. It was at one time self-evident that the phrase “to distance man from death” referred to one man’s life and death. Now, however, the extension of one life requires the utilization of another “death.” The prolongation of one man’s life is achieved through a partial compositing with other men, and is carried out by sacrificing the identity of the “individual” on at least the corporeal level. Here we can already glimpse a “communality” at the corporeal level of the “individual” itself.

Death was that which completed and concluded the being of the individual, constituting proper being as such. While death’s postponement delays the completion of the individual, the postponement of death through present technology as well as the “immortality” envisioned therein does not simply postpone the individual’s death, it also changes its identity. Such change takes place not only in the recipient, whose life is extended through organs that are not his own, but also in the donor, whose organs become, so to speak, recyclable parts. The possibility of organ transplantation is premised upon the understanding that the body itself is divisible, that its parts can at a certain level lose their propriety and be exchanged. Of course this is not to say that the universality of the concept of “organ” does not already imply this. Yet such implication (e.g., that a liver be any liver) only first took into account actual “exchangeability” through advances in technology. In order to liberate the exchanged partial body from personality and propriety, the idea emerges to assign the roles of forming man’s propriety and controlling personal identity exclusively to the brain. If, however, the loss of the brain’s integrating function does not result in the body’s becoming mere individual-less exchangeable parts, but rather parts with their own lives (even if this now seems like a frayed bundle), then it could be said that the brain’s integration is enabled by this composite of living individual parts, rather than the individual-less parts being integrated by the brain as center. Assuming it were technologically possible, moreover, organ transplantation might advance to the point where the brain itself could be transplanted, just like the heart and liver, for transplant technology makes no essential distinction between the brain and other organs.

If the praxis of organ transplantation is based on a thoroughly physiological and functional grasp of the body, then the exchangeability and compositing of the “individual” must be understood as such on a material level. In other words, man is made not through “spirit,” but “corporeality”: “I” am this personality not through the brain’s integration, but rather in the composite nature of this body; and “my” personal identity is not a simple, invariable essence as guaranteed by the brain’s identity, but rather a variable that can at any time be reorganized by this body’s composite nature. “I” am nobody, and it is only through this fact that the “I” first has life. Were this not the case, it would be impossible to reclaim the experience of “impersonal existence” on the part of those who suffer “personal death” and become barely existing, expendable objects living on until their final demise.

In an essay on the world of the concentration camps as depicted in Robert Antelme’s novel The Human Race, Blanchot examines man’s appalling need to live even in the most destitute of situations. When those who survived the camps speak of the brutality of their experiences, it is not only the absolute violence of their captors that they mention, but also the conflict of naked egos among the now personality-less prisoners, which unfolded like images of hell. Under the pitiless scorn of their captors, life-and-death struggles were waged between helpless prisoners over a morsel of bread or a drop of soup. Stripped of their personality, these prisoners lost their self-respect and concern for others, for otherwise they could not have survived this “otherworld.” The survivors of the camps perhaps enjoyed certain privileges or abandoned others to their misfortunes, but in any case they lived “inhumanely,” and it was this that made their memories all the more unbearable (according, for instance, to Primo Levy, who committed suicide in 1984).³ For these people, being placed in inhuman conditions meant that one could only live “inhumanly.” Human life in such an inhuman environment is reduced to one’s most basic needs of “living” and “eating.” There is of course no concern for others here, for what sustains life is only the “animal” need to live. This “primordial need” of those forced to live such an “inhuman existence” is described by Blanchot as follows:

[This need] relates me no longer either to myself or to my self-satisfaction, but to human existence pure and simple, lived as lack at the level of need. And it is still no doubt a question of a kind of egoism, and even of the most terrible kind, but of an egoism without ego where man, bent on survival, and attached in a way that must be called abject to living and always living on, bears this attachment to life as an attachment that is impersonal, as he bears this need as a need that is no longer his own need proper but as a need that is in some sense neutral, thus virtually the need of everyone. “To live,” as Antelme more or less says, “is then all that is sacred.”⁴

As Primo Levy writes, the survivors are sometimes confronted with the cruel question of why they went on living under such conditions (the survivors themselves no doubt ask this same question). I do not know whether the prisoners of the camps remained alive through the will to live. Placed in a situation that strips away all human will, one might say rather that they survived precisely because they utterly lost their will and were reduced to a kind of pure instinct. That is, precisely because they had no will, they unthinkingly just ate whatever was placed before them. Thus Blanchot, finding these people reduced to the “most basic needs” of existence, regards such “attachment to life” as impersonal. Because, as Blanchot writes, this is no longer “my” need (for the subject that says “I” has been destroyed) but rather impersonal need, the need of this “person” who is now a naked corporeal existence “potentially bears the needs of all people,” such that the life of one “person” is equivalent to the life of all “people.” With these words, Blanchot affirms and “sanctifies” those anonymous, impersonal corporeal existences who lived through an inhuman situation as “inhuman” in their very impersonality. Too wretched to be remembered and too cruel to be forgotten, this “inhuman” experience has no resting place within any normal “personal existence” (survivors not only were treated “inhumanly,” they prolonged their own lives as “inhumans”). It is this “fractured present” of those suffering from the “disobedient past” that Blanchot affirms without solace or deceit, and in so doing seeks to “save” these people.

Rather than deny or rationalize the “meaning” of personality-less existence (corporeal existence) from the standpoint of personality, Blanchot seeks to affirm the two in the very knot of their shifting (between the loss and recovery of personality, between personal and impersonal being). His thinking is extremely suggestive in its reflection upon another “corporeal being,” in which “anthropological death” is pronounced and personality removed. If the state of personal “death” is regarded simply as “nothing” and its experience considered one of exceptional misfortune that is best forgotten, then (the time of) lost life becomes merely a meaningless and pitiable lack. “If only this misfortunate lack were compensated for by the fullness of a ‘redeemed life’”—such is the “economy of compensation.” If “lost life” represents one part of a man’s life, then this lack is offset by a “redeemed life.” Likewise, if “compensation” functions within social relations, then such a pure offsetting or balancing out is socioeconomically expanded through the notions of “sacrifice” and “donation.” Individual existence is considered irreplaceable, and yet precisely because of this irreplaceability—in other words, death is proper, and no one can die in place of another—“death” can become a “sacrifice” and a “donation.” When “death” becomes a sacrifice and a donation, it is ultimately compensated for by that other “life” that receives this favor. Otherwise, sacrifice and donation would never take place. Here, sacrifice and donation depend ultimately upon an “economy of compensation.” The “propriety of death” raises the value of sacrifice and donation, and compensates for the fact that compensation is merely “compensation,” thereby hiding the truth that in this “economy of compensation” even propriety can be supplemented. However, the aim of Blanchot’s thinking here is not to compensate that which is lost with something else; rather it is to ensure that what was in the state of “nothingness” be “sanctified” in the present while yet remaining “nothing.” Hence “what is lost (and lived in death)” is affirmed within “something else (extended life),” even as it remains “what was nothing.” In other words, “what is lost” is now reborn within “something else.” Here there is no “economy of compensation,” for everything is saved as it is.

It is only because “I” am nobody that “I” have life—this “nobody” that supports the “I” is a corporeal existence that can be ascribed to no person, and is revealed only upon the demise of “my” personality. In discarding this “anonymous body” as “nothing,” “my” present, surviving life would also be lost, for “I” am revived only in being borne by that “nothing.” Confronted now with the concrete emergence of a personality-less “corporeal existence,” what is to be demanded? It is not that we treat the otherwise “worthless” body (parts) as usable material resources, reclaiming the body’s “meaninglessness” within “utility,” thereby strengthening an inflexible “humanism.” Rather we might affirm this “meaninglessness” as such, allowing it to spread within us through the compositing of the “individual” at a bodily level, thus transforming “man” himself. We must accept the changing nature of the being of the “individual” and consciousness of “communality.”

For hundreds of thousands of years, man has died in his naturally proper body. With the exchangeability of bodily parts, however, man is no longer man in his propriety. Without taking into account this “no-longer man,” or man’s composite being, we can only fraudulently accept the possibility of transplant technology—and hence we will be unable to “revive” that neutral body. In effect, we must seek “rebirth” rather than “compensation.”

At the level of existence at which bodily parts become exchangeable between individuals, the compositing of the individual itself emerges within the universal reserve of death. Of course organ transplantation is not unconditionally possible. On the whole, actual transplants involve such a variety of practical constraints that every case seems unique. For man, however, the meaning of this situation as such is utterly fundamental. The exchangeability of parts renders individuality itself composite, thus changing the meaning of the event of “death,” which completes the individual as absolute unit. In the world of the individual as exchangeable composite, even death comes to be cheated in the formation of new composites. Death occurs only with the individual, but this individual is now variable and recombinable.

Just as there is no death in the existence of single-celled organisms, so “immortality” returns to the human world. Yet this is not the “immortality” of everlasting “spirit,” but rather a materialist “immortality” as grounded in the dimension of material life. With this return of “immortality,” man is now nomadized. Such nomadization does not simply take place in man as “individual,” however, as this “individual” is itself already a nomadized composite of partial lives. Levinas calls il y a (there is) the state of impersonal or “neutral” existence as exposed to the fear of being unable to die while dying. According to Levinas, “negativity” is no longer effective in this il y a, for it can only be destroyed or eradicated here. “Immortal” man as this composite of partial lives exists—if one can say this—on the surface of il y a. Such il y a is freed from the violent pursuit of “negativity” and transformed into something benign.

The image of the world of immortality is always haunted by an air of inauspiciousness. This is perhaps because immortality generally refers to that which should die, and thus the disappearance of death is at once its dispersal. When immortality is envisioned as the negation of limited life or the postponement of everlasting death, the decision on the “individual” is deferred: the “individual” is maintained as unchanging while the shadow of death grows the more death is delayed. If this world of life grows increasingly inauspicious, this is because “immortality” as the negation of death does not disturb the notion of the “individual.”

The notion of “immortality” embraced here, however, represents the consequences of dissolving the “individual’s” absoluteness, as the partial lives untied from the “individual” bundle both cut across and recombine “individuals.” Death completes the individual and ensures its substantiality. Yet the dissolution of individual absoluteness evades death. Death is visited upon the “individual,” but this “individual” is already faint. The “immortality” that now comes into view occurs not as the individual’s permanence, but rather as the attenuating of a death that has lost its support. There is thus nothing inauspicious here. Just as division at the level of single-celled organisms eliminates “death” and is explained materially as “immortality,” so too does the compositing of the “individual” attenuate “death.”

Of course this does not mean that each individual existence is incorporated within one permanent and totalizing essence (the Other) that transcends the individual, as the individual’s death is not overcome by integration within this essence. Rather such deaths are dissolved within the event that takes place on the same surface as “individual” existence in the form of a hybridization of partial beings at the material level, a relay, sharing, and compositing of the “individual.”

This principle radically “de-essentializes” and nomadizes existence. Technology has now allowed this principle to come into view at the material level, but it extends to the “individual” at every level of human existence. The transformation of “death” is decisive for man, and profoundly changes the very conditions upon which we think of the human. All forms of the “individual”—corporeal, spiritual, cultural, and communal—reveal this aspect of hybridization. “Individuality” of course remains, allowing us to speak of the individual as individual. However, this individual is now rendered transparent by virtue of the composite nature of individuality itself, and this both allows for the emergence of the individual’s own diverse coloring and provides for the freedom to always accept rebirth, or metamorphosis. This process is not something that has begun only now, however, for man was originally like this, even before entering upon the “humanist” impasse. Death binds the individual to an essence that is fixed to a certain truth. From the material dimension of partial lives, however, the material “immortality” that has now come into view again reminds us that man, his practices, thinking, communality, and “culture” can always be a free composite, one that is not determined by the essence of death.

2. See, for example, the article by Morioka Masahiro and Akabayashi Akira, “‘Nōshi’ shintai no kakushu riyō” [The various uses of the “brain dead” body], in Chūō kōron (May 1988). Intended as a contribution to fruitful “calm discussion” on “brain death” by a young scholar of “bioethics” and a doctor, this essay explains the possibilities regarding those “various uses of the brain dead body” that are far more “important” (if relatively unknown) than organ transplant. Written as if exploiting a new resource, it reads like a kind of black humor parody on the benefits of “brain death.” It is the naïveté of these techno-elites, who do not for one moment dwell on the uncanny desire for “brain death” but rather speak triumphantly only of its “benefits” for the “general public,” that comes across as being so uncanny. It is clear that such scholars of bio-“ethics” regard “ethical problems” here simply in terms of the psychological aftercare given to those family and friends of the “brain dead body.”