In this paper I compare two attitudes to death, and the two contrasting ways of understand ing mourning connected with these: one emphasizes the need to move on after loss has been suffered, the other stresses the need to reaffirm the value of what was lost. I argue that with out the latter prospects for both community formation and selfdetermination may be dam aged. I suggest this is because the death of another impoverishes the way we experience the world, threatening the continuity of mutually affirmed meanings and values which consti tute the Lebenswelt. However, this effect can be mitigated through the process of mourning which attempts to reclaim this experience. I argue that one of the most devastating aspects of twentieth century totalitarianism was the thwarting of mourning understood in this way.

One of the core themes of Stanisław Lem's 1961 novel Solaris is the encounter with radical otherness. The ocean planet being studied by scientists form earth is usually interpreted as a representation of radical otherness, which eludes human efforts of understanding. In this paper we argue that in Solaris Lem attempts to show not merely that the ocean is unknowable, but that the unknowability is itself impossible to adequately conceptualise and represent. However, we further argue that this impossibility is the subject of an experience in which the presence of otherness is made available. We focus on the images of chaos which Kelvin discovers on Solaris to show that Lem presents the epistemic situation of the main protagonist as radically unstable. Contrary to most interpretations, however, we argue that the discursive narration in the novel engages with the presence of otherness only superficially. Rather, we suggest that the encounter with otherness is shown as something that manifests itself in bodily emotions, and is, therefore, only possible to convey non-discursively. The fear and dread inspired by the vastness and strangeness of the ocean are always presented by appeal to sensuality and bodily experience. These emotive reactions to encounters with otherness subvert its conceptual representations. We suggest that in this way Lem attempts to convey what cannot be discursively described, or even depicted. He presents radical otherness as something impossible to represent conceptually but offers a vision of the possibility of an encounter with otherness through bodily emotions. On this interpretation Solaris is not only a novel about the encounter with otherness, but also about the very possibility of representing such an encounter.