Learning to live up to death — finally: Ricoeur and Derrida on the textuality of immortality

Abstract

In the ninth fragment of his posthumous work Living Up to Death, Paul Ricoeur reflects on Jacques Derrida’s final interview given to the French newspaper Le Monde just months prior to his death. Although he confesses to a genuine distanciation from Derrida regarding salient aspects of their individual memento mori, he does so within the context of significant concessions of agreement. I argue in this article that their differing positions de facto agree at a critical structural level with reference to the possibility of positing something akin to a textual immortality. Both contend that traces of the author remain in the corpus of a work, a remainder that allows for a form of resurrection through reading. By analogizing their perspectives with Rudolf Bultmann’s kerygmatic resurrection of Christ in the proclaimed word, I conclude that Ricoeur and Derrida contend that one truly learns to live up to death ‘ finally’, that is, enfin — ‘at last’, ‘after all’, or one might say, ‘ in a word’.

Going Public: Performing Dying in the Second Decade of the 21st Century

“…Seen in this light, the intense creative activity of those who – in the liminal period between terminal diagnosis and death – perform their dying publicly, speaks to a rejection of a moribund existence in favour of living fully, in the now, and up to the moment of death. It reflects not only a ‘jouissance for life in the face of death’ (Putt, 2011: 240) but a more clearly defined sense of purpose in which life is experienced more vividly in the firmament provided by knowledge of one’s own non-being. Those who narrate their experiences of dying publicly routinely talk of feeling more alive in dying than in life itself; as if giving testimony to the metaphoric notion of how a candle burns brightest just before it is extinguished.…”