The Other, the Irrevocability of Death and the Aporia of Mourning: A Hermeneutic Approach

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze the irrevocable character of death, the relation between the bereaved, wounded self and the dead Other, melancholia and the impossibility of mourning. The death of the Other constitutes a devastating experience for the self and entails the truth about the self’s own death, opening a path for a recognition of the irrevocable nature of death. Heidegger interprets death as the impossibility which makes being possible. Reflecting on death, Derrida dubs “Dying awaiting (one another at) the ‘limits of truth’.” Levinas is mostly preoccupied with the death of the Other; he underlines the relation between the self and the Other. For him the one who survives in the face of death feels blameworthy. Freud analyzes the relation between death and melancholia, differentiating between healthy and unhealthy mourning. All these propositions account for a vision of death as a phenomenon inasmuch inevitable as escaping any conceptualization. I substantiate the philosophical and psychological reflections with a hermeneutic interpretation of bereavement, melancholia and mourning encrypted in the fctional imagining of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Gardener.”