untergeher's Journal

The paradox inherent in representation of death is that 'death' is always culturally constructed, since outside any speaking subject's personal experience, outside and beyond the imaginary and symbolic registers [...] Placed beyond the register of images that the living body can know, 'Death' can only be read as a trope, as a signifier with an incessantly receding, ungraspable signified, invariably always pointing back self-reflexively to other signifiers. Death remains outside clear categories. It is nowhere, because it is only a gap, a cut, a transition between the living body and the corpse, a before and an after, an ungraspable point, lacking any empiric object. At the same time it is everywhere, because death begins with birth and remains present on all levels of daily existence. It is the one privileged moment of absolutely real, of true, non-semiotic materiality as de-materailising or de-materialised body; it is the failure of the tropic. Non-negotiable and non-alteriable, death is the limit of language, disrupting our sign system and image repertoire. Signifying nothing, it silently points to the indertermination of meaning so that one can speak of death only by speaking other. As the point where all language fails it is also the source of all allegorical speaking.