Beyond the Death Principle

This is a review essay about Marc Crépon'sThe Thought of Death and the Memory of War(2013), a study of efforts by postwar French thinkers to come to terms with and in most cases attempt to overturn Heidegger's doctrine of Being-toward-death. The book includes sections on Sartre, Levinas, and Derrida. Crépon's central concern is whether one's relationship to one's own mortality is an essentially isolating, even atomizing dynamic, or if it is possible to envision genuinely collective engagements with death. I argue that Crépon's account of the ethical challenges inherent to these questions is more complete than his description of what a communal politics of death would be, and I suggest that his analysis could be expanded to include reflections on Hegel and on Adorno's critiques of Heidegger.