Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 63 页

We are now in a position to comment on Heidegger’s culminating definition of death. Following his order of presentation, death is, in full: Dasein’s ownmost possibility, which is non-relational [unbezügliche], unsurpassable [unüberholbar], certain [gewiß] and indefinite [unbestimmt].⁹² Grounding each of these dimensions is what Heidegger calls the ‘in each case mineness’ [Jemeinigkeit] of Dasein’s death which, after John Haugeland, indicates that in being-towards-death, it is not Dasein per se which is ‘mine’, but rather Dasein in each respective case which is ‘mine’.⁹³ The extent to which a conception of the limit is interwoven through each of these dimensions is readily apparent. However, there is an equally apparent philosophical problem with this conception of death, a problem which is not beget by the concept of the limit as such, but rather by the particular individualising character of the limit which underlies being-towards-death. This is the well-documented problem which Dasein’s originary sociality (the equi-originary existentiales of being-with and Dasein-with) constitutes for being-towards-death. For Levinas, the individualising structure of being-towards-death in Heidegger ignores the ethical, non-derivative structure of responsibility for the Other which produces ‘a world where I can die as a result of someone and for someone.’⁹⁴ For Ricœur, the ‘intimist tendency’ at the core of Heidegger’s analysis of death conceals the full scope of the ‘horizon of the world…from our sight.’⁹⁵ It is possible to mitigate these critiques through the ambiguities inherent within certain passages. For instance, when Heidegger states that ‘death lays claim to it [Dasein] as an individual Dasein’⁹⁶, it is important to recall that it is unclear what the exact contours of this ‘individual’ are, since, as earlier suggested, the individuation of Dasein signifies the demarcation of Dasein from other domains of entity, not – at least originarily – the difference of one individual human being from another. In this sense, and on the condition that being-with and Dasein-with are in fact originary existentiales, we might suggest that death lays claim to Dasein as, to invoke Nietzsche, an ‘individual more-thanindividual’ (wherein the latter individual is an individual human being but the former individual is not). However, the stance that ‘death individualises – but only in such a manner that…it makes Dasein, as being-with, have an understanding of the ability-to-be of others’⁹⁷ undercuts the philosophical potential of the individual and the social alike, because the content of this understanding is not the same understanding which first ‘raise[s] the question of this entity’s ability-to-be-a-whole’. The latter understanding is in both existential and existentiell opposition to the former, given that ‘all being-alongside things of concern and all being-with others…fails when the ownmost ability-to-be is at stake.’⁹⁸ Despite their originary status, concern and solicitude have been relegated to second-rate existentiale. From the standpoint of being-towards-death, they are not constitutive limits of Dasein’s ability-to-be-a-whole, but mere barriers which Dasein can choose to overcome, and in fact must choose to overcome, if it is to free itself from the illusions of ‘the one’.

the non- and excessive possibility of existence. If Heidegger is in fact invoking Unmöglichkeit in this doubled sense, it is possible to suggest that death erases any measure to possibility both within and outside the limit, thus grounding the ontological importance of the limit. See White, ‘Dasein, Existence, and Death’, 342.

⁹² Heidegger, SZ, 349-52 (BT, 307-10).

⁹³ Haugeland, ‘Truth and Finitude: Heidegger’s Transcendental Existentialism’, 62. As previously indicated (see footnote 47), this specification of Jemeinigkeit adds weight to the idea that Dasein is not already always a human individual, that there is, in other words, a unique and separate Dasein for each individual person.

⁹⁴ Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: an Essay on Exteriority [1961], trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague/Boston/London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1979), 239.

⁹⁵ Ricœur, Time and Narrative, Volume 3, 295, ft. 38. Consider Ricœur’s comment in light of the fact that the ‘horizon’ (from the Greek horizein) is that which limits, surrounds and encloses. Simon Critchley’s insistence on the ‘fundamentally relational character of finitude’ qua the ‘originary inauthenticity’ of death is a thought-provoking but ultimately unconvincing reworking of Heidegger, because it strips all existentiality away from Heidegger’s explicitly existential conception of death, and because the novelty of his ‘originary inauthenticity’ is premised on the notion that authenticity is the exclusive domain of the origin in Being and Time, which is simply untrue [ursprüngliche ≠ eigentliche]. See Simon Critchley, ‘Originary Inauthenticity – on Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit’, in Simon Critchley and Reiner Schürmann, On Heidegger’s Being and Time, ed. Steven Levine (London: Routledge, 2008), 144.

⁹⁶ Heidegger, BT, 308.

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