Awaiting Faith: Jacques Derrida and the Impossible Encounter with Death

What implications does the fact of death have for religious faith? In his Aporias, Jacques Derrida probes Heidegger's well known analysis, from Being and Time, of human death as constituting the “ownmost possibility” of human being (in Heidegger's terminology, Dasein). Derrida deems Heideg...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Pacifica
Main Author: Martis, John (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Sage Publ. 2005
In: Pacifica
Year: 2005, Volume: 18, Issue: 1, Pages: 1-17
Online Access: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Parallel Edition:Non-electronic
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Summary:What implications does the fact of death have for religious faith? In his Aporias, Jacques Derrida probes Heidegger's well known analysis, from Being and Time, of human death as constituting the “ownmost possibility” of human being (in Heidegger's terminology, Dasein). Derrida deems Heidegger's account susceptible to a fatal aporia, or logical impasse. Developing Derrida's investigation, this article further invokes Maurice Blanchot and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, linking their work to that of John D. Caputo. It proposes that death, far from confirming us as selves, confirms us as selves-in-loss. Curiously, though, this implies that the religious or “faith” attitude, properly and broadly interpreted as “a saying of ‘yes' to the radically impossible”, is intrinsic to the interpretation of experience as such.
ISSN:1839-2598
Contains:Enthalten in: Pacifica
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1177/1030570X0501800101