2 - Projections of Death
from Part I - Melancholia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
If uneasiness comes over him and threatens to develop into melancholia … he asks himself whether his anxiety has an object.
KantIn order to argue that death is one of the conditions for the possibility of experience, we need first to examine the nature of Dasein's experience. Having established this, I will argue that Dasein's experience is made possible by death. In Division One of Being and Time Heidegger is attempting to articulate Dasein in what he calls its ‘average everydayness’. Given the usual way we go about things, can we discern a structure which accounts for our particular way of being? Heidegger answers that we can, in fact, discern such a structure, and the name of that structure is ‘care’ (Sorge). Care, however, has many constituent parts, each of which points to a particular space that Dasein inhabits. Care, however, does not arise immediately in Being and Time. The analysis of care as Dasein's way of being is the result of the entirety of Heidegger's analysis in Division One. The first chapter of Division One simply introduces the analytic of Dasein and distinguishes it as more primordial than other analyses of human existence, such as anthropology, psychology or biology. In the second chapter Heidegger introduces the conception of ‘being in the world’ as Dasein's basic state. As we saw in the previous chapter, Dasein cannot be properly conceived as an isolated subject encountering isolated objects.
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- Death and Desire in Hegel Heidegger and Deleuze , pp. 38 - 53Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007