It is well known that Being and Time is an unfinished work, or at least the completion of the goals that it sets for itself were not accomplished within the confines of the book. What we have is two divisions of a proposed six in which Heidegger articulates the basic structure of human existence and argues that this structure is founded on a particular type of temporality. Heidegger provides a rigorous analysis of death at the beginning of Division Two. We thus find death at the centre of Being and Time. Death allows Heidegger to grasp human existence in its totality and points the way towards his discussion of temporality, which occupies the remainder of Division Two.

That death is at the centre of Being and Time is not merely fortuitous, however. I will argue that death plays a transcendental role in Being and Time, and this role is highlighted by its placement. I read Being and Time as a profoundly (but not solely) Kantian text in which Heidegger articulates the conditions for the possibility of human existence. I will argue below that the conditions for the possibility of human experience are predicated on a lack. This lack is manifested in Being and Time as being towards death but arises in other guises in other texts. For example, in the texts immediately surrounding Being and Time this constitutive lack appears as ‘the nothing’ or ‘transcendence’. In later texts it appears as ‘Ereignis’ or ‘presencing’.