EXPLAINING ONESELF WITH DEATH

Death, ‘the final chapter’. It seems appropriate to leave death till the end of my small subset of all of the possible ethical subjects this book might have addressed. But, it might just as well have been introduced at the beginning, or indeed be placed at any other point, as death hangs over every ethical subject/Subject as a figure of the inevitable end, of mortality, in other words; as the horizon from which a perspective on the ethical life of the Subject might be gained.

Of course, the contemporary philosophical themes of the ‘end of Man’, the postmodern critique of anthropocentrism, the ‘post-human’ and the question ‘who or what comes after the Subject?’, which set the scene for this book's discussion of ethical subjects, are not simply concerned with the fact of mortality as a natural phenomenon. They are concerned rather with how the identification of ‘the human’ as the source and measure of both truth and value limits the scope of critical thinking to the sphere of what has been referred to throughout this book as ‘the Same’.