The Wall and the Changing Perception of Death in Confinement (original) (raw)
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JEAN-PAUL SARTRE’S “THE WALL”: A STUDY OF “BEING” AND “DEATH”
International Journal of Management and Applied Science, 2017
The objective of this paper titled “Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Wall”: A Study of “being” and “death” is to understand Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of the “being” through a study of the relationship between the ideas of “being” and “death” in his short story “The Wall”. Sartre, an existentialist philosopher and writer has extensively discoursed on the subject of “being” in his philosophical and literary works such as “Being and Nothingness”, “Existentialism Is a Humanism”, “The Wall”, “No Exit”, “The Flies” and such others. This paper is primarily concerned with the study of the ideas of being and death in Pablo, the protagonist of “The Wall”. Some of Sartre’s major existential concepts such as, “existence precedes essence”, “being-for-itself” and “bad faith” are portrayed through the character of Pablo. Contemplation on Sartre’s “being” is also a meditation on his concept of death. Death is not physical death per se, but death of fixated ideas and concepts. Thus, an exploration into the concept of death paves the way for a study of the idea of the “being”. In this paper, terms such as “being”, “self”, “person” and “personhood” are used interchangeably as they refer to ideas akin to the concept of “personhood”.
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES & SOCIAL STUDIES, 2019
This work consists of a critical appraisal of Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim of absolute freedom despite of the reality of death. If death terminates man’s transcendence and forecloses his possibilities, then it also does limit his freedom. It is the argument of this work that freedom has its limitation and the greatest of such is death. Though death may limit man’s freedom it is not the end of man. The work employing the expository and critical methods discussed the reality of death within the context of Sartre’s existential position on freedom. It is Sartre’s claim that death is outside man’s possibilities and thus cannot limit man’s freedom in the real sense since it comes from outside man. For him, when death comes the pour soi (man, consciousness or freedom) is no more. The work argues that death which terminates ones existence does limit his potentialities and possibilities. The work further argues against Sartre’s position that one’s death makes him a prey to other humans and also makes his existence absurd and meaningless. Against Sartre’s position, the work concludes that freedom has its limitations among which is death. Though death limits man’s possibilities, it is not the end of everything about man.
The Rigmaroles of Life and Death: A Study on the Politics of Death in Select Literary works
The paper attempts to study the role of death in determining ones existence. The existence of man is on the belief that he centres the universe and the enter universe conspires to make his life easy. He limits his life to his self and forgets the role of death-the universal leveller. Much study has gone into understanding the concept of death which still remains a mystery. The paper draws its strength from the writing of Jacque Derrida, Michel Foucault, Achille Mbembe and Gayathri Spivak. Death is an act performed by an individual in the times of his insecurity either as a protest against the norms or voluntary as a resistance to life. The question of whether a man has the right to tale one's life and for that matter other debatable. The paper extends its study on the role of nation or state in matters dealing with capital punishments and suicides.
2020
{}The presence of death in our lives is the price we pay for such joys as self-reflection, the arts, Gothic architecture and the simple pleasure of using salt and sugar, but how we establish a settlement for this debt, or even if we acknowledge those worrying 'notices of enforcement' slid under our door, is an important exercise in understanding our mortality. For beings of consciousness, the idea of living alongside one's own death and thinking on how we might best negotiate an acceptance of our finitude and finality is a complex web of subconscious thought, coping strategies, mindful practices and doses of wilful ignorance. In this respect, this paper seeks to make some connections between the philosopher Martin Heidegger's being-towards-death and the experience of the sublime, inquiring into what it might truly feel like to consider our own death, not that of others, and what kind of spaces might best expedite this feeling.
FACING DEATH: A SARTREAN PERSPECTIVE ON THE CONTEMPORARY TENDENCY TO OVER-HUMANIZE DEATH
Death within the Text: Social, Philosophical and Aesthetic Approaches to Literature, 2019
The contemporary Western society manifests a strong tendency to humanize death and to endow it with meaning. It does this in various ways, for instance through an overemphasis on the natural side of death, which has roots in an evolutionistic perception of life, or by casting a positive light upon death, which stems from the secular use of cultural elements belonging to traditional religions. The exaggerated humanization of death can be observed in literature, popular culture, and in many theories and research directions within the field of death studies/thanatology. This chapter discusses the main occurrences of the over-humanised death and exposes its ideological construction and the significant social, cultural and anthropological negative implications. The study uses the Sartrean philosophical perspective on death and dying as a theoretical framework. The French existentialist writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre engages in a negative relationship with death. According to Sartre, death is the ultimate embodiment of the inhuman, which accounts for its lack of relevance on the level of ontology, on the level of knowledge, and on the level of meaning. If death is a denial of human beings, the only thing left for them to do is to deny death in their turn. The Sartrean human being is always a being-against-death. This study strives to illustrate that there is a Sartrean lesson on death and dying that we could benefit from in terms of critical thinking in relation to certain contemporary approaches to death.
2022
This article is proposed as a study on the issue of the relationship between the datum of death and the aesthetic context of the creation of a literary work, and therefore of authorial poetics. Starting with an in-depth study of the concept of literature and poetics 'of death', it will be intended to proceed with research on the related philosophical and critical issues, to provide an overview of the most important insights on the subject. Thanks to a comparative and transmedia approach, the discourse will be addressed to the theory of death in literature, considering in a broad sense the most significant contemporary critical proposals. Thus, literary and cinematographic case studies will be proposed, as part of a reflection on the issue from a theoretical point of view. The ontological implications relating to the creation of the work of art will also be considered, in order to deepen, with full awareness, the relationship between the poetics of death and works of a not only artistic and literary nature, but also the testimonial.
Exploring the motifs of death and immortality
Journal of Language, Technology & Entrepreneurship in Africa, 2009
felt threatened by the eventuality of death, inculcating in them a fear so great that all possible strategies are engaged in the search for an avenue that would prepare them for this eventuality. A careful exploration of human activities surrounding the issues of death and immortality reveals an obsession with the expression of the possibility of defeating death through the artistic act. Art functions as the arena where human beings can mock, jeer, and repudiate mortality. Indeed, death is a central conundrum in philosophical, literary and even religious arguments that focus on human identity and reality. The usefulness of literature in exposing human fears, aspirations and desires is emphasized as literature functions as the meeting point where all manner of philosophies are presented and debated. In examining how the motifs of death and immortality are represented in the artistic act, it is imperative that this article draws from a wide range of genres. Apparently, both oral and w...
Dis)Figures of Death: Taking the Side of Derrida, Taking the Side of Death
Derrida Today, 2010
If the dominant ethico-philosophical thinking of responsibility in the West is founded upon, or tied to a certain figure of death, it is because this ethical notion of responsibility is also a certain econo-ontothanatology. Here the notion of the gift to the other is always already inscribed within a certain economic equivalence of value, or an economic determination of temporality as the geometric figure of the circle, or a certain economy of the experiences of abandonment and mourning, through which the event-character of the gift, its excess and its infinite surplus is economised, reduced, repressed, or even annulled. Reading Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of this econo-onto-thanatology, and relating him to Schelling, Heidegger, Levinas and Kierkegaard, this article attempts to reveal this very complex relationship of the ethical notion of responsibility and the gift with death, in order to think anew -in the spirit of Derrida -a responsibility in relation to mourning and abandonment, and in relation to a death that does not figure in any figuration of self-figuration and self-presence, but -to speak with Maurice Blanchot -as interminable, incessant worklessness, as endless ruination and abandonment of itself. This impossible aporia of the notion of responsibility is itself a dis-figuring of death, which is also an aporia of an instant which escapes, in its event character, the geometric figure of time as circle.
The excess of life and death in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness
Text, 2016
This paper examines two novels, both published in 2004 and later translated into English: 2666 by Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño and Senselessness by Honduran-Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya. Bolaño and Castellanos Moya write death and dying as a global concern and place readers in the global North at the centre of events that happened, or are happening, in the South. This paper argues that 2666 and Senselessness express the human potential in desire for, and to create, excess, universalising guilt against a tendency to contextualise or localise events of mass murder in Central and South America. Both novels represent death and dying while expressing an uncanny excess of life at the level of form and content. Bolaño and Castellanos Moya bombard the reader with the details of crimes and harrowing witness testimonies in their novels, but deny the reader closure or the ability to mourn the dead. Instead, the excess of life traces a void that, according to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and others, is at the centre of the subject of desire. It is at the level of desire that we can locate ourselves in both novels and understand our part in the events of mass murder their writers narrate.