Dead People

Their ultimate result of death is a sexual fantasy it exposes our attempt to control
life past death and reveals our necrophilic fascination with death
Erich Fromm 64, PhD in sociology from Heidelberg in 1922, psychology prof at MSU in the 60s,
Creators and Destroyers, The Saturday Review, New York (04. January 1964), pp. 22-25
People are aware of the possibility of nuclear war; they are aware of the destruction such a war could bring with it--and yet they seemingly make no effort to avoid it. Most of us are puzzled by this behavior because we start out from the premise that people love life and fear

death. Perhaps we should be less puzzled if we questioned this premise. Maybe there are people who are indifferent to life and
many many others who do not love life but who

do love death . There is an orientation which we may call love of life (biophilia); it is the normal orientation among healthy persons. But there is also to be found in others a deep attraction to death which, following Unamuno's classic speech made at the

University of Salamanca (1938), I call necrophilia. It is the attitude which a Franco general, Milln Astray, expressed in the slogan "Long live death, thus provoking Unamunos protest against this "necrophilous and senseless cry." Who is

a necrophilous person? He is one who is attracted to and fascinated by all that is not alive, to all that is dead ; to corpses, to decay, to feces, to dirt. Necrophiles are those people who love to talk
about sickness, burials, death . They come to life precisely when they can talk about death. A clear example of the purenecrophilous type was Hitler. He was fascinated by destruction, and the smell of death was sweet to him. While in the years of success it

may have appeared that he wanted only to destroy those whom he considered his enemies, the days of the Gtterdmmerung at the end showed that his deepest satisfaction lay in witnessing total and absolute destruction: that of the German people, of those around him, and

of himself. The necrophilous dwell in the past, never in the future. Their feelings are essentially sentimental; that is, they nurse the memory of feelings which they had yesterday--or believe that they had. They are cold, distant, devotees of "law and order." Their values are

precisely the reverse of the values we connect with normal life; not life, but death excites and satisfies them. If one wants to understand the influence of men like Hitler and Stalin, it lies precisely in their unlimited capacity and willingness to kill. For this

they' were loved by the necrophiles. Of the rest, many were afraid of them and so preferred to admire, rather than to be aware of, their fear. Many others did not sense the necrophilous quality of these leaders and saw in them the builders, saviors, good fathers. If

the necrophilous leaders had not pretended that they were builders and protectors, the number of people attracted to them would hardly have been sufficient to help them seize power, and the number of those repelled by them would probably soon have led to their downfall.

While life is characterized by growth in a structured, functional manner, the necrophilous principle is all that which does not grow, that which is mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically,

as if all living persons were things. All living processes, feelings, and thoughts are transformed into things. Memory, rather than experience--having, rather than being--are what counts. Thenecrophilous person can relate to an object--a flower or a person--only if he possesses it;

hence, a threat to his possession is a threat to himself; if he loses possession he loses contact with the world. That is why we find the paradoxical reaction that he would rather lose life than possession, even though, by losing life, he who possesses has ceased to exist. He loves

control, and in the act of controlling he kills life. He is deeply afraid of life, because it is disorderly and uncontrollable by its very nature. The woman who wrongly claims to be the mother of the child in the story of Solomon's judgment is typical of this tendency; she would rather

have a properly divided dead child than lose a living one. To the necrophilous person justice means correct division, and they are willing to kill or die for the sake of what they call, justice. "Law and order" for them are idols, and everything that threatens law and order is felt as a

satanic attack against their supreme values. The necrophilous person is attracted to darkness and night. In mythology and poetry (as well as in dreams) he is attracted to caves, or to the depth of the ocean, or depicted as being blind. (The trolls in Ibsen's Peer Gynt are a good

example.) All that is away from or directed against life attracts him. He wants to return to the darkness {23} of the womb, to the past of inorganic or subhuman existence. He is essentially oriented to the past, not to the future, which he hates and fears. Related to

in order to make life controllable, it must be transformed into

this is his craving for certainty. But life is never certain, never predictable, never controllable;

death ; death, indeed, is the only thing about life that is certain to him. The necrophilous person can often be recognized by his looks and his gestures. He is cold, his skin looks dead, and often he has an expression on his

face as though he were smelling a bad odor. (This expression could be clearly seen in Hitler's face.) He is orderly and obsessive. This aspect of the necrophilous person has been demonstrated to the world in the figure of Eichmann. Eichmann was fascinated by order and death.

His supreme values were obedience and the proper functioning of the organization. He transported Jews as he would have transported coal. That they were human beings was hardly within the field of his vision; hence, even the problem of his having hated or not hated his

victims is irrelevant. He was the perfect bureaucrat who had transformed all life into the administration of things. But examples of the necrophilous character are by no means to be found only among the inquisitors, the Hitlers and the Eichmanns. There are any number of

individuals who do not have the opportunity and the power to kill, vet whose necrophilia expresses itself in other and (superficially seen) more harmless ways. An example is the mother who will always be interested in her child's sickness, in his failures, in dark prognoses for the

future; at the same time she will not be impressed by a favorable change nor respond to her child's joy, nor will she notice anything new that is growing within him. We might find that her dreams deal with sickness, death, corpses, blood. She does not harm the child in any

obvious way, yet she may slowly strangle the child's joy of life, his faith--in growth, and eventually infect him with her own necrophilous orientation. My description may have given the impression that all the features mentioned here are necessarily found in

the necrophilous person. It is true that such divergent features as the wish to kill, the worship of force, the attraction to death and dirt, sadism, the wish to transform the organic into the inorganic through "order" are all part of the same basic orientation. Yet so far as individuals

are concerned, there are considerable differences with respect to the strength of these respective trends. Any one of the features mentioned here may be more pronounced in one person than in another. Furthermore, the degree to which a person is necrophilous in comparison

with his biophilous aspects and the degree to which a person is aware of necrophilous tendencies and rationalizes them vary considerably from person to person. Yet the concept of the necrophilous type is by no means an abstraction or summary of various disparate behavior

trends. Necrophilia constitutes a fundamental orientation; it is the one answer to life that is in complete opposition to life; it is the most morbid and the most dangerous among the orientations to life of which man is capable. It is true perversion; while living, not life but death is

loved--not growth, but destruction. The necrophilous person, if he dares to be aware of what he feels, expresses the motto of his life when he says: "Long live death!" The opposite of the necrophilous orientation is the biophilous one; its essence is love of life in contrast to love of

death. Like necrophilia, biophilia is not constituted by a single trait but representsa total orientation, an entire way of being. It is manifested in a person's bodily processes, in his emotions, in his thoughts, in his gestures; the biophilous orientation expresses itself in the whole

man. The person who fully loves life is attracted by the process of life in all spheres. He prefers to construct, rather than to retain. He is capable of wondering, and he prefers to see something new to the security of finding the old confirmed. He loves the adventure of living more

than he does certainty. His approach to life is functional rather than mechanical. He sees the whole rather than only the parts, structures rather than summations. He wants to mold and to influence by love, by reason, by his example--not by force, by cutting things apart, by the

bureaucratic manner of administering people as if they were things. He enjoys life and all its manifestations, rather than mere excitement. Biophilic ethics has its own principle of good and evil. Good is all that serves life; evil is all that serves death. Good is reverence for life (this

is the main thesis of Albert Schweitzer, one of the great representatives of the love of life--both in his writings and in his person), and all that enhances life. Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, {24} cuts it into pieces. Thus it is from the standpoint of life-ethics that the Bible

mentions as the central sin of the Hebrews: "Because thou didst not serve thy Lord with joy and gladness of heart in the abundance of all things." The conscience of the biophilous person is not one of forcing oneself to refrain from evil and to do good. It is not the superego

described by .Freud, a strict taskmaster employing sadism against oneself for the sake of virtue. The biophilous conscience is motivated by its attraction to life and joy; the moral effort consists in strengthening the life loving side in oneself. For this reasons the biophile does not

dwell in remorse and guilt, which are, after all, only aspects of self-loathing and sadness. He turns quickly to life and attempts to do good. Spinoza's Ethics is a striking example of biophilic morality. "Pleasure," he says, "in itself is not bad but good; contrariwise, pain in itself is

A free man thinks of death least of all things; and wisdom is a meditation
bad." And in the same spirit: " of life his not of death but ." Love

that aim is to be
of life underlies the various versions of humanistic philosophy. In various conceptual forms these philosophies are in the same vein as Spinoza's; they express the principle that the same man loves life; man's in life

attracted by all that is alive and to separate himself from all that is dead and mechanical. The dichotomy of biophilia-necrophilia is the same as Freud's life-and-death instinct. I believe, as Freud did, that this is the most

fundamental polarity that exists. However, there is one important difference. Freud assumes that the striving toward death and toward life are two biologically given tendencies inherent in all living substance that their respective strengths are relatively constant, and that there is

only one alternative within the operation of the death instinct--namely, that it can be directed against the outside world or against oneself. In contrast to these assumptions I believe that necrophilia is not a normal biological tendency, but a pathological phenomenon--in fact, the

most malignant pathology that exists in mail. What are we, the people of the United States today, with respect to necrophilia and biophilia? Undoubtedly our spiritual tradition is one of love of life. And not only this. Was there ever a culture with more love of "fun" and

excitement, or with greater opportunities for the majority to enjoy fun and excitement? But even if this is so, fun and excitement is not the same as joy and lov e of life; perhaps underneath there is indifference to life, or attraction to death? To answer this question we must

consider the nature of our bureaucratized, industrial, mass civilization. Our approach to life becomes increasingly mechanical. The aim of social efforts is to produce things, and. in the process of idolatry of things we transform ourselves into commodities. The question here is not

whether they are treated nicely and are well fed (things, too, can be treated nicely); the question is whether people are things or living beings. People love mechanical gadgets more than living beings. The approach to man is intellectualabstract. One is
interested in people as objects , in their common properties, in the statistical rules of mass behavior, not in living individuals. All this goes together with the increasing role of bureaucratic methods. In giant centers of

production, giant cities, giant countries, men are administered as if they were things; men and their administrators are transformed into things, and they obey the law of things. In a bureaucratically organized and centralized industrialism, men's tastes are manipulated so that

they consume maximally and in predictable and profitable directions. Their intelligence and character become standardized by the ever-increasing use of tests, which select the mediocre and unadventurous over the original and daring. Indeed, the bureaucratic-industrial

civilization that has been victorious in Europe and North America has created a new type of man. He has been described as the "organization man" and as homo consumens. He is in addition the homo mechanicus. By this I mean a "gadget man," deeply attracted to all that is

mechanical and inclined against all that is alive. It is, of course, true that man's biological and physiological equipment provides him with such strong sexual impulses that even the homo mechanicus still has sexual desires and looks for women. But there is no doubt that the

gadget man's interest in women is diminishing. A New Yorker cartoon pointed to this very amusingly: a sales girl trying to sell a certain brand of perfume to a young female customer recommends it by remarking, "It smells like a new sports car." Indeed, any observer of men's
behavior today will confirm that this cartoon is more than a clever joke. There are apparently a great number of men who are more interested in sports-cars, television and radio sets, space travel, and any number of gadgets than they are in women, love, nature, food; who are

more stimulated by the manipulation of non-organic, mechanical things than by life. Their attitude toward a woman is like that toward a car: you push the button and watch it race. It is not even too farfetched to assume that homo mechanicus has more pride in and is

more fascinated by, devices that can kill millions of people across a distance of several thousands of miles within minutes than he is frightened and depressed by

the possibility of such mass destruction. Homo mechanicus still likes sex {25} and drink. But all these pleasures are sought for in the frame of reference of the mechanical and the unalive. He expects that there must be a button which, if pushed, brings happiness, love, pleasure.

(Many go to a psychoanalyst under the illusion that he can teach them to find the button.) The homomechanicus becomes more and more interested in the manipulation of machines, rather than in the participation in and response to life. Hence he becomes indifferent to life,

fascinated by the mechanical, and eventually attracted by death and total destruction. This affinity between the love of destruction and the love of the mechanical may well have been expressed for the first time in Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto (1909). "A roaring motor-car,

which looks as though running on a shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. We wish to glorify war--the only health-giver of the world-militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful Ideas that kill the contempt for woman." Briefly

then, intellectualization, quantification, abstractification, bureaucratization, and reification--the very characteristics of modern industrial society--when applied to people rather than to things are not the principles of life but those of mechanics. People living in such a system must

lack of
necessarily become indifferent to life, even attracted to death. They are not aware of this. They take the thrills of excitement for the joys of life and live under the illusion that they are very much alive when they only have many things to own and to use. The

protest against nuclear wa r and the discussion of our "atomologists" of the balance sheet of total or half-total destruction show how far we have already gone into
the "valley of death. the shadow of "1 To speak of the necrophilous quality of our industrial civilization does not imply that industrial production as such is necessarily contrary to the principles of life. The question is whether the principles of

social organization and of life are subordinated to those of mechanization, or whether the principles of life are the dominant ones. Obviously, the industrialized world has not found thus far an answer, to the question posed here: How is it possible to create a humanist

industrialism as against the bureaucratic mass industrialism that rules our lives today? The danger of nuclear war is so grave that man may arrive at a new barbarism before he has even a chance to find the road to a humanist industrialism. Yet not all hope is lost; hence we might

awareness of our pathological

ask ourselves whether the hypothesis developed here could in any way contribute to finding peaceful solutions. I believe it might be useful in several ways. First of all,an

situation , while not yet a cure, is nevertheless a first step. If people became aware
more they of the difference between love of life and love of death, if became aware that they

could produce new

themselves are already far gone in the direction of indifference or of necrophilia, this shock alone reactions and healthy . Furthermore, the sensitivity toward those who recommend death might be increased.

Many might see through the pious rationalizations of the death lovers and change their admiration for them to disgust. Beyond this, our hypothesis would suggest one thing to those concerned with peace and survival: that every effort must be made to weaken the attraction of

death and to strengthen the attraction of life. Why not declare that there is only one truly dangerous subversion, the subversion of life? Why do not those who represent the traditions of religion and humanism speak up and say that there is no deadlier sin than love for death

and contempt for life? Why not encourage our best brains--scientists, artists, educators--to make suggestions on how to arouse and stimulate love for life as opposed to love for gadgets? I know love for gadgets brings profits to the corporations, while love for life requires fewer

things and hence is less profitable. Maybe it is too late.Maybe the neutron bomb, which leaves entire cities intact, but without life, is t o be the symbol of our civilization. But again, those of us who love life will not cease the struggle against necrophilia.

This necrophilia is ultimately part of the overarching structure of death related

representations within our discourse, thus losing all reference to the real world
through a constant criticism of credibility through images of destruction.
Baudrillard in 94 [Jean, The Illusion of the End p. 55-58]

In the case of the Romanian revolution, it was the faking of the dead in Timisoara which aroused a kind of moral
indignation and raised the problem of the scandal of 'disinformation' or, rather, of information itself as scandal. It
was not the dead that were the scandal, but the corpses being pressed into appearing before the
television cameras, as in the past dead souls were pressed into appearance in the register of deaths. It
was their being taken hostage, as it were, and our being held hostage too, as mystified TV viewers. Being
blackmailed by violence and death, especially in a noble and revolutionary cause, was felt to be worse than the
violence itself, was felt to be a parody of history. All the media live off the presumption of catastrophe and of
the succulent imminence of death. A photo in Liberation, for example, shows us a convoy of refugees 'which,
some time after this shot was taken, was to be attacked by the Iraqi army'. Anticipation of effects, morbid
simulation, emotional blackmail. It was the same on CNN with the arrival of the Scuds. Nothing is news if it
does not pass through that horizon of the virtual, that hysteria of the virtual - not in the psychological
sense, but in the sense of a compulsion for what is presented, in all bad faith, as real to be consumed as
unreal. In the past, to show something up as a fake, we said: 'It's just play-acting', 'It's all romance!', 'It's put on for
the cameras!'. This time, with Romania and the Gulf War, we were able to say, 'It's just TV!' Photographic or
cinema images still pass through the negative stage (and that of projection), whereas the TV image, the video
image, digital and synthetic, are images without a negative, and hence without negativity and without reference.
They are virtual and the virtual is what puts an end to all negativity, and thus to all reference to the real or to
events. At a stroke, the contagion of images, engendering themselves without reference to a real or an
imaginary, itself becomes virtually without limits, and this limitless engendering produces information as
catastrophe. Is an image which refers only to itself still an image? However this may be, that image raises the
problem of its indifference to the world, and thus of our indifference to it - which is a political problem. When
television becomes the strategic space of the event, it sets itself up as a deadly self-reference, it becomes a
bachelor machine. The real object is wiped out by news not merely alienated, but abolished. All that
remains of it are traces on a monitoring screen. Many Romanian eyewitness accounts speak of being
dispossessed of the event in this way, deprived of the lived experience they have of it by being submerged in the
media network, by being placed under house arrest in front of their television screens. Spectators then become
exoterics of the screen, living their revolution as an exoticism of images, themselves exogenous, touristic
spectators of a virtual history. From the moment the studio becomes the strategic centre, and the screen the
only site of appearance, everyone wants to be on it at all costs, or else gathers in the street in the glare of the
cameras, and these, indeed, actually film one another. The street becomes an extension of the studio, that is, of
the non-site of the event, of the virtual site of the event. The street itself becomes a virtual space. Site of the
definitive confusion of masses and medium, of the real-time confusion of act and sign. There is no will to
communicate in all this. The only irresistible drive is to occupy this non-site, this empty space of representation
which is the screen. Representation (political representation too) is currently a trough of depression -
meteorological depression - which the media fill up with their turbulences, with the same consequences as occur
when any kind of space is suddenly depressurized. The highest pressure of news corresponds to the lowest
pressure of events and reality [Ie reel]. The same unrealism in the Ceausescu trial. It is not the judicial procedure
itself which is scandalous but the video tape, unacceptable as the only, bloodless trace of a bloody event. In the
eyes of the whole world, this will remain an event forever suspect, for the sole reason of its - strangely obscene -
scenic abduction. This hidden jury, its voice striking out against the accused, these defendants we are forced to see
even though they are virtually dead, these dead prisoners shot a second time to meet the needs of news. One
might even wonder whether the actors in this staged event were not deliberately trying to make themselves seem
suspect in the eyes of world opinion, as though playing at sabotaging their image. At the same time, the Ceausescu
trial was pulled off perfectly as a video production, betraying a sharp sense of the image function, the blackmail-
function, the deterrence- function. Deep down, the intuitive grasp of these things has grown more sophisticated
over there, in the shadow of dictatorship, than it has with us. We have nothing to teach them. For, if the
Romanians themselves got high on this media speculation which served them as a revolutionary aphrodisiac, they
also dragged all the Western media into the same news demagogy. By manipulating themselves, they caused us
spontaneously to swallow their fiction. We bear the same responsibility as they do. Or, rather, there is no
responsibility anywhere. The question of responsibility cannot even be raised. It is the evil genius of news which
promotes such staging. When information gets mixed in with its source, then, as with sound waves, you get a
feedback effect - an effect of interference and uncertainty. When demand is maximal (and everywhere today
the demand for events is maximal), it short-circuits the initial situation and produces an uncontrollable
response effect. That is, ultimately, why we do the Romanians an injustice when we accuse them of manipulation
and bad faith. No one is responsible. It is all an effect of the infernal cycle of credibility . The actors and the
media sensed obscurely that the events in Eastern Europe had to be given credibility, that that revolution had
to be lent credibility by an extra dose of dead bodies. And the media themselves had to be lent credibility by
the reference to the people. Leading to a vicious circle of credibility, the result of which is the
decredibilizing of the revolution and the events themselves. The logical sequence of news and history turns
back against itself, bringing, in its cyclical movement, a kind of deflation of historical consciousness. The Americans
did just the same in the Gulf War. By the excessive nature of their deployment and stagecraft, by putting their
power and news control so extravagantly to the test, they decredibilized both war and news. They were the Ubus
of their wn power, just as the Romanians were the Ubus of their own mpotence. Excess itself engenders the
parody which invalidates the facts. And, just as the principle of economics is wrecked by financial
speculation, so the principle of politics [Ie politique] and history is wrecked by media speculation.

This only works to reduce peoples lives to mere numbers for debaters to consume in
their game. This fascination with the spectacle of death creates a culture with no
meaning, thus trivializing our existence.
Jean Baudrillard, 93 (Symbolic Exchange and Death trans Iain Grant, 162-3, 173-5, manpower is left deliberately in)
2. More importantly, that everyone should have a right to their life (habeas corpus habeas vitam) extends social jurisdiction over death. Death
is socialized like everything else, and can no longer be anything but natural, since every other death is a social scandal: we have not done what is
necessary. Is this social progress? No, it is rather the progress of the social, which even annexes death to itself. Everyone is dispossessed
of their death, and will no longer be able to die as it is now understood. One will no longer be free to live as long as possible. Amongst other
things, this signifies the ban on consuming ones life without taking limits into account. In short, the principle of natural death is

equivalent to the neutralization of life . 28 The same goes for the question of equality in death: life must be reduced
to quantity (and death therefore to nothing ) in order to adjust it to democracy and the law of equivalences. The same objective that is inscribed in the
monopoly of institutional violence is accomplished as easily by forced survival as it is by death: a forced life for lifes sake (kidney machines, malformed children on life-support machines, agony
prolonged at all costs, organ transplants, etc.). All these procedures are equivalent to disposing of death and imposing life, but according to what ends? Those of science and medicine? Surely
this is just scientific paranoia, unrelated to any human objective. Is profit the aim? No: society swallows huge amounts of profit This 'therapeutic heroism is characterised by soaring costs and
'decreasing benefits': they manufacture unproductive survivors_ Even if social security can still be analysed as 'compensation for the labour force in the interests of capital, this argument has no
purchase here_ Nevertheless: the system is facing the same contradiction here as with the death penalty. it overspends on the prolongation of life because this system of values is essential to
the strategic equilibrium of the whole; economically: however, this overspending unbalances the whole_ What is to be done? An economic choice becomes necessary, where we can see the
outline of euthanasia as a semi-official doctrine or practice_ We choose to keep 30 per cent of the uraemics in France alive (36 per cent in the USA!). Euthanasia is already everywhere, and the
ambiguity of making a humanist demand for it (as with the 'freedom' to abortion) is striking: it is inscribed in the middle to long term logic of the system. All this tends in the direction of an
increase in social control. For there is a clear objective behind all these apparent contradictions: to ensure control over the entire range of life and death. From birth control to death control,

the essential thing is

whether we execute people or compel their survival (the prohibition of dying is the caricature, but also the logical form of progressive tolerance),

that the decision is withdrawnfrom them: that their life and their death are never freely theirs, but that they live or die
according to a social visa. It is even intolerable that their life and death remain open to biological chance, since this is still a type of
freedom. Just as morality commanded you shall not kill', today it commands: 'You shall not die', not in any old way. anyhow, and only if the law
and medicine permit. And if
your death is conceded you, it will still be by order. In short: death proper has been abolished
to make room for death control and euthanasia strictly speaking, it is no longer even death, but something
completely neutralised that comes to be inscribed in the rules and calculations of equivalence: rewriting-
planning-programming-system. It must be possible to operate death as a social service,integrate it like health
and disease under the sign of the Plan and Social Security. This is the store of 'motel-suicides' in the USA, where, for a comfortable sum,
one can purchase one's death under the most agreeable conditions (like any other consumer good); perfect service, everything has been foreseen,
even trainers who give you back your appetite for life, after which they kindly and conscientiously send the gas into your room, without torment
and without meeting any apposition. A service operates these motel-suicides, quite rightly paid (eventually reimbursed?). Why did death not
become a social service when: like everything else: it is functionalised as individual and computable consumption in social input and output?

Only this questioning of necrophilic fascination allows us to recreate meaning in our

life.
Austin Kutscher, President of the Foundation of Thanatology and Professor Columbia University, 80 (Death & Existence, p. Foreward)
Within the educational setting, interdisciplinary relationships are altering the perspectives of those who must make decisions on the
care of terminally ill patients, the members of their families, and other involved professional staff. The approaches to and expectations from
therapeutic modalities are being broadened by new explorations into the ethics and values which should be automatically considered whenever
human lives are being cared for. Philosophical enlightenment adds indispensable historical clarification to scientific interventions on behalf of the
dying and the bereaved. Philosophy relates death to human existence and the quality of life the essential quality of human existence itself that
engages the consciences of those who would offer us humanistic medicine. Compassion and knowledge are the springs from which flow trust and
faith, without which man can live only a most deprived and barren existence. The
task is to know how and when decisions can
be made, to proceed thoughtfully while making them, to distinguish between what can and cannot be done and
what should and should not be done. In analyzing death, in interpreting its every significant nuance, Professor
Carse advances the cause of all who delve into the meaning of life. Mere survival is not enough to provide nourishment for
the soul of man. The message to be read in Philosophy and in Thanatology is the same: Life is a treasure which mankind must cherish a treasure
whose value increases exponentially when one being bestows solace on and acts to give love to

Debate is theater. Our 1AC allows an intimate encounter with death critical to turn
survival into life.
Razinsky 9 (Liran, University of Wisconsin, How to Look Death in the Eyes: Freud and Bataille)
Thus we see that the stakes are high. What is at stake is the attempt of the subject to grasp itself in totality. This attempt necessitates bringing
death into the account, but death itself hampers this very attempt. One never dies in the first person. Returning to Bataille, why does he
believe sacrifice to be a solution to Hegels fundamental paradox? For him, it answers the requirements of the human, for Man meets death
face to face in the sacrifice, he sojourns with it, and yet, at the same time, he preserves his life. In sacrifice, says Bataille, man destroys the
animal within him and establishes his human truth as a being unto death (he uses Heideggers term). Sacrifice provides a clear manifestation
of mans fundamental negativity, in the form of death (Bataille, Hegel 335-36; 286). The sacrificer both destroys and survives.
Moreover, in the sacrifice, death is approached voluntarily by Man. In this way the paradox is overcome, and yet remains open. We can
approach death and yet remain alive, but, one might ask, is it really death that we encountered, or did we merely fabricate a simulacrum?
Bataille insists elsewhere, however, that sacrifice is not a simulacrum, not a mere subterfuge. In the sacrificial ritual, a real
impression of horror is cast upon the spectators. Sacrifice burns like a sun, spreading radiation our eyes can hardly
bear, and calls for the negation of individuals as such (The Festival 313; 215). We did not fool death; we are burned in its
fire. Batailles idea of the sacrifice also addresses Freuds paradox. It might be impossible to imagine our own death directly, but it is possible
to imagine it with the aid of some mediator, to meet death through an others death. Yet on some level this others death must be our own as
well for it to be effective, and indeed this is the case, says Bataille. He stresses the element of identification: In the sacrifice, the sacrificer
identifies himself with the animal that is struck down dead. And so he dies in seeing himself die (Hegel 336; 287). There is no
sacrifice, writes Denis Hollier, unless the one performing it identifies, in the end, with the victim (166). Thus it is
through identification, through otherness that is partly sameness, that a solution is achieved. If it were us, we would die in the
act. If it were a complete other, it would not, in any way, be our death. Also noteworthy is Batailles stress on the involvement of sight: and so
he dies in seeing himself die (Hegel 336; 287), which brings him close to Freuds view of the nature of the problem, for Freud insists on the
visual, recasting the problem as one of spectatorship, imagining, perceiving. Batailles description recapitulates that of Freud, but renders it
positive. Yes, we remain as a spectator, but it is essential that we do so. Without it, we cannot be said to have met death. Significantly,
meeting death is a need, not uncalled-for. We must meet death, and we must remain as spectators. Thus it is through
identification and through visual participation in the dying that a solution is achieved, accompanied by the critical revaluation of
values, which renders the meeting with death crucial for humanness. Note that both possibilities of meeting
deathin the sacrificial-ritual we have just explored, and in theatre or art, to which we now turnare social. Thus Freuds text, although it
insists on the irrepresentability of death, actually offers, unintentionally perhaps, a possible way out of the paradox through turning to the
other. Death perhaps cannot
be looked at directly, but it can be grasped sideways, indirectly, vicariously through a
mirror, to use Perseuss ancient trick against Medusa. The introduction of the other, both similar to and different from
oneself, into the equation of death helps break out of the Cartesian circle with both its incontestable truth and its solipsism and affirmation of
oneself. The safety that theater provides, of essentially knowing that we will remain alive, emerges as a kind of
requirement for our ability to really identify with the other. In that, it paradoxically enables us to really get a taste of death.
Bataille radicalizes that possibility. Although Freud deems the estrangement of death from psychic life a problem, as we have seen and shall
see, theater is not a solution for him. With Bataille however, theater emerges as a much more compelling alternative. Again, it is a matter of a
delicate nuance, but a nuance that makes all the difference. The idea common to both authorsthat we can meet death through the other and
yet remain aliveis ambiguous. One can lay stress on that encounter or on the fact of remaining alive. 11 Freud SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2,
2009 75 Looking Death in the Eyes: Freud and Bataille tends to opt for the second possibility, but his text can also be read as supporting the
first. The benefit in bringing Freud and Bataille together is that it invites us to that second reading. An Encounter with Death Death in Freud is
often the death of the other. Both the fear of death and the death wish are often focused on the other as their object. But almost always it is as
though through the discussion of the other Freud were trying to keep death at bay. But along with Bataille, we can take this other more
seriously. Imagining our own death might be impossible, yet we can still get a glimpse of death when it is an other that dies. In one passage in
his text, the death of the other seems more explicitly a crucial point for Freud as wellone passage where death does not seem so distant.
Freud comments on the attitude of primeval Man to death, as described abovenamely that he wishes it in others but ignores it in himself.
But there was for him one case in which the two opposite attitudes towards death collided, he continues. It occurred when primeval man saw
someone who belonged to him diehis wife, his child, his friend []. Then, in his pain, he was forced to learn that one can die, too, oneself,
and his whole being revolted against the admission. (Thoughts 293) Freud goes on to explain that the loved one was at once part of himself,
and a stranger whose death pleased primeval man. It is from this point, Freud continues, that philosophy, psychology and religion sprang. 12 I
have described elsewhere (Razinsky, A Struggle) how Freuds reluctance to admit the importance of death quickly undermines this juncture of
the existential encounter with death by focusing on the emotional ambivalence of primeval man rather than on death itself. However, the
description is there and is very telling. Primeval man witnessed death, and his whole being revolted against the admission. Man could no
longer keep death at a distance, for he had tasted it in his pain about the dead (Freud, Thoughts 294). Once again, it is through the death of
the other that man comes to grasp death. Once again, we have that special admixture of the other being both an other and oneself that
facilitates the encounter with death. Something of myself must be in the other in order for me to see his death as relevant to myself. Yet his or
her otherness, which means my reassurance of my survival, is no less crucial, for if it were not present, there would be no acknowledgement of
death, ones own death always being, says Freud, ones blind spot. 13 Liran Razinsky SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 76 I mentioned
before Heideggers grappling with a problem similar to Batailles paradox. It is part of Heideggers claim, which he shares with Freud, that ones
death is unimaginable. In a famous section Heidegger mentions the possibility of coming to grasp death through the death of the other but
dismisses it, essentially since the other in that case would retain its otherness: the others death is necessarily the others and not mine (47:221-
24). Thus we return to the problem we started withthat of the necessary subject-object duality in the process of the representation of death.
Watching the dead object will no more satisfy me than imagining myself as an object, for the radical difference of both from me as a subject will
remain intact. But the possibility that seems to emerge from the discussion of Freud and Bataille is that in-between position of the person both
close and distant, both self and other, which renders true apprehension of death possible, through real identification. 14 As Bataille says,
regarding the Irish Wake custom where the relatives drink and dance before the body of the deceased: It is the death of an other, but in such
instances, the death of the other is always the image of ones own death (Hegel 341; 291). Bataille speaks of the dissolution of the subject-
object boundaries in sacrifice, of the fusion of beings in these moments of intensity (The Festival 307-11; 210-13; La Littrature 215; 70).
Possibly, that is what happens to primeval man when the loved one dies and why his whole being is affected. He himself is no longer sure of
his identity. Before, it was clearthere is the other, the object, whom one wants dead, and there is oneself, a subject. The show and the
spectators. Possibly what man realized before the cadaver of his loved one was that he himself is also an object, taking part in the world of
objects, and not only a subject. When he understood this, it seems to me, he understood death. For in a sense a subject subjectively never dies.
Psychologically nothing limits him, 15 while an object implies limited existence: limited by other objects that interact with it, limited in space,
limited in being the thought-content of someone else. Moreover, primeval man understood that he is the same for other subjects as other
subjects are for himthat is, they can wish him dead or, which is pretty much the same, be indifferent to his existence. The encounter made
primeval man step out of the psychological position of a center, transparent to itself, and understand that he is not only a spirit but also a thing,
an object, not only a spectator; this is what really shakes him. 16 The Highest Stake in the Game of Living Thus far we have mainly discussed our
first two questions: the limitation in imagining death and the possible solution through a form SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 77 Looking
Death in the Eyes: Freud and Bataille of praxis, in either a channeled, ritualized or a spontaneous encounter with the death of an other,
overcoming the paradox of the impossibility of representation by involving oneself through deep identification. We shall now turn to our third
question, of the value of integrating death into our thoughts. We have seen that Batailles perspective continuously brings up the issue of the
value of approaching death. The questions of whether we can grasp death and, if we can, how, are not merely abstract or neutral ones. The
encounter with death, that we now see is possible, seems more and more to emerge as possessing a positive value, indeed as fundamental.
What we shall now examine is Freuds attempt to address that positive aspect directly, an attempt that betrays, however, a deep ambivalence.
As mentioned, Freuds text is very confused, due to true hesitation between worldviews (see Razinsky, A Struggle). One manifestation of this
confusion is Freuds position regarding this cultural-conventional attitude: on the one hand he condemns it, yet on the other hand he accepts it
as natural and inevitable. For him, it results to some extent from deaths exclusion from unconscious thought (Thoughts 289, 296-97). Death
cannot be represented and is therefore destined to remain foreign to our life. 17 But then Freud suddenly recognizes an opposite necessity: not
to reject death but to insert it into life. Not to distance ourselves from it, but to familiarize ourselves with it: But this attitude [the cultural-
conventional one] of ours towards death has a powerful effect on our lives. Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the
highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American
flirtation, in which it is understood from the first that nothing is to happen, as contrasted with a Continental love-affair in which both partners
must constantly bear its serious consequences in mind. Our emotional ties, the unbearable intensity of our grief, make us disinclined to court
danger for ourselves and for those who belong to us. We dare not contemplate a great many undertakings which are
dangerous but in fact indispensable, such as attempts at artificial flight, expeditions to distant countries or experiments with
explosive substances. We are paralyzed by the thought of who is to take the sons place with his mother, the husbands with his
wife, the fathers with his children, if a disaster should occur. Thus the tendency to exclude death from our calculations in
life brings in its train many other renunciations and exclusions. Yet the motto of the Hanseatic League ran: Navigare
necesse est, vivere non necesse. (It is necessary to sail the seas, it is not necessary to live.) (Thoughts 290-91) Readers unfamiliar with
Freuds paper are probably shaking their heads in disbelief. Is it Freud who utters these words? Indeed, the oddity of this citation cannot be
over-estimated. It seems not to belong to Freuds Liran Razinsky SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 78 thought. One can hardly find any other
places where he speaks of such an intensification of life and fascination with death, and praises uncompromising risk-taking and the neglect of
realistic considerations. In addition to being unusual, the passage itself is somewhat unclear. 18 The examplesnot experimenting with
explosive substancesseem irrelevant and unconvincing. The meaning seems to slide. It is not quite clear if the problem is that we do not bring
death into our calculations, as the beginning seems to imply, or that, rather, we actually bring it into our calculations too much, as is suggested
at the end But what I wish to stress here is that the passage actually opposes what Freud says in the preceding passages, where he describes
the cultural-conventional attitude and speaks of our inability to make death part of our thoughts. In both the current passage and later
passages he advocates including death in life, but insists, elsewhere in the text, that embracing death is impossible. In a way, he is telling us that
we cannot accept the situation where death is constantly evaded. Here again Bataille can be useful in rendering Freuds position more
intelligible. He seems to articulate better than Freud the delicate balance, concerning the place of death in psychic life, between the need to
walk on the edge, and the flight into normalcy and safety. As I asserted above, where in Freud there are contradictory elements, in Bataille
there is a dialectic. Bataille, as we have seen, presents the following picture: It might be that, guided by our instincts, we tend to avoid death.
But we also seem to have a need to intersperse this flight with occasional peeps into the domain of death. When we invest all of our effort in
surviving, something of the true nature of life evades us. It is only when the finite human being goes beyond the limitations necessary for his
preservation, that he asserts the nature of his being (La Littrature 214; 68). The approaches of both Bataille and Freud are descriptive as
well as normative. Bataille describes a tendency to distance ourselves from death and a tendency to get close to it. But he also describes Mans
need to approach death from a normative point of view, in order to establish his humanity: a life that is only fleeing death has less value. Freud
carefully describes our tendency to evade death and, in the paragraph under discussion, calls for the contrary approach. This is stressed at the
end of the article, where he encourages us to give death the place in reality and in our thoughts which is its due (Thoughts 299).
Paradoxically, it might be what will make life more tolerable for us once again (299). But since Freud also insists not only on a tendency within
us to evade death, but also on the impossibility of doing otherwise, and on how death simply cannot be the content of our thought, his sayings
in favor of bringing death close are confusing and confused. Freud does not give us a reason for the need to approach death. He says that life
loses in interest, but surely this cannot be the result of abstaining from carrying out experiments with explosive substances. In addition, his
ideas on the shallowness of a life without death do not seem to evolve from anything in his approach. It is along the lines offered by Batailles
worldview that I wish to interpret them here. Sacrifice, Bataille says, brings together life in its fullness and the
annihilation of life. We are not mere spectators in the sacrificial ritual. Our participation is much more involved. Sacrificial
ritual creates a temporary, exceptionally heightened state of living. The sacred horror, he calls the emotion experienced in sacrifice:
the richest and most agonizing experience. It opens itself, like a theater curtain, on to a realm beyond this world and every
limited meaning is transfigured in it (Hegel 338; 288). Bataille lays stress on vitality. Death is not humanizing only on the
philosophical level, as it is for Hegel or Kojve. Bataille gives it an emotional twist. The presence of death, which he interprets in a
more earthly manner, is stimulating, vivifying, intense. Death and other related elements (violence) bring life closer to a
state where individuality melts, the mediation of the intellect between us and the world lessens, and life is felt at its
fullest. Bataille calls this state, or aspect of the world, immanence or intimacy: immanence between man and the world, between the
subject and the object (The Festival 307-311; 210-213). Moments of intensity are moments of excess and of fusion of beings
(La Littrature 215; 70). They are a demand of life itself, even though they sometimes seem to contradict it. Death is problematic for us, but it
opens up for us something in life. This line of thought seems to accord very well with the passage in Freuds text with which we are dealing
here, and to extend it. Life without death is life lacking in intensity, an impoverished, shallow and empty life. Moreover, the repression of death
is generalized and extended: the tendency to exclude death from our calculations in life brings in its train many other renunciations and
exclusions. Freud simply does not seem to have the conceptual tools to discuss these ideas. The intuition is even stronger in the passage that
follows, where Freud discusses war (note that the paper is written in 1915): When war breaks out, he says, this cowardly, conservative, risk-
rejecting attitude is broken at once. War eliminates this conventional attitude to death. Death could no longer be Liran Razinsky SubStance
#119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 80 denied. We are forced to believe in it. People really die. . . . Life has, indeed, become interesting again; it has
recovered its full content (Thoughts 291). Thus what is needed is more than the mere accounting of consequences, taking death into
consideration as a future possibility. What is needed is exposure to death, a sanguineous imprinting of death directly on our minds, through the
accumulation of deaths of others. Life can only become vivid, fresh, and interesting when death is witnessed directly. Both authors speak of a
valorization of death, and in both there is a certain snobbery around it. While the masses follow the natural human tendency to avoid death,
like the American couple or those who are busy with the thought of who is to take our place, the individualists do not go with the herd, and
by allowing themselves to approach death, achieve a fuller sense of life, neither shallow nor empty. 19 Yet again, Freuds claims hover in the air,
lacking any theoretical background. Bataille supplies us with such background. He contests, as we have seen, the sole focus on survival.
Survival, he tells us, has a price. It limits our life. As if there were an inherent tension between preserving life and living it. Freud
poses the same tension here. Either we are totally absorbed by the wish to survive, to keep life intact, and therefore limit our existence to the
bare minimum, or else we are willing to risk it to some extent in order to make it more interesting, more vital and valuable. Our usual world,
according to Bataille, is characterized by the duration of things, by the future function, rather than by the present. Things are constituted as
separate objects in view of future time. This is one reason for the threat of death: it ruins value where value is only
assured through duration. It also exposes the intimate order of life that is continuously hidden from us in the order of things where
life runs its normal course. Man is afraid of death as soon as he enters the system of projects that is the order of things (The Festival 312;
214). Sacrifice
is the opposite of production and accumulation. Death is not so much a negation of life, as it
is anaffirmation of the intimate order of life, which is opposed to the normal order of things and is therefore
rejected. The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life []. Death reveals life in its plenitude (309;
212). Batailles neutral image of life is the equivalent of Freuds shallow and empty life. What Freud denounces is a life trapped within the
cowardly economical system of considerations. It is precisely the
economy of value and future-oriented calculations that
stand in opposition to the insertion of death into life. Who is to take the sons place with his mother, the husbands with
his wife, the fathers with his children. Of course there is an emotional side to the story, but it is this insistence on replacement that leaves us
on the side of survival and stops us sometimes from living the present. The need for duration, in the words of Bataille, conceals
life from us (The Festival 309; 212). For both authors, when death is left out, life as it is is false and superficial. Another Look at
Speculation Both authors, then, maintain that if elements associated with death invade our life anyway, we might as well succumb and give
them an ordered place in our thoughts. The necessity to
meet death is not due to the fact that we do not have a choice. Rather,
familiarization with death is necessary if life is to have its full value, and is part of what makes us human. But
the tension between the tendenciesto flee death or to embrace itis not easily resolved, and the evasive tendency always tries to assert
itself. As seen above, Bataille maintains that in sacrifice, we are exposed through death to other dimensions of life. But the exposure, he adds,
is limited, for next comes another phase, performed post-hoc, after the event: the ensuing horror and the intensity are too high to maintain,
and must be countered. Bataille speaks of the justifications of the sacrifice given by cultures, which inscribe it in the general order of things.
humankind, collectively and individually.