ABSTRACT
Today any phenomenology of death “in the second person” has to consider the work of Vladimir Jankelevitch. He distinguishes between three different modes of the reality of death: the first person, the second person, and the third person. This chapter focuses on the second person, which provides the clavis hermeneutica to the problem, namely of how one is to give testimony of or bear witness to the death of the close other. The two fundamental phenomena that arise from the death of a loved one: loss and lack. Rebirth after the death of the loved one would require the domestication of the wild region henceforth instituted in the proper, or one’s own sphere. In the wake of death in the second person—more precisely, in its two constitutive moments, trauma and mourning—intersubjectivity reveals itself in the process of constitution or, better, reconstitution. Thus the role played by otherness in the process of mourning is inseparable from a reflection on memory.
