ABSTRACT
It has been suggested that awareness of death is the origin of self-consciousness itself, yet perhaps the most obvious thing about death is that it is ultimately unknowable. Death is “always only represented” Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin contend; “there is no knowing [it], no experiencing it and then returning to write about it, no intrinsic grounds for authority in the discourse surrounding it” (4). Indeed, the concept does not just defy imagination, Zygmunt Bauman argues, it is the archetypal contradiction in terms; death is “an absolute nothing and ‘absolute nothing’ makes no sense” (2, 15, emphasis original).
