ABSTRACT
“Excursus: Memory, Relation, Death” takes up a consideration of the politics of finitude, i.e. death and relation. Here, at stake is the concept of kinship and the enclosure called the family as it becomes a response to finitude, and therefore, relation to the necropolis. Tracking this thought through the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Robert Pogue Harrison, Martin Hägglund, and others via a critique of Martin Heidegger’s privatized notion of death – i.e. death being described in his work as “the one thing no one else can do for me”– the excursus considers how the proprietary notion of death as the horizon of Being has profound political consequences, particularly, via a relation to grief and memory. Insofar as we are born into the necropolis and in that death reveals ontological insecurity and this not only exposes us to others – to possibility – it also allows us to grasp the ways in which projects are always a continuation of the work of the dead, always already embedded in the temporal continuities and discontinuities that inform the generative spatial and ancestral web of social life.
