ABSTRACT
What is the significance of individual death in the face of collective annihilations? In this chapter, I aim to unsettle an old equivalence—life as good and death as bad—through a multispecies epistemology of death. We see this life-death opposition reflected, or mirrored, in the human-animal dichotomy. In much of Western philosophy and Christian thought (in the work of Heidegger, among others) humans are thought to understand the fact that they are mortal, and this has meant that their deaths are meaningful. Humans deserve to die a good death (or perhaps to avoid death altogether) because they know they are mortal. Using my original translations of the work of Spanish philosopher Susana Monsó, I reflect on her “minimal concept of death,” one that she sees at work in more-than-human worlds. Thinking with Monsó, death becomes something that all earthlings navigate and encounter differently, though not always in fully understandable ways. In this minimal view, death is not a punishment, a form of evil, or a condition to either escape or wield against others as a weapon. Instead, it’s part of what keeps us bound to more-than-human life worlds.
