Death, Poetry, and Hope

The paper revisits the question of immortality with Dostoevsky’s reference to ‘eternal memory’ as a leitmotif. Starting with Agamben’s discussion of Hegel, language, and death, the paper notes three ways in which language is understood as mimetic. For Hegel (according to Agamben) language imitates death. However, Heidegger highlighted the challenges of speaking authentically about death in such a way as to raise the further question as to the nature or capacity of language. For Herder, language imitates nature and poetry is the supreme expression of language. How this might work in relation to our thrownness towards death is explored by Michael Theunissen in his study Pindar, where he sees poetic language as essentially imitating a divine hope in relation to death. The paper concludes how this might be restated in the context of modernity.