Die Masken des Todes

This article explores the various masks through which death shows inside the world. Via a scene from Robert Musil’s The Man Without Properties, it scrutinizes death with Martin Heidegger’s existential analytic. Heidegger’s tendency to focus on the challenge my own death poses has been criticized by both Eugen Fink and Emmanuel Levinas. Both highlight that my own death is not necessarily a privileged way of understanding death. Rather, it is, as Fink shows, one of the many masks of death. The death of others begs cosmological questions. Death points towards the negativity of the world, that which never appears, but without which there would be no appearing. Through cults of the dead, human life not only recognizes its indebtedness to those that preceded it, but also ties its understanding of its intra-worldly situation to the nothingness of the world. For Levinas, on the other hand, our understanding of death remains overly intellectualistic and unpersonal, if we do not pay attention to the affective dimension of death. In the death of the Other, a face becomes a mask, and someone, for whom we live, is gone. Death thus allows us a glimpse into the ethical structure of subjectivity itself: the Other-in-the-Same.