Life or Death. The Tragic and the Irreversible, Starting from Natsume Sōseki.

In the diary that closes Natsume Sōseki’s Gubijinsō, the choices of life are consigned to comedy and a single question, life or death, to tragedy. The essay starts from that page to propose a distinction it does not thematize, between temporal irreversibility, common to every event, and configurational irreversibility, proper to events that modify the conditions within which what follows can occur. The tragic is defined as the meeting of this second structure with the non-substitutable loss of a constitutive possibility, and the locus of the problem moves from the agent to the field. Death interrupts the one who crosses it without erasing the transit, which persists there as 銘, a shift incorporated into the arrangement from which everything resumes. The comparison with Jankélévitch, Arendt and Williams delimits the question; the openness of the future, assumed as a premise, prevents confusing the irreversible with determinism.