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Natality and mortality: rethinking death with Cavarero
Alison Stone
Published online: 30 July 2010
Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract In this article I rethink death and mortality on the basis of birth and
natality, drawing on the work of the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero.
She understands birth to be the corporeal event whereby a unique person emerges from
the mother’s body into the common world. On this basis Cavarero reconceives death
as consisting in bodily dissolution and re-integration into cosmic life. This impersonal
conception of death coheres badly with her view that birth is never exclusively
material but always has ontological significance as the appearance of someone new
and singular in the world of relations with others. This view of birth calls for a
relational conception of death, which I develop in this article. On this conception,
death is always collective, affecting all those with whom the one who dies has
maintained relations: As such, our different deaths shade into one another. Moreover,
because each person is unique in virtue of consisting of a unique web of relations with
others, death always happens to persons as webs of relations. Death is relational in this
way as a corporeal, and specifically biological, phenomenon, to which we are subject
as bodily beings and as interdependent living organisms. I explore this with reference
to Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir of her mother’s death from cancer. Finally I argue
that, on this relational conception, death is something to be feared.
Keywords Beauvoir Birth Cavarero Death Mortality Natality
1 Introduction
Many contemporary feminists are exploring the philosophical significance of birth.
1
Often these authors present their orientation towards birth, life, and beginnings as an
1
They include Battersby (1998), Guenther (2006,2008), Irigaray (1991), Kristeva (1986), Mullin (2005).
This list is far from exhaustive.
A. Stone (&)
Department of Philosophy, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YG, UK
e-mail: a.stone@lancaster.ac.uk
123
Cont Philos Rev (2010) 43:353–372
DOI 10.1007/s11007-010-9148-3
alternative to philosophy’s long-standing preoccupation with death, endings, and
last things. However, feminist ideas about birth may instead be taken as opening up
possibilities for rethinking death and mortality in relation to birth, as I shall attempt
to do here. I will put forward a natal conception of mortality according to which
death, like birth, is an entirely relational phenomenon. This view of mortality is
implicitly feminist, insofar as I will interpret mortality and death starting from the
feminist recognition that we are completely constituted by and dependent upon our
relations with one another, beginning with our first relations to those who care for us
in our infancy. Based on this view of mortality, I shall argue that each of us has
grounds to fear death: firstly on one’s own behalf, because death marks the end of
the unique and irreplaceable web of relations of which one consists, and secondly on
behalf of the others with whom one is in relation, because one’s death is also the
death of a part of those others.
I will develop these arguments through an engagement with the work of Adriana
Cavarero, one of the main contemporary feminist thinkers of birth, whose work (as I
will explain in Sect. 2) is important because it is deeply grounded in Hannah
Arendt’s ideas but transforms them in a feminist direction. However, I do not
follow, but rather criticize, the particular birth-oriented view of death which
Cavarero herself presents in her book In Spite of Plato (hereafter Plato), originally
published in Italian in 1990. Approaching death in relation to birth understood as
material emergence from one’s mother’s body, Cavarero interprets death not as
personal annihilation but the process of one’s material reintegration into the cosmic
life-cycle. In Sect. 3I will argue that this account of death actually conflicts with
Cavarero’s view of birth. On this view, birth is an event that is never solely
biological but always also has the ontological significance that through it a unique
person appears in the shared world amongst a plurality of others. Thus birth is at the
heart of Cavarero’s ‘ontology of uniqueness’: her account of the human condition as
inescapably singular and plural—as relational.
2
In Sect. 4I argue that, from this birth-oriented perspective, death must be
relational, not merely an anonymous biological process. Someone’s death is their
departure from the shared world and from the relations with others that have
constituted this person. Consequently, I will argue—with critical reference to
Heidegger’s claim that death radically individuates Dasein—a person’s death is
never solely their own. It is always their death as termination of the plurality of
relations of which that person has been constituted, so that death is always shared, a
collective event of loss afflicting all those involved in these relations. Reciprocally,
I will argue, the deaths of others are part of each person’s own death: Our different
deaths are continuous with one another. With these arguments, I aim to understand
mortality in a way that does justice to the depth of our attachments to one another
and to the ontological significance of bereavement, which on my relational view is
no less significant in human existence than each person’s ‘own’ death—because self
and others, bereavement and death, are indissociable.
2
Cavarero (2008, p. 148).
354 A. Stone
123
Moreover, for Cavarero, we are natal and relational beings qua living bodies.
Thus, it is as a corporeal, and indeed biological, phenomenon that death is
relational. Our deaths are continuous with one another as physical occurrences,
because we depend on one another, are vitally entwined with one another, as living
bodies. To develop these ideas, I shall draw in Sect. 5on Simone de Beauvoir’s
1964 memoir of her mother’s death, A Very Easy Death. Finally, in Sect. 6, I will
suggest that from a relational perspective it makes sense for us to fear death, for our
own sakes and those of our loved ones.
2 Cavarero on natality
The starting-point for Cavarero’s conception of birth is Arendt’s concept of natality.
But Cavarero transforms the meaning of this concept, reinterpreting natality as our
condition of being materially born from our mothers’ bodies. This transformation is
important because it goes together with Cavarero’s rejection of the hierarchically
gendered contrast between public and private which structures Arendt’s thinking of
natality. In this way, Cavarero’s re-interpretation of natality aligns this concept with
contemporary feminism.
In The Human Condition, Arendt defines natality as ‘the fact that human beings
appear in the world by virtue of birth.’
3
For Arendt, ‘appear’ has a partly technical
meaning in relation to her reinterpretation of the public sphere as the ‘space of
appearance.’ In this connection, to ‘appear’ is to actively disclose oneself to a
plurality of others by interacting with them through words and deeds, an interaction
that constitutes public space. One discloses oneself to others as the unique person
that one is by the distinctive and the unprecedented character of one’s deeds and
words. This self-disclosure is possible because we, human beings, are each unique,
not only sociologically in terms of our historical-cultural locations, but principally
in a phenomenological sense: Each of us is a unique existence, one amongst others
in a common world, but a unique opening onto that world, an opening no one else
can ever occupy.
To say, then, that we appear in the world by virtue of birth is to say, Arendt
clarifies, that ‘men are equipped for …making a new beginning’—publicly
performing new actions, interacting in new ways, and thereby constituting new
configurations of power—‘because they themselves are new beginnings and hence
beginners.’
4
Here Arendt effectively equates being a ‘beginner’ with acting
politically and equates the ‘beginning’ that makes being a ‘beginner’ possible with
the coming into existence of a new, unique someone: ‘[W]ith each birth something
uniquely new comes into the world. With respect to this somebody who is unique
it can be truly said that nobody was there before.’
5
In acting politically I activate
my unique existence. I can do so fully only in acting politically, for Arendt in The
3
Arendt (1958, p. 211).
4
Arendt (1958, p. 211).
5
Arendt (1958, p. 178).
Natality and mortality 355
123
Human Condition, because my uniqueness is relational. To be unique is to differ
from others, so that I can be unique only because I am constitutively in relations
with others, one of a plurality. The political sphere is the proper home of
uniqueness because it is, inherently, the space constituted of interactions among
plural actors.
Although in The Human Condition birth as beginning is always the beginning of
someone embodied, nonetheless Arendt considers birth in abstraction from the
physical process of being born. She does not define beginning in terms of physically
emerging from one’s mother’s womb and body—as being born of or from someone,
one’s mother. Neither does Arendt define beginning as receiving existence from
one’s mother. Peg Birmingham has shown that in earlier writings, Arendt had
defined natality as involving both the capacity for new actions and the givenness of
one’s existence.
6
But in The Human Condition Arendt splits these two dimensions
across a series of oppositions: on one hand, physical birth (reproduction) from a
mother, givenness and necessity, sameness, and the private household where
reproduction takes place; on the other hand, natality, uniqueness, action, politics,
and plurality. This hierarchically gendered series of oppositions is problematic from
a feminist perspective (as numerous critics of Arendt have pointed out).
7
It is this oppositional framework that Cavarero transforms by redefining birth as
‘a coming from the mother’s womb.’
8
To be born is still to appear as someone
unique amongst others—as a ‘who,’ as Cavarero often says following Arendt, not
(or not only) a ‘what’—but one appears in physically emerging from one’s mother’s
body. It is in being physically born that one appears in the common world and,
simultaneously, becomes manifest, or ‘exposed,’ to this world’s other inhabitants as
the new, unprecedented existence that one is. Because coming-into-existence is
physically coming into the world as a body, one’s uniqueness as it appears to others
coincides with the uniqueness of one’s body and voice, for instance with ‘the sound
of the ‘‘vibration of a throat of flesh’’ …Alive and bodily, unique and
unrepeatable.’
9
Cavarero reunites natality—existing uniquely amongst plural
others—with physical birth. Consequently, novelty, action, and power cease to be
confined to the political realm in the way that they were in The Human Condition,
and Arendt’s sharp public/private contrast is broken down. Consequently, too, one’s
unique existence amongst others is always a corporeal existence with others, an
intertwining of plural bodies. Cavarero sums up: ‘Our condition is that of corporeal,
unique, vulnerable human beings, dependent on one another and reciprocally
exposed.’
10
In uniting what Arendt had split apart in The Human Condition, Cavarero
reconnects natality, appearing into singular and plural existence, with being given
the uniqueness of one’s socially situated body. The embodied situation in which I
6
See Birmingham (2005).
7
See inter alia Honig (1995). The contributors to this volume discuss this feminist criticism of Arendt,
but they also complicate it and put forward productive feminist rereadings of Arendt’s work.
8
Cavarero (1995, p. 6).
9
Cavarero (2005, p. 2).
10
Cavarero (2008, p. 137).
356 A. Stone
123
begin life is an unchangeable fact. Furthermore, I receive it from my mother. I have
this body, in this place and time, because of who my mother is or was, because of
her unique embodied situation through which she has transmitted my unique
situation to me. Thus, I not only (firstly) receive my living bodily existence from my
mother, but I also (secondly) inherit from her a unique cultural location. Moreover
(thirdly), Cavarero claims that I am given my existence by my mother. We might
question this. Perhaps I receive existence and inherit cultural circumstances from
my mother without her intending to give these to me. Certainly the gift of birth is a
peculiar kind of gift. As Lisa Guenther points out, what the mother ‘gives’ in giving
life is not any finite thing or property but rather the conditions under which the child
can receive any particular things or properties at all.
11
And the mother ‘gives’ a
uniquely new life that she herself never possessed—no simple transfer of property
occurs here. Nonetheless, perhaps understanding birth as a gift makes sense if we
see physical birth, as Cavarero does, as only the beginning of the more extended
process of early care-giving generally undertaken by mothers. Mothers (or other
carers) typically do experience this giving of care as, precisely, a giving, although
not exactly as voluntarily undertaken but rather as immediately elicited by the child
in his or her need.
12
This means that for mothers gestation and birth all along have
significance as anticipating this post-natal care-giving, and from that perspective
birth does, by anticipation, count as a gift.
Cavarero further suggests that I am given my existence not only by my mother
but also by a chain of foremothers, the members of my maternal genealogy. This is
because my mother’s singular existence has been given to her by her own singular
mother, whose existence was given to her by her mother in turn, and so on.
13
What
about fathers? For Cavarero, it seems that genealogy is properly maternal because
birth gives each of us existence and birth is inescapably from a mother: ‘[M]aternity
is the matrix of the arrival of humans into the world.’
14
Admittedly, this is so only in
principle; in practice, most cultures disavow the importance of the maternal line,
passing names and goods along the paternal line, and taking the father to be the true
parent while construing the mother as mere container. From Cavarero’s perspective,
all this reverses the real primacy of maternal genealogy. This privileging of
maternal genealogy is problematic. Since Cavarero believes that I receive my
existence and inherit my cultural conditions from generations of foremothers
through my mother, it is inconsistent of her to deny that I can also, through my
mother, receive my existence and cultural inheritance from my father. But perhaps
Cavarero gives mothers, and by extension entire lines of maternal descent,
genealogical primacy because, since it is mothers who physically give birth, they
mediate whatever fathers hand down to their children. Nonetheless, fathers do hand
things down. So we should qualify Cavarero’s privileging of the maternal line, to
11
Guenther (2006).
12
See for instance Baraitser (2009).
13
Cavarero (1995, p. 60).
14
Cavarero (1995, p. 59).
Natality and mortality 357
123
say that we are all children of our mothers and fathers, albeit mothers first and
fathers second.
15
Despite these qualifications, Cavarero’s philosophy of birth remains insightful
and important because she recognizes that birth has ontological significance—it is
one of the fundamental conditions structuring and shaping human existence, not a
bare material process. At the same time, going beyond Arendt, Cavarero recognizes
that this ontological significance inheres in birth as the corporeal process of
emerging from the body of one’s mother. In its nature as corporeal process, birth has
the existential or ontological significance that it always initiates the one who is born
into the human condition of natality, of appearing uniquely new in the world shared
with others. Birth and natality are one.
3 Cavarero on mortality
Based on her reconception of birth as natality, Cavarero at the end of Plato outlines
a distinctive approach to death and mortality. But this approach, I shall argue, is
unsatisfactory. Moreover, contrary to Cavarero, this approach coheres badly with
her own conception of birth: Her views of birth and death actually conflict. This
conflict means that Cavarero unfortunately misses the opportunity to develop her
view of birth in its full richness, as opening up a relational conception of death.
In Plato, Cavarero redefines death in contrast to birth as she has understood it.
Since birth is coming into existence from somebody, not appearance ex nihilo,
reciprocally death is not annihilation, passage into non-existence, but passage into
new bodily form: ‘[F]rom the point of view of …living matter, one’s own death is a
metamorphosis.’
16
This passage into new bodily form occurs as one’s body loses its
organization and its material members break down into component elements that
disperse and become incorporated into new material processes and forms. Cavarero
interprets this disorganization and re-incorporation of bodily matter to be a
participation in cycles of super-individual, cosmic life. To die is to physically pass
into life’s impersonal, ever-ongoing cycle, and to supply this cycle with fresh
materials.
17
At death I will go, not into nothingness, but back into the anonymous
cosmic life from which (across the threshold of my mother’s birth canal) I came.
Cavarero’s ideas here are inspired by Clarice Lispector’s 1964 novel The Passion
According to G.H. The protagonist G. H. attempts to kill a cockroach; having
watched its insides ooze out with revulsion, she feels drawn into (what she now sees
15
I lack space to ask how this picture accommodates genealogies that are social rather than biological—
adoptive families, surrogacy, sperm donation—where the biological and social parents come apart. We
might ask, too, why Cavarero assigns ontological significance to birth (thus mothers primarily) and not
conception (thus mothers and fathers). This is, I think, because birth marks the entrance into the common
world alongside plural others. One might object that the developing foetus already begins to participate in
this world in a form mediated by the mother—hearing sounds, tasting tastes, detecting changes in light.
But perhaps we only understand this to be participation in a shared world by extrapolating from the
existing-in-common with which we are familiar post-natally, so that such understandings of pre-natal
existence would already presuppose the ontological centrality of birth.
16
Cavarero (1995, p. 114).
17
Cavarero (1995, pp. 115–117).
358 A. Stone
123
as) the single immemorial process of life going on within and through the
cockroach. Embracing this life-process, G. H. says:
The narrow passage had been the daunting cockroach …And I had ended up,
all impure myself, embarking, through it, upon my past, which was my
continuous present and my continuous future—…and my fifteen million
daughters, from that time down to myself, were also there. My life had been as
continuous as death. Life is so continuous that we divide it into stages and call
one of them death. …I had always been in life.
18
G.H. (and/or Lispector)—and Cavarero after her—take the life-process to be one
super-individual, hence ‘neutral’ process, yet also to be female in that it proceeds
through females giving birth to females who give birth to females, and so on.
Ultimately, for Cavarero, each person’s death is part of this cosmic life-process.
Dying is ‘conquered’ by life, she thus writes.
19
Cavarero suggests that if this view of death became accepted, then we would
cease to have reason to fear death. This fear has been pervasive in the West, she
suggests, only because Western culture has ignored birth and defined death without
reference to birth, hence not as passage into new living forms but rather as passage
into non-existence, as annihilation—which is something to be feared.
20
Once this
fear of death as annihilation was installed, philosophers and theologians became
obliged to alleviate it by postulating the soul’s immortality or other forms of post-
mortem survival. If death were seen to be not personal annihilation but one phase in
life’s overarching cycle, then it would no longer elicit fear and anxiety—or as
Cavarero puts it, ‘since there is no nothingness in the incessant and internal labor of
life’s metamorphoses’ we would experience a ‘disinvestment from death’—a
‘conciliation’ with it.
21
We would accept that on death we will not cease to exist but
be reincorporated into something larger than us.
G.H. suggests something similar: That our membership in infinite life tends to be
concealed from us qua organised bodies. Totally identified with her organised
bodily form, ignorant of the larger life that this form organizes, G.H. is ‘afraid to
understand, the matter of the world frightens [her], …with its cockroaches.’
22
G.H.
fears death, falsely believing that with it she will lose ‘everything I have had …
what I am.’ But when she comes to embrace the deeper life-process suffusing her,
her fear gives way to joy.
Cavarero’s view of death is, I believe, implausible. Firstly, as she herself says,
the human fear of death has been so pervasive (pervading even our efforts to deny
and avoid confronting death) that it has motivated the formation of entire traditions
of religious doctrine and practice concerning life after death. It seems implausible
that such an all-pervasive and apparently fundamental human fear could have
resulted merely from the error of thinking about death in isolation from birth. To
18
Lispector (1988, p. 57).
19
Cavarero (1995, p. 116).
20
Cavarero (1995, pp. 99–100, 105).
21
Cavarero (1995, pp. 114, 119).
22
Lispector (1988, p. 59).
Natality and mortality 359
123
have been so pervasive, this fear must have deeper grounds in the structure of
human existence. Secondly, approaching death impersonally as Cavarero advises
seems impossible and inappropriate given that (for Cavarero herself) we are
relational beings, thoroughly shaped by and therefore constitutively attached to our
relations with particular others. What begins to emerge here is the conflict between
Cavarero’s relational ontology and her view of death.
The conflict becomes apparent in Cavarero’s recent book Horrorism, first
published in Italian in 2007. In it, she identifies a class of acts of horrific violence,
acts carried out in war or by ‘terrorists’—‘horrorists,’ for her—which dismember
and disfigure human bodies. In dismembering bodies, these acts are attacks,
precisely, on the uniqueness of persons insofar as this is directly expressed in their
bodies and bodily forms. For Cavarero, every act of this class ‘overshoots the
elementary goal of taking a life and dedicates itself instead to destroying the living
being as singular body.’
23
Following Arendt, Cavarero also describes the extreme
violent dehumanization which the Nazi concentration camps inflicted on their
inmates as an assault on their embodied singularity. Strikingly, she adds that the
‘horrorism’ perpetrated by the death camps ‘also takes away from them [the
inmates] their own death.’ She endorses Arendt’s claim that the camps made the
murder of these people into an event ‘as impersonal as the squashing of a gnat.’ The
inmates’ deaths were reduced to merely impersonal, biological, processes or
occurrences. This implies, contrary to Plato, that human deaths in their proper
ontological character are never merely impersonal biological processes. Rather,
following the terms used in Horrorism, our deaths must always have ‘personal’
meaning for us, such that each human person’s death is ‘their own.’ On one side are
the human, the meaningful, the personal, and death as in each case one’s own—on
the other the animal, the meaningless, the impersonal, and the anonymous. Contrast
this to Plato, in which Cavarero urges precisely that death should be viewed as
reintegration into ‘impersonal’ life.
That conclusion, it turns out, conflicts with Cavarero’s own understanding of
human singularity, according to which our singularity entails that we cannot relate
to our deaths impersonally. To be denied a meaningful relation to one’s own death,
as the camp inmates were, is to be radically dehumanized. The relation to one’s own
death as to the end of one’s singular existence is not merely an illusion stemming
from Western culture’s neglect of birth. Rather, this relation is an irreducible
concomitant of our very status as singular and natal beings.
These are rather Heideggerian-sounding suggestions about death and mortality—
recalling that for Heidegger, ‘death …individualizes Dasein down to itself.’
24
So
does Cavarero’s view of natality actually support a Heideggerian view of death? Not
necessarily. For her reference in Horrorism to each person’s death being their ‘own’
is in tension with her insistence upon the depth at which our relations with others
constitute us in our singularity. One’s singular existence never is solely one’s ‘own’
23
Cavarero (2009, p. 12; my emphasis).
24
Heidegger (1962, p. 308).
360 A. Stone
123
but is constituted all along in a crucible of relations with plural others.
25
We need,
then, to reconceive death as relational rather than exclusively either personal or
impersonal. Neither radically individuating nor straightforwardly antithetical to
singular personhood, death obtains in some sense between or amongst persons. To
think about this, I shall return to Cavarero’s relational ontology and tease out how it
bears upon death and mortality.
4 Relational mortality
Within the general terms of Cavarero’s ontology, we can interpret her as
understanding our singularity to be relational in weaker or stronger senses. We
find some support for both interpretations in her 1997 book Relating Narratives.In
the weaker sense, relations obtain between singular beings; these relations, we
might say, are inter-personal. These relations constitute who we as singular beings
are by constituting the meaning of actions and lives that are in each case a singular
person’s ‘own,’ theirs and no one else’s (‘a unique being is such in the relation, and
the context, of a plurality of others, …likewise unique themselves, [who] are
distinguished reciprocally’).
26
This ‘ownness’ arises because each person comes
new, irreplaceable, unrepeatable, insubstitutable, into the world at birth. Although
the content, the concrete shape, of who he or she is as a person will unfold only over
time through this person’s interactions with others, it remains a fact that he or she is
this unique person and no one other from birth. The newborn, Cavarero says, is
totally unique at once, a unified new person
27
who will remain the same self
throughout his or her life.
28
Alternatively, we could take Cavarero to be saying that we singular beings are
constituted, in our singularity, of relations. On this reading not only do relations
hold between singular beings; also, each singular being, within itself, is the holding-
together, the concrescence, of a determinate and in each case unique set of relations.
In addition to obtaining inter-personally, then, relations are sub-personal: They
constitute each of us as singular persons. The sub-personal is not impersonal: Sub-
personal relations make us into in each case singular persons rather than dissolving
us into anonymous impersonal life. Thus, my life and actions are ‘mine’ because
they express the unique concrescence of relations that constitutes me.
Cavarero suggests this when, having in Relating Narratives said that the newborn
is totally unique at birth, she then explains that this is so only because, firstly, with
birth each newborn begins to participate in a unique web of relations with others
29
;
25
Moreover, Cavarero’s philosophy of birth conflicts with Heidegger’s philosophical privileging of
Dasein’s being-towards-death as the ground of its orientation towards its birth. See Heidegger (1962,
pp. 425–427, 442–443). Whereas Heidegger makes mortality the ground of natality, Cavarero (following
Arendt) reverses this ordering.
26
Cavarero (2000, p. 43).
27
Cavarero (2000, p. 38).
28
Cavarero (2000, p. 73).
29
Cavarero (2000, pp. 38–39).
Natality and mortality 361
123
and, secondly, because each newborn appears in a unique place within a web of
familial, social, cultural relations, inherited through the mother, condensed in the
newborn’s name
30
and embodied in their corporeal form and voice.
31
Thus, ‘the
ontological status of a who is always relational and contextual.’
32
The self is unique
at birth not because of anything mysteriously ‘new’ but because birth is the
conclusion of the process by which a unique set of relations has cohered into, and as,
the gestating fetus. With this conclusion, the new being becomes corporeally
independent of its mother—and simultaneously begins to participate in new
relations with other persons-as-webs-of-relations—an always unique set of other
persons because of each newborn’s genealogically specific entry-point into the
world.
33
I favor this more strongly relational reading of Cavarero because it
acknowledges more fully the depth at which we are constituted by others, a chain of
constitution that begins with our constitution by our mothers at and immediately
after birth. As such, the relational reading also better acknowledges the significance
of birth from the mother.
What does this imply regarding death? If someone’s birth is their entrance into a
shared world with others, then their death must equally be their irreversible
departure from this shared world. The significance of someone’s death to the extent
that they anticipate it, then, is not that they will cease to be there as such, but that
they will cease to be there with these others, with the particular others with whom
this person has been related, in the particular places and contexts that they have
shared. Of course, with death each person will lose contact with all others, not only
the particular others who matter to them. But it is the loss of contact with those
others who matter and have mattered to them over time that is significant to a person
anticipating their death. After all, although we are constituted by our relations with
others, we are not constituted by our relations with all the others in the world but
with a particular set of others, a set comprised initially of those amongst whom we
find ourselves placed by birth, and then taking in those through whom we come into
contact via complex chains of action and causation arising out of our initial set of
natal relations. On death I will no longer be exposed to these others, and will no
longer be in the world specifically as a world shared with these particular others. In
this sense, one’s death as anticipated is constitutively social.
However, so far, death still seems, even if it always has a social character, to be a
person’s own: that person’s departure from the shared social world, no-one else’s.
This reminds us again of Heidegger’s position in Being and Time. For him, death is
experienced in crucially different ways by different parties: I experience the death
of others as events or occurrences in my life, but I can never, even in dying,
experience my own death in this way. Thus, my own death is not properly an event
or occurrence as are the deaths of others, although we tend to lapse into treating our
own deaths in this inauthentic way. Properly, my death is the limit of my life—a
limit absolutely exterior to my life, yet simultaneously internal insofar as it
30
Cavarero (2000, p. 21).
31
Cavarero (2000, p. 34).
32
Cavarero (2000, p. 90; my emphasis).
33
For a similar strongly relational reading of Cavarero, see Perpich (2003).
362 A. Stone
123
constitutes my life as the incomplete, temporal, finite life that it is. Hence my death
radically individuates me, placing me into my unique and limited time, place, and
circumstances, for which I alone am responsible. From this perspective, death
cannot be shared because my death and those of others differ in kind. Thus
Heidegger describes my death as my ‘ownmost possibility [which] is non-relational’
(unbezu
¨glich), which necessarily is mine alone (existentially, even if empirically
others surround me when I am dying).
34
Cavarero’s relational ontology, when read strongly relationally, suggests a
different picture. If I am constituted of a web of relations with others, then when I
die, these relations end, relations that were equally parts of the webs of relations that
constituted each of those other people. So something of each of those people does
die at the same time. Conversely, when others die part of me dies; our deaths are not
separate from one another. But are the ‘deaths’ in question here merely
metaphorical? Let me try to suggest not, with reference to Cavarero’s account of
life-stories in Relating Narratives.
Cavarero understands story, and narrative, to be central to who each of us is.
Through narratives, others communicate (to me, to one another) who I am. I can
only learn who I am from others; this is because I only am the person I am in
relation to those others in the first place. Who I am coincides with the story of my
life and my actions, as others recount and articulate this story in a plurality of
narratives. A story, which begins for each of us at birth, can thus only exist if there
is both the one whose story it is and the plurality of others to whom that someone
appears. The notion of a story brings together the connotations of history and of
fiction, the imaginative conferring of meaning on events. In this case, then, what
takes place—the events of someone’s life—only takes place as those events insofar
as others confer meaning upon them: ‘[T]he identity of the self [and its life and
actions] …is totally constituted by the relations of her appearance to others in the
world’: As one appears to others, so one is.
35
The meaning of the self/life/actions,
though, need not be articulated in explicit narrative, symbolic, form—hence
Cavarero’s distinction of story from narrative.
36
For her, meaning emerges from and
between our bodies before it is articulated in language: There is a prior, broader,
domain of pre-linguistic meaning or significance.
On this picture, a person’s death cannot be separate from the deaths of others. If
this person is their story, and if this story only exists in that it appears to (and is
narrated by) multiple others, then, whenever any of the others before whom the
person has been appearing die, part of this person ceases to exist too. When these
others die, part of the person’s story is lost, and so, since that person is their life-
story, part of them has died. One might object that the person loses nothing of him-
or herself here, only the possibility of gaining access to part of him- or herself by
hearing the other speak about that part and reveal its meaning. Indeed, we might
think that not even this is entirely lost: A bereaved person, remembering the other
who has died and the ways that she tended to view things, can remember the
34
Heidegger (1962, p. 308; my emphasis).
35
Cavarero (2000, p. 36).
36
Cavarero (2000, p. 28).
Natality and mortality 363
123
meanings that his past actions had in that other’s eyes and can anticipate the
meanings that his still-ongoing life would likely have in the other’s eyes were she
still here. Yet real others are not reducible to those others as we remember,
anticipate, or otherwise experience them. Moreover, the meanings of our lives and
actions always remain indefinitely open to new interpretations and perspectives.
37
As such, in losing an other with whom I have been related, I lose real possibilities of
meaning that were in the process of unfolding within my own life as lived before
that other—and this is to lose a dimension of my life and actions, a strand
constitutive of their richness and significance as incomplete and temporally lived.
I cannot recover that dimension by anticipating how the lost other might have seen
me or remembering how they saw me, for this can only ever be my anticipation or
remembrance, not the other’s perception from the perspective of their alterity.
Even if I have indeed lost part of my life here, have I thereby undergone any part
of my death? It might seem that I have ‘died’ here only in an extended,
metaphorical, sense of death as loss. But, I suggest, Cavarero’s ontology discloses a
way in which I have literally undergone part of my death. I have lost one of the
relations, or strands of relational history, that have been constitutive of me and have
contributed to making me the singular individual that I am. I have lost a constitutive
part of what I was. If my death is the end of my existence as the unique
concrescence of relations that I am, then for one of those relations to end is for me to
undergo, already in life, part of my death. In that case, our deaths are not separate
from but comprise parts of one another, feeding over time into the final death of
what remains of someone after successive losses that they have undergone through
bereavement.
38
A person’s death is never solely his or her own, then, because it is
never the case that only this person who dies, dies. Always it is we who die: a death
shared, communal, collective.
However, on this view, it appears that deaths are still always the deaths of
different persons, even though these different deaths affect and feed into one
another. If so, then every death is shared only in that it is both some singular
person’s death and also part of the deaths of other persons. If death is always ‘ours,’
nonetheless this ‘ours’ still seems to consist of ‘mine’ and ‘yours.’ After all, the one
who dies ceases to exist altogether, whereas the others caught up in this death only
suffer the partial loss, the attenuation, not the complete end, of their existence.
When read as strongly relational, though, Cavarero’s ontology implies a further
way in which deaths are communal: that each ‘I’ is already, internally, a ‘we,’ for
each person comprises a web of relations. To amplify this idea we can draw on
37
Cavarero (2000, p. 38).
38
For Heidegger, in contrast, it makes no sense to say that a bereaved person exists less than they did.
Rather, for Heidegger, the bereaved person is still in the world, but as a world from which the other has
gone, or in which the bereaved is with that dead other only as-dead. But the bereaved person has not
herself died at all; she hasn’t died with the dead person, who necessarily died alone. Heidegger’s views
here reflect the ultimate priority that he gives to (individual) being-there over being-with: After all, for
him, ‘The world of Dasein is a with-world’ (1962, p. 155; my emphasis)—the world is primarily of
Dasein. Having said this, there is a question about how it is possible for someone bereaved to exist less
than they did before. I address this in Sects. 5and 6.
364 A. Stone
123
Freud’s view that ‘the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned …object-
choices.’
39
Freud was led to this view by his analysis of the identificatory
mechanism involved in melancholia, whereby the melancholic person reacts to the
loss of a loved one by mentally taking that lost ‘object’ into him- or herself. Freud
then recognized that this identificatory mechanism underpins psychical formation
much more broadly. Each individual’s psyche forms through successive identifi-
cations with the different figures—primarily mother- and father-figures—to whom
the individual relates in infancy, childhood, and beyond. These internalized figures
become the different sub-systems that collectively comprise the individual’s psyche
(for instance, paradigmatically, the internalized authoritarian father becomes the
nucleus of the super-ego and the ego-ideal). Thus, each psyche takes shape as a
complex system of agencies, stratified in relations to one another that reflect the
relations the individual has had with real others. Our emotional dispositions, and our
typical patterns of action and response to others, distill our past histories of
relations, carrying those pasts forward into and as the present of new interactions.
This is particularly evident in the phenomenon of transference, in which the
analysand re-enacts and re-creates with his analyst his ingrained modes of relation
to past significant figures, putting the analyst in the position of his imagined/
remembered/fantasized mother, father, or other significant figure. At the same time,
we remain constantly open to others in their uniqueness: New others respond to us
in unpredicted and unprecedented ways, provoking shifts or transformations in our
mental configurations, so that the present constantly re-shapes the past sedimented
within each of us. The web of relations of which each person consists is thus
constantly shifting in relation to unique external others, while equally it shapes the
character of those present relations. This psychoanalytic view provides one way to
expand on the idea that we are entirely constituted by or of our relations with others.
Someone’s death, then, in addition to being not only their own but also part of the
deaths of others, is the death of multiple others precisely in being that person’s own.
When the person dies, what ceases to be is a particular web of internalized relations.
This is still the end of that unique person: Just as sets of relations coalesce into
unique persons in their singularity, reciprocally when a set of relations comes to an
end, this is always the end of a unique person. However, the death is not that
person’s own in the way that Heidegger maintains, where their own death is sharply
differentiated from the deaths of others. Rather, each person’s death segues into the
partial deaths of multiple related others, and each person’s death just is the end of a
set of relations with others—relations that had been continuously unfolding between
that person and others external to them. As such, the death is best characterized not
as being the person’s own as opposed to those of others, but rather as being that
person’s own only because it is the end of a set of unfolding histories that had been
maintained between that person and others, histories none of which were simply that
person’s own. Ultimately, Cavarero’s view of birth implies a conclusion not unlike
Derrida’s in Aporias when he writes that: ‘The death of the other, this death of the
other in ‘‘me,’’ is fundamentally the only death that is named in the syntagm ‘‘my
39
Freud (1984, p. 368).
Natality and mortality 365
123
death.’’’
40
Insofar as I relate in advance to my death, what I anticipate is the
termination of multiple strands of interaction and history shared with others, and I
fear the loss of this shared history as a loss to all those involved in it. Those strands
of interaction were ours rather than narrowly mine, insofar as they unfolded
between the self and real external others.
Cavarero’s ontology implies, then, that death is relational in the following ways.
Firstly, distinct deaths intertwine; the death of A affects and feeds into the death of
B, or vice versa; the loss is shared, collective. Secondly, each death befalls a
collectivity, the unique collectivity that each person is, so that that the death is only
ever that person’s own insofar as it is the end of a set of relations not owned solely
by the one who dies. These are two faces of the mortality of intertwined selves.
Insofar as I do relate in advance to the prospect of my death, I fear not only (as I
put it earlier) the prospect of ceasing to be in a shared world with particular others.
I also fear the prospect of this particular web of others (which I am) ceasing to be in
the world: partly in that the relevant others will thereby lose part of their own being;
partly in that these others will cease to be carried forward as dimensions of me.
Admittedly, when one fears death the experience often presents itself as if what is
feared is one’s own personal, absolute annihilation, one’s own no-longer being-
there. Yet if each person is at root a web of relations, then what someone who fears
their annihilation ultimately fears must be—whether it is immediately apparent to
them or not—the dissolution of this web. My relation to the prospect of death places
me into the depths of my attachments to others.
Does this relational view of death open up a possibility of post-mortem
survival? It might appear to do so. If, after someone’s death, others remember that
person (and commemorate them, relate narratives about them, maintain them in
their psyches, maintain their habitual ways of having responded to that person),
then that person seems still to be appearing to these others and thus would be
being kept in some kind of presence within the shared world—not entirely dead
after all.
41
I am not convinced by this line of thought. If birth is always the arrival
of someone uniquely new, new in virtue of being a unique concrescence of
relations, then when somebody dies there must, reciprocally, be an irreplaceable
loss. Certainly, aspects of the formerly living person can be and generally are
taken up by others—those who are bereaved take over the possessions, the home,
the habits of body and mind, of those who have died. But inevitably, when others
engage in this work of mourning, they incorporate these aspects of the dead person
into the unique webs of relations that they in each case are. These surviving others
cannot maintain these aspects as the facets of that particular web that constituted
40
Derrida (1993, p. 76). Derrida says this partly with reference to Freud’s view of the personality as a
precipitate of relations with others. But Derrida also means that I can only anticipate my death (from
within my life) as an occurrence of the order of the deaths of others. This is because, necessarily, my
death as my constitutive limit is not something I can anticipate or bring within my compass at all. Thus
here Derrida wishes to turn Heidegger’s distinction between my own death and those of others against his
account of anticipatory resoluteness and authenticity. In doing so, though, Derrida still operates within
Heidegger’s conceptual framework, whereas Cavarero follows Arendt in building a positive philosophical
alternative to Heidegger, an alternative that prioritizes natality and sociality over mortality and
individuation.
41
For a version of this argument see Guenther (2008).
366 A. Stone
123
the now-dead person. Necessarily, these aspects assume new meanings for those
who take them over (not least in that they tend to make reference back to the now-
dead person—a meaning of commemorating or remaining faithful to that person,
or of rebellious insistence on reshaping the dead person’s legacy). If each person is
a singular concrescence of relations, then nothing of them can survive the loss of
this whole concrescence.
5 Corporeal mortality
I now want to make this sketch of an account of relational death more concrete by
re-reading Beauvoir’s short narrative of her mother’s death from cancer. This will
also enable me to elaborate on the corporeality of death: For, since birth has
ontological significance as the particular kind of corporeal event that it is, likewise
the relationality of death must inhere in what death is corporeally. I will argue, too,
that deaths are corporeal processes that affect us as living bodies, and specifically as
mutually entwined, interdependent, organisms; and that this is what makes it
possible for us partly to die along with one another—to exist less the more we are
bereaved.
Beauvoir criticizes Heidegger’s connection between mortality and authentic
existence in her 1944 essay Pyrrhus and Cineas.
42
Nonetheless, in A Very Easy
Death she inclines to the Heideggerian belief in a sharp distinction between one’s
own death and the deaths of others such that death is, as Heidegger says, non-
relational.
43
‘The misfortune,’ Beauvoir thus declares, ‘is that although everyone
must come to this, each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman
during these last days …and yet we were profoundly separated from her.’
44
Yet this
belief of Beauvoir’s eventually succumbs to a rather different view—in effect, the
view that death is relational, and is relational in its corporeal, and specifically
biological, character.
The memoir begins with Beauvoir’s mother admitted to hospital after a fall. The
doctors discover that she has intestinal cancer, on which they operate. Beauvoir is
frustrated that the doctors persistently deceive her mother about her condition and
prolong her mother’s life with drugs and operations although she is terminally ill
and in great pain. Beauvoir longs to seize (benevolent) control over her mother’s
death from the doctors: to project some meaning onto the impending death so that it
would cease to be merely a physical process befalling a ‘defenseless carcass,’ which
is how the doctors insist on treating it.
45
Yet something stops Beauvoir from
exerting control: ‘One is caught up in the wheels and dragged along, powerless in
42
de Beauvoir (2004, p. 114).
43
In Pyrrhus and Cineas Beauvoir does not reject that distinction as such (indeed, she does not mention
it). Rather, what she rejects in Heidegger’s account of death is his view that authenticity must be
grounded in the assumption of one’s mortality, for (anticipating Derrida) she denies that one can have any
anticipatory relation to one’s death as such. She instead grounds the possibility of authenticity in our
ambiguous transcendence. See de Beauvoir (2004, pp. 113–115).
44
de Beauvoir (1966, p. 87).
45
de Beauvoir (1966, p. 10).
Natality and mortality 367
123
the face of specialists’ diagnoses, their forecasts, their decisions.’
46
Finally her
mother dies unwillingly, painfully unable to breathe, having declared that she does
not want to die.
In the face of this event, Beauvoir affirms the Heideggerian view that we each die
alone, ontologically. But her narrative undermines these claims. Immediately after
making them, she writes of how closely bound up in body with her mother she has
always felt. Her mother’s body was her first love; it was her mother as a body with
whom the infant Beauvoir was identified. Unconsciously, she remains caught up in
this early loving identification with her mother: In her dreams Mme Beauvoir
‘blended with Sartre, and we were happy together.’
47
The movement of the text then reveals how this continuing identification
overcomes the purported solitude of Mme Beauvoir’s death. Mme Beauvoir resists
death, doggedly clings to life—a bodily clinging, which for Beauvoir is rooted in her
mother’s intense organic vitality: ‘[S]he clung ferociously to this world, and she had
an animal dread of death’; ‘Her vitality filled me with wonder.’
48
Correspondingly,
it is the physical process of dying that her mother resists, the process that Beauvoir,
faithful to her mother’s perspective, describes in meticulous, gruesome detail: Her
mother’s ‘flayed body was bathing in the uric acid that oozed from her skin’—
‘rotting alive.’
49
Actually, Beauvoir professes both repugnance and admiration for
the vitality with which her mother defies these processes, but admiration prevails.
This is because, she tells us, it is rooted in her identification—her unconscious,
enduring, bodily identification—with her mother: ‘[I]n every cell of my body I
joined in her refusal, her rebellion’ against death.
50
Beauvoir continues, has always
been continuing, her mother’s vitality: Her own resistance to the death is her
mother’s bodily resistance continuing in and through her own body, so that just
when Beauvoir is bemoaning her mother’s existential loneliness in the hospital, she
finds her face copying her mother’s movements, crying her mother’s tears—‘I had
put Maman’s mouth on my own face …Her whole person, her whole being, was
concentrated there.’
51
Death is, again, relational: With Mme Beauvoir’s death (and resistance) a part of
Beauvoir is dying (and resisting) too—the death, and the battle against it, is theirs,
shared. For the relations that constitute selves are equally their relations as bodies.
My life, actions, are lived and performed bodily; the story others narrate to me is the
story of who I am as a body. The concrete others with whom I interact, parts of
whom I continually take in, are bodily others. When someone dies to whom I was
exposed, I lose part of the person that I have been—in that the death affects me as
someone exterior to the dead person; and in that the dead person takes part of me
away with him or her within his or her bodily interior.
46
de Beauvoir (1966, p. 50).
47
de Beauvoir (1966, p. 89).
48
de Beauvoir (1966, pp. 14, 17).
49
de Beauvoir (1966, pp. 71, 73).
50
de Beauvoir (1966, p. 91).
51
de Beauvoir (1966, p. 28).
368 A. Stone
123
This loss is corporeal. It ‘undoes’ a person, inflicts on them a—more-or-less
partial, more-or-less temporary—disintegration of the body, the concrescence of
relations in bodily form, that that person is.
52
This is possible because our bodies are
biological—although, to be sure, they are not merely biological, and their
expressive and relational qualities are not reducible to their biological properties.
It is along such lines that Beauvoir distinguishes in her earlier work (notably
including The Second Sex of 1949) between our bodies as lived—our bodies as we
directly experience them, with expressive significance sedimented within our
corporeal habits and dispositions—and those same bodies considered merely as
biological systems, the objects of a scientific perspective that abstracts from lived
experience. In making this distinction Beauvoir is not denying that our bodies have
biological properties or that they are systems of biological processes. She is arguing
that when studying human life we must re-situate the biological facts (faits) within
the field of human relations and projects which gives them concrete significance
(sens), building further levels of expressive meaning into them. In turn, our
biological features affect what relations and projects we can embrace and what
particular habits and attitudes we can assume corporeally—although these effects
are already mediated by the prior levels of concrete significance with which these
biological features have become infused over time.
53
Beauvoir retains a similar approach to the corporeal in A Very Easy Death.Aswe
have seen, she describes both her mother’s death and her resistance to death as
biological processes. But they take on significance in terms of her mother’s
attachment to her relations with others, including her daughter’s—an attachment
that Beauvoir reciprocates, so that the breaking of these relations pervades and
unsettles her body’s biological processes in turn. If we can be corporeally undone by
one another’s deaths, then, this is because we are biological beings whose biology
becomes enfolded within the context of our mutual relations. Our mutual
appearance is our bodily entwinement with one another and our vital dependence
upon one another. Our entwinement together as bodies enfolds our biological
properties, shaping the concrete context in which those properties exist and work
their effects, so that we become vitally invested in and organically dependent upon
our mutual relations. To die, too, is to undergo a biological process—one in which
the bodily organism that one has been undergoes dissolution (as Beauvoir
mercilessly documents with respect to her mother, and as Cavarero rightly says
in Plato; her fault there is to take death to be exclusively biological and not
simultaneously existential and relational). Because death is a biological process, the
transition from life to death is generally graduated. If one loses an important other,
then one may well take some of the first steps along this transition: The bodily
organism that one is may cease to perform some of its vital functions, lose some of
its vital hold on life—as if one had suffered a physical blow. It is in this way that
bereavement can reduce or attenuate someone’s existence, by stripping away some
52
Butler says: ‘We’re undone by each other’ when we lose one another to death (2004, p. 23). Cavarero
(2009, p. 8) tells us that to ‘undo’ formerly meant to viscerally disfigure or dismember.
53
de Beauvoir (1988, pp. 66–67).
Natality and mortality 369
123
of the relational conditions on which that person has become vitally dependent,
reducing their power to persist in their bodily being.
Not surprisingly, therefore, Beauvoir answers her self-addressed question ‘why
was she so moved by her mother’s death?’ by writing first of her unconscious
identification with her mother and then of their shared vital spirit, their corporeal
intertwining. All this leads her to concede that death is not so solitary after all:
‘[L]ove, friendship or comradely feeling overcomes the loneliness of death.’
54
From
A Very Easy Death it emerges that death is relational as a corporeal phenomenon
that befalls human beings as bodies entwined organically. One person’s death is part
of another’s insofar as they have become entwined as organisms, so that the loss of
the one disables the other physically, makes their biological functions seize up and
collapse, more-or-less temporarily. The continuity between our deaths corresponds
to our physical interdependence as living beings.
6 Fearing death
As Beauvoir describes it, her mother was ‘quite worn out’ and ‘of an age to die.’ Yet
her death was not ‘easy’; she met it unwillingly, holding to life with all her
remaining, still considerable, force. This returns us to Cavarero’s suggestion, in
Plato, that if we understood death as biological re-incorporation into life then we
would cease to have grounds to fear death and would instead be reconciled to it.
Once we recognize that Cavarero’s philosophy of natality actually calls for a
different view of mortality from the one that she explicitly adopts, we also see that,
on this relational view of death which I have sketched, we do have grounds to fear
death.
55
There are two main grounds for fear. Firstly, we each have grounds to fear our
own deaths because these will mark the end to the unique webs of relations of which
we are constituted, and to which we are necessarily attached because these relations
constitute us. Secondly, we have grounds to fear death on behalf of the related
others who will also be caught up in the death, because my death is also the death of
a part of those others. We feel fear on behalf of these related others just because,
again, we are attached to them in our very being. Thus, we have grounds to fear our
deaths not merely on our own behalf but also on behalf of the others who will partly
die along with us. Indeed, even in fearing my own death as the loss of the unique set
of relations that I am, I am fearing, precisely, the end of this set of relations. What is
feared cannot be specified without reference to the multiple others who have shaped
the unique world of significance that these relations make up. I fear my death as the
end of a set of shared attachments, meanings, histories; a web of remembered and
anticipated events shared with particular others; of stories exchanged and re-worked
with successive others over time.
54
de Beauvoir (1966, p. 91).
55
I say ‘fear’ (contrary to Heidegger’s distinction of fear from anxiety) because from my perspective, it
is death as a phenomenon with corporeal and biological dimensions that we as living beings have reason
to fear.
370 A. Stone
123
But still, why should we be attached to the relations that constitute us? In terms
of Beauvoir’s memoir, it is as an organism that Mme Beauvoir wishes to persist in
being. She is attached to her own organic form, and, because in human beings
biology is socialized through and through, this means that she is attached in her
body to the particular series of relations that has coalesced into her. Consequently,
to convey the nature of this attachment, Beauvoir offers us a brief history of her
mother’s life—her natal family, her marriage, children, relationship to the church,
etc.—at the same time as she conveys the vital nature of this attachment and its
opposition to the gruesomely physical process of her mother’s death.
This recalls Lispector’s suggestion that each organism is necessarily attached to
its own form. Presumably, an organism can remain so even when (as in Mme
Beauvoir’s case) it has reached the end of its narrowly biological life-course—that
is, in Lispector’s terms, when anonymous life is pressing beyond the finite form in
which it has been temporarily contained. For the strictly biological functions of a
human organism invariably become entwined with the psychical functions that
make up its personality, the set of social relations congealed within it. Human life (if
not life as such) conflicts with itself: It tends to adhere to its own finite relational
forms even when the biological structures that are entwined with them have become
exhausted. Or, in Cavarero’s terms in Plato: If cosmic life rearranges, scrambles,
and unscrambles elements into ever-new combinations and relations, then any living
concrescence of relations will nonetheless be apt to try to persist in the form of the
particular concrescence that it has become. Life conflicts with itself; cosmic life
conflicts with the finite forms that it constantly produces. Eventually in each case,
the conflict ends with cosmic life dissolving these forms. But for the most part,
too—that is, barring terrible illness, pain, sorrow, repeated or overwhelming
bereavement—these finite living forms resist death: They resist the efforts of cosmic
life to break through them.
In being attached to the sets of relations with others through which we have lived,
we are equally attached to our own organic forms as these have come to be, forms
that are never merely biological but always biological-cum-social. The disintegra-
tions that we fear are our disintegrations as organisms. Our finite, bodily, nature is
such that we cannot readily embrace re-incorporation into neutral life in the way
that Cavarero proposes. To view death in light of birth is to appreciate that death is
to be feared.
56
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I thank the anonymous referees for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions, and those
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