The insistence of death in life: Hegel afterHeidegger

Abstract

According to Heidegger’s critique, Hegel would have subjected death to the logical consequences of speculative thought, thus depriving death of the sting of its negativity –such a critique belongs nowadays to the commonplaces of the confrontation with Hegel’s thought. However, if one reads Hegel after Heidegger, and considers the unsolved problems of Heidegger’s thinking on death, Hegel’s concept of death emerges under a new light. Particularly because it was precisely the fact that Hegel did not hide the negativity of death from the consideration of thought, which allowed him to conceive of death as an immanent, pervasive and ever changing dimension of life. Only in this way becomes intelligible that death is not just an absolute negation of life, but also an unconditional claim governing it, and constitutive of life’s temporal “form”.