Life, Death & Spectres

Bettye 2022-04-19 09:03:21

Derrida saw Western thought as structured on binaries in which one term is seen as privileged over the other. Man, woman. Speech, writing. Essence, appearance. Absence, presence. Derrida believes that these binaries are arbitrary but philosophers in constructing philosophical systems elevate them into eternal and absolute categories. His famous concept of deconstruction, among other things, is a way of showing how certain generally accepted binaries are--arbitrary and unstable.

Baudrillard drawing from Derrida's concept of binaries focused on one specific binary--the binary between life and death, death being seen as the absence of life. For Baudrillard these binaries are also the origin of different types of authority. People submit to political authorities that prompt is the postponement of death in this life, and to religious authorities that prompt is the continuation of life after death. We become so obsessed with keeping life and death separated that we ironically become obsessed with death. Our perceptions, our ideas, and our actions are haunted by such spectres, entities in between being and non-being, imagined absences, non-existent objects and events that will never occur.

Claudia's motivation for asking her father Egon to move-in with her was not Egon's death as such, but the thought of it--the expectation of Egon's death before it actually occurred. And so since death is someone's absence, her motivation was Egon's absence's absence--death that has not yet occurred. The process of preventing Egon's death ultimately led to Egon's death, but a homicidal death, not the death by disease expected by Claudia, and the result is that Egon's death was caused by the thought of a death that never in fact happened--an anticipation of an absent absence that never became present and yet clearly it was present in its effects on the world.

As Mark Fisher said when talking about Derrida's concept of ontology, "Haunting is the state proper to being as such." Claudia was haunted by the idea of ​​Egon dying by disease which never occurred and forever remained a ghost.

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Extended Reading
  • Ulices 2022-04-21 09:03:53

    A/ The pit can be left unfilled, Jonas must die.

  • Benny 2022-04-24 07:01:27

    More and more... Dialogue has a strong sense of didactic. The panting sounds in each episode are really annoying. The soundtrack isn't good either. German dramas always have good ideas, but when they come out they suck.

Beginnings and Endings quotes

  • Investigator Clausen: Expectations lead to disappointment. "Have hope," my mother used to say, "not expectations. You might just be surprised, but not disappointed."