Ontology of Death

Through examination of the death penalty in literature Aaron Aquilina contests Heidegger's concept of 'being-towards-death' and proposes a new understanding of the political and philosophical subject.<br/><br/>Dickens Nabokov Hugo Sophocles and many others explore capital punishment in their works from <i>Antigone</i> to <i>Invitation</i> to a <i>Beheading</i>. Using these varied case studies Aquilina demonstrates how they all highlight two aspects of the experience. First they uncover a particular state of being or more precisely non-being that comes with a death sentence and second they reveal how this state exists beyond death row as sovereignty and alterity are by no means confined to a prison cell.<br/><br/>In contrast to Heidegger's being-towards-death which individualizes the subject - only I can die my own death supposedly - this book argues that when condemned to death the self and death collide putting under erasure the category of subjectivity itself. Be it death row or not when the supposed futurity of death is brought into the here and now we encounter what Aquilina calls 'relational death'. Living on with death severs the subject's relation to itself the other and political sociality as a whole rendering the human less a named and recognizable 'being' than an anonymous 'living corpse' a human thing.<br/> <br/>In a sustained engagement with Blanchot Levinas Hegel Agamben and Derrida <i>The Ontology of Death</i> articulates a new theory of the subject beyond political subjectivity defined by sovereignty and beyond the Heideggerian notion of ontological selfhood.