Dead Man Walking

In my previous post I ended with the statement that, “theory and moral formation is only as good as it postures the individual towards what I can only describe at this point as death.” This is one of the only viable options I can see in the hope of genuine movement or what should be better characterized as transformation. That is, if we want to discard magical or mechanistic appeals to the Big Other or flaccid hopes of the “power within”. It should be stated at the outset that murder and suicide do not have a monopoly on the social and existential importance of “death” as I am conceiving it. More often than not murder and suicide carry with them a sense of fierce preservation or control that does not allow the movement of death.
Death is of course the ultimate movement. Because of this artists and scientists alike give it much attention. Though it should be noted their pursuits often diverge in almost opposite directions. Scientists like Ray Kurzweil pursue, with hope and substantial funding, the possibility of immortal biological life. I make no critique here of modern medicine only the observation of its relationship to the artists engagement with death. Without the aid of technology or significant capital the artist reflects on the reality of life’s movement which is the movement towards death. The Russian novelist Boris Pasternak says that art “always meditates on death and thus always creates life.” What is significant is that consistently in history artists have found currency and in fact excess in their reflection on death. It has not taken it has repaid ten-fold. It is in these spaces that openings occur and with it the possibility of transformation.
In his reflections on art Rowan Williams looks to Flannery O’Connor as one who understands death as “getting somewhere”. This notion must be treated with some care so as not to fall into a vague nihilism. The artist points to death because it is the only perspective that maintains integrity (that is not falling into one of the “false options” noted at the beginning). In a recent seminar that I sat in on we were asked to bring for the first class images of transformation. Invariably there was a point of “death” in each one that preceded some sort of qualitative shift in life (Raskolnikov’s transformation at the end of Crime and Punishment). There is no great life that does not engage death. Otherwise death always holds the upper hand in any given “system”.
Unless true dispossession of self is accounted for in theory and reflection I would hold little hope transformation. If the entirety of a particular theory remains strictly within the movement of human reason or perhaps more specifically of logic, without so much a hint as to the immanent external (and perhaps beyond), then movement remains a reshuffling.