Answering the question : ‘what is life?’

Abstract

The present paper offers five approaches to the question of life as it is posed in the intersection between Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’ and Jacques Derrida’s reading of it in ‘Living On/Border Lines’. After a brief overview of the circumstances of the poem’s composition, it explores (1) the relation between historical fact and figuration; (2) the afterlife of literary texts as theorised by Derrida and Walter Benjamin; (3) the responsibility of critical writing on life and figuration; (4) the difference between survival and immortality as well as Shelley’s conception of poetry’s eternity; and finally (5) the possibility that it is living on that destroys life.