Abstract:
This talk will disseminate my ideas around literature, death, and politics as I’ve articulated them in my monograph, The Ontology of Death, published with Bloomsbury (18 May 2023).
The book examines several literary works of fiction that present us with a protagonist condemned to death. The implicit question that runs throughout this project may be phrased as follows: why would such a varied group of authors, from Sophocles to Blanchot, from Dickens to Hugo to Nabokov, among others, be concerned with the death penalty, which seems such a niche corner of human experience? The exceptional situation of these condemned individuals is made more complex in light of the fact that these same narratives consistently offer their protagonists an escape – through the action of someone else, an Other – from the totalitarian and sovereign decision that decrees their demise. With such an interruption of the death penalty, we have before us, then, the problematic concept of the dead man walking... away from their own death.
I will explain how one may read these fictions as shedding new light on the death penalty in two key ways. First, through their universalisation of the experience of condemnation, the reader is led to comprehend the death penalty as the very foundation of political society and human existence, and so even we who live on outside of death row are nonetheless fundamentally implicated within the fatal and multifaceted matrices of the penalty. Second, in subverting the supposed certainty of death through the protagonists’ survival of their own sentence, these narratives gesture beyond the sovereign–subject relation and lead us to conceive the human subject otherwise, both on ontological and political grounds.
The talk will undertake a particularly anti-Heideggerian examination of that instant when ‘death’ and ‘self’ collide, contesting the idea that ‘my death’ is an irreplaceable possession, and thus, in turn, condemning to death Heideggerian ‘Being-towards-death’. In a sustained engagement with Blanchot’s thought, the talk will also make significant reference to the work of Hegel, Levinas, Derrida and Agamben, and will conclude with a re-evaluation of the human, less as a named and recognisable ‘being’ than as an anonymous living corpse or ‘thing’, residing beyond names and concepts.
Bionote:
is a resident academic with the University of Malta’s . Before that, he was an Associate Lecturer and Assistant Director at Lancaster University. Aquilina has published somewhat eclectic articles with journals such as Textual Practice, Word and Text, and Parallax. Apart from other material, including book reviews and interviews with established thinkers – amongst others, Judith Butler and Terry Eagleton (CounterText and antae) – Aquilina has also published a chapter in The Essay At The Limits, and another chapter on queer theory and popular games is forthcoming in Beyond the Deck (McFarland, 2023). His main research interests comprise queer theory (and literary theory in general), the politics of speculative fiction and conceptual writing, continental philosophy, and creative writing.
Further details of Prof. Aquilina's book can be accessible .
