Death is the key to human existence
by Giovanni Cucci
Death presents itself as an uncomfortable but at the same time inevitable problem, which both disturbs and fascinates: just think of its presence in films, music and novels. Death in a fantasy version attracts today's young audience in a special way: the representations and narratives linked to the afterlife, vampirism, or horror make its mark. To give an example, among many possible, the novel Twilight, by S. Meyer (the first of a series of four, all crowned with great editorial success), which narrates the love story between a girl and a boy/ vampire, had sold more than 17 million copies at the time of its cinematic release (2008), further contributing to its diffusion and popularity.
The great renown of this theme runs parallel to its substantial censorship in ordinary life. This removal is a peculiarity of Western culture: starting from the industrial revolution, the theme of death has been placed in "quarantine", in a sort of limbo, even if in this way it, like any repressed reality, makes one feel even more his own suggestion is disturbing: «Death in the past was a tragedy - often comical - in which the part of the dying was played. Today's death is a comedy - always dramatic - in which one plays the part of someone who does not know he is close to dying" (Ph. Ariès).
However, forgetting death remains a constant temptation of Western thought. The philosopher Epicurus considers it antithetical to life, since only those who are not dead can talk about it, and dismisses the problem with a phrase that has become famous: «When we are there there is no death, when there is death we we are no longer." But the author who has most successfully analyzed today's attempt to erase the personal confrontation with death is M. Heidegger. In his work Being and Time he focuses at length on "chatter", a typical expression of empty existence, which superficially deals with serious and inevitable problems, such as death: "Death is conceived as something indeterminate, which certainly, a one day or another it will end up happening, but which, for the meantime, is not yet present and therefore does not threaten us. The “you die” spreads the belief that death concerns the anonymous Yes. He implies: from time to time it's not me. In fact, Yes is no one."
On the side of psychoanalysis, Freud does not express himself in different terms, recalling the enormous and unfortunately daily massacres of the great war, which had transformed death into a sort of habit, a daily routine. He notes in particular how we can certainly talk about death, but always about the death of others, a death that has become a spectacle that we witness, but which does not concern us. For Freud this has a purely psychoanalytic reason: one defends oneself from the anguish that the thought of one's own death arouses by removing it, because the unconscious does not know time, in particular it does not know the end of one's life experience. It finds itself structurally placed outside one's field of thought and imagination: «Indeed, one's own death is unrepresentable, and every time we try to do so we can see that in reality we continue to be present as spectators. There is no one who ultimately believes in his own death, or, what is equivalent, that in his unconscious each of us is convinced of his own immortality."
The most rigorous attempt to justify the removal of death was made by idealist philosophy. It conceives the single being as indistinguishable from the totality: dying means dissolving into it to continue living in another form. The most eloquent and controversial representative of this thought in Italy was Benedetto Croce; he warns, however, that something escapes this identification, there remains an irreducible opposition between the singularity of the human being and the All of the Spirit. This disparity is revealed precisely in death: in the face of it man must stoically resign himself, his personal identity disappears, while his work remains forever.