Suny Press
A Death of the World
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Harris B. Bechtol
About this book
Offers a description of what happens to survivors after a death, based on the effect this death has on the survivor's relation to the spatial and temporal world occupied after the loss of the deceased.
A Death of the World offers a phenomenological description of what happens to the world for those who survive the death of someone. Bringing Jacques Derrida's works into conversation with the philosophies of Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, Maurice Blanchot, and Claude Romano; the poetry and literature of Paul Celan, W. H. Auden, Emily Dickinson, Ovid, and Jonathan Safran Foer; and psychological works concerning trauma, mourning, epigenetics, and memory, author Harris B. Bechtol provides interdisciplinary language for understanding the death of the other as an event. He argues that such death must be understood as an event because this death is more than just the loss of the other who has died insofar as the meaning of the world to and with this other is also lost. Such loss manifests itself through the transformations of both the spaces in which meaning takes place and the lived time of a survivor's world. These transformations of the world culminate in his account of workless mourning, which establishes the contours of the life after these deaths of the world.
Author / Editor information
Reviews
"Bechtol has produced a work that is impressive both in its reconstruction of key themes in Derrida, Heidegger, and Marion (death, time, mourning, memory, the gift, the event) and, more distinctively, in how it takes up these themes to develop an original phenomenology of surviving the death of the other. He shows how the loss of those close to us transforms the very meaning of the world spatially, temporally, interpersonally, and practically, offering insight into how we might live better in the face of this." — Ian Alexander Moore, author of Dialogue on the Threshold: Heidegger and Trakl
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Abbreviations
ix -
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Preface
xiii -
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Introduction: The Question of Death, Event, and Survival
1 -
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Part One — Symptoms of an Event
21 -
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Part Two — Spatial Transformations of the World
89 -
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Part Three — Temporal Transformations of the World
125 -
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Conclusion: The Afterlife
189 -
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Notes
193 -
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Bibliography
227 -
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Index
241
