Endless Ontology: Agamben and Sartre on Death

Agamben’s engagements with Heidegger attempt to revise the latter’s notion of death as the formative condition of life. For Heidegger, Dasein’s distinctive mode of life is shaped by awareness of death and orientation towards death, but this teleological structure threatens to limit potentiality - a key concept for Agamben, concerned especially with the self-generating and self-contained capacity of thought. Accordingly, Agamben instead positions death as Dasein’s beginning rather than its end. This revision of Heidegger finds a precursor in the work of Sartre, who sought to develop an idea of radically spontaneous consciousness, unconstrained by any narrative logic  or sense of self. Though engaged in a different context and reliant on a different vocabulary, Sartre’s proposals concerning consciousness can help elaborate Agamben’s as conceptual tools for the maintenance of potentiality.