Death and the Negative in Agamben and Beauvoir

Heidegger’s theory that Dasein is a being-toward-death exerted a significant influence on existentialism. Agamben marks a break with the sacrificial, nihilistic dimensions of Heidegger’s negative orientation. And yet Agamben is no vitalist. He does not offer figures of life as a curative to soothe this negativity with an affirmation. Instead, the negative dimensions associated with death are differently arranged. There is a resonance between Agamben’s figurations of life and death, and those that appears in Simone de Beauvoir. Both Agamben and Beauvoir think death within a site of suspension—as if imbricated with the embryonic or the infantile. For both thinkers, death appears alongside life; a figure that not only evokes decay and destruction but also germination and fermentation. In both, neither the powers of life nor the powers of death are ascendant. Instead, in figures such as the homo sacer, these powers are held in a form of suspension.