Despair and Hope for a ‘Life that Does not Live’ - Conference Presentation

If according to Kierkegaard despair is a "sickness unto death", a sickness which does not lead to one's physical death but like a "moribund [one] lies and struggles with death, and cannot die - yet not as though there were hope of life", then I propose that we currently exist in a constant state of despair that is not acknowledged and declared as we are faced with a great danger that death cannot protect us against.

This great danger is not simply the threat of Covid-19 as a potentially death-inducing illness; it is the sickness emerging from our anaesthesia and anti-emotionality that dominate our everyday encounters with ourselves and others, the lack of connectivity and sensitivity to other people's suffering and death as a way of avoiding 'suffering' our own feelings and registering our own mortality. We try to turn ourselves to no-thing so as to avoid feeling any-thing: if we are already no-thing, then the death of ourselves or others cannot affect or destroy any-thing within us.

Bereft of aliveness resulting from our connection to our own and other bodies, death also becomes nothing for us. It becomes a negligible quantity which is entirely assimilated. Moreover, as we are repeatedly reminded of the priority of the health of the markets over our own health, especially the health of those who are deemed not to be economically relevant or productive anymore, death merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of our own and other bodies (especially of those who are no-bodies) in the face of the social and economic body.

What is decisive here, however, is the absorption of biological destruction by collective will. "For only a humanity", Adorno suggests in Minima Moralia, "to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people." If there is to be any hope, the despair of a "life that does not live" needs to be acknowledged so as to lead to the symbolic death of our disconnected self and the rebirth of a self that is constituted (as well as undone) by our connection to others.

Here is a link to the YouTube video of the conference talk:

Kierkegaard's Despair and Hope for the 'Life that Does not Live' - Conference Presentation - YouTube