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Deconstructing Dignity

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About a “right to die” there is obviously not yet any legal, political, or ethical consensus. But has the very question of such a right been formulated clearly? Despite a long philosophic tradition addressing the question of suicide itself and, more recently, a half-century of legal decisions, a growing library of scholarly studies across multiple disciplines, and a steady out- pouring of polemic from advocacy groups, the debate about a right to die remains marked by contradictions and misrecognitions on every side—if one can even speak of the “sides” of a debate whose warring positions often seem secretly complicit with one another. Something still seems to impede our access to a vexed set of decisions about the end of (human) life—deci- sions that have never been easy, and that will not become easy even when all the common arguments so far brought to them have been deconstructed, assuming such a thing is possible.
My preface title, which already takes from my epigraph a hint of the comic, also gives homage to Georges Bataille’s La Part Maudite—the “cursed part” or, as Robert Hurley translates it, The Accursed Share—to invoke the “burst of laughter” with which (in Derrida’s memorable summary) Bataille responds to the very work of philosophy under its privileged name of Hegel. This laughter, which emerges from or perhaps constitutes a certain relation between the finite being and death, seems at once to be the very thing always at stake in this debate, and the very thing that remains entirely unthought within it.

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Detail Information

Series Title

Deconstructing Dignity

Call Number

-

Publisher

USA : The University of Chicago Press., 2014

Collation

1-228

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

13: 978-0-226-08826-

Classification

NONE

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

1st Edtion

Subject(s)

Communication

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

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