Session Four: Speech/Finding the Language
Editor's Note

The fourth and final session of Seeing the Difference is an open discussion involving all resource speakers and participants. The session is introduced by three Ph.D. candidates who had all participated in a three-day interdisciplinary workshop on illness, death and dying sponsored by the Townsend Center (in collaboration with International and Area Studies) in 1998: Shai Lavi (Jurisprudence and Social Policy, Boalt Hall School of Law, UC Berkeley), Darcy Buerkle (European Studies, Claremont Graduate University), and Elizabeth Dungan (History of Art, UC Berkeley). As rapporteurs of the Seeing the Difference program, this group had the important--and challenging--task of summarizing the issues that had arisen in the preceding three sessions and presenting a set of questions and issues to be addressed by the group as a whole. For Shai Lavi, the role of technology in our consciousness of the process of dying is a central issue. Darcy Buerkle, drawing on her own work on a Jewish woman artist who painted her autobiography in the year before she died in Auschwitz, points to the importance of what she calls the "imaginative project" in the face of loss. As the final commentator, Elizabeth Dungan eloquently reminds us of the various notions of vision that have emerged in the two days of discussion, the recurring examples of the spatiality of death, and finally, how both visual and spatial metaphors lend themselves to notions of relationship. --CMG