Session Four: Speech/Finding the Language

Darcy Buerkle, Ph.D. Candidate
European Studies, Claremont Graduate University

One of the things that is most interesting to me about these kinds of meetings is that people do come to them for such a variety of different reasons, and some of those reasons begin to get uncovered in a way that doesn't usually happen in an academic context. The dissertation I'm about to finish is called, "Reading the Will: Jewish Women, Subjectivity and Suicide in Germany." It was inspired by the paintings of a woman artist who painted her autobiography while she was in exile in the South of France. That autobiography consists of over a thousand paintings she did in the year before she was killed in Auschwitz. And it is really the story of the way in which she imagined the reasons for her mother's suicide and also her grandmother's suicide. There were a total of six suicides in her family. Hence her project was really an imaginative one, completely preoccupied with the possibility of an explanation of those losses.

Right now I want to speak briefly about two ideas that have come up over the last two days. The first is imagination. It is probably clear from what I have said about my own work that the imagination plays a very pivotal role for the artist I am studying, a woman who spent twenty hours a day while she was in exile creating paintings. Those paintings have trace-paper overlays on them, and the narrative of her life, and of her mother's life, is written on the trace-paper overlays.

It's my feeling in talking to people over the last couple of days that as a group we actually divide up into those people who think the conversation [with the dead] goes on and those people who think that it doesn't. That notion is usually coupled with belief about the possibility or impossibility of a world in the aftermath of loss. And I wonder about doing those things together. Might it be true that a reconstituted world in the aftermath of such a death is a world constituted of the very vestiges of an intimacy that remains? That is, if there isn't a continued conversation, is it perhaps the case that there is a continued intimacy? And how might we describe that? What would be the phenomenology of that intimacy?

Secondly, I wanted to ask some questions about language, and suggest that we might discuss whether there is a discourse of the dead, a discourse of the dying. And also to add to that, motivated in part by Michael Witmore's comments yesterday, is there a discourse of the near-death, and what authority do we grant or not grant that experience? Are we so committed to the inevitability of death that the near-death experience is necessarily invalidated or ridiculed? I wonder about that.

And I wonder about this too in connection with Shai's comments about time. The near-death experience marks time in a radical way, particularly since time continues to go on. And how do we account for that marking of time? Do we say that we now have a new relationship to our mortality, or do we have a relationship to death for which there must be a language and there must be some description?

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