Death: Making Sense of the Nonsensical

Modern Western society holds a perspective on death as being the opposite to life in an attempt to separate and exclude it from life, and thereby control it by overwriting it with knowledge and science. In contradistinction to this view, the current project explores the notion of death from the standpoint of Lacan’s conceptualisation of a subject, a subject in opposition to the Cartesian conception dominating modern subjectivity. Lacan’s theoretical framework offers a rich, in-depth account of the notion of death as it is structured through language. More precisely, human experiences are structured through the intertwining of the three registers constitutive of reality and subjectivity: the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. It is thus the main purpose of this project to trace the construction of death as it happens through the interaction of these three registers. Three volunteers participated in this study who wrote down two life-changing events. The guidelines stemming from the framework of a Lacanian Discourse Analysis (LDA) were applied to the narratives as a method for analysis. The analysis of these narratives revealed that the interaction of the three registers determines the position death gains in reality, that is, what sense it is given, which subsequently influences the experience of anxiety. The revealed relationships to death further elucidate three points. Firstly, as meaning and language are introduced in life, life and death become inextricably bound to each other. Secondly, as long as a symbol acts as a mediator between a subject and death, making sense of death becomes an impossibility; any attempt to put death into reason, finite knowledge or generalisations fails. Finally, death as standing both inside and outside our constructed reality sheds light on a necessary relationship to death that moulds an impossible, interdependent subject.