Abstract
The purpose of this article is to consider a philosophical concept in terms of narrative inquiry. In this instance, the authors explore the Nietzschean concept of Amor Fati and explore what it means to construct narratives based on this concept. The authors provide a detailed literature review of Narrative Inquiry and align their work with the post qualitative narratives, specifically new materialism based on the work of Rosi Braidotti. The article concludes with suggestions about the nature of the tensions between life and death as well as how to fashion a life in spite of the ever-pervasive specter of death.
For me, writing is a wandering after death and not a path to the source of life. We do not live, we only lead a semblance of life; we can only think of how to keep from dying, and our whole life is a death worship.
It was Rosi Braidotti who proclaimed, “Death is overrated.” Quite a stunning announcement considering death remains the only absolute for human beings. Death is also the constant always-already in most human endeavors. Death hovers as a specter and quite paradoxically grants life to the living. Braidotti’s complaint with death remains largely with those of us who spend a considerable amount of time thinking, even obsessing about it. Foucault’s claims that as a writer he chases after death, when the writing ends and the speaking can begin represents perhaps a rather dramatic invocation to death—at least from Braidotti’s point of view. Similarly, Deleuze’s view that momentary experiences of life, or jouissance, reflect inherently a “death worship” may make Braidotti groan or roll her eyes.
Death’s relationship to life exists in an agonistic rather than a binary relationship, and Braidotti wishes to shift the focus from death as a “limit-experience” to the modes of life that brush death aside, if even for a moment. The shadows of endings, or conclusions, or stoppages hover over narratives of life. Death is overrated because of its certainty. It is the certain uncertainty of life that generates the most problems for human beings. We live, according to Braidotti, in precarity. What this (precarity) means is that the human being’s situation is fraught with too many unknowns, too many mysteries, too many potentialities to feel completely safe. To be brief, human beings live in and with the whims of chance. Chance and its twin Fate dictate much of human behavior. Kant’s Analytic of the finitude be damned! Limitations of the human being does not necessary equate to complete knowability. The will to knowledge of the human sciences remains quite destructive and dehumanizing.
In response to this phenomenon, Braidotti (2011) evokes a Nietzschean term to argue that we need to focus on what she calls, Amor Fati, or an “ethic of overturning the negative” (p. 292). In this instance, it is transforming moments of death into the prospects of life. Thus, the purpose of this article is to illustrate how to produce narratives of Amor Fati. Specifically, we focus on how we negotiate the shadows of death and privilege the life of the body in our everyday lives. Thus, we first position our Amor Fati narratives within the existing scholarly literature of narrative inquiry in the field of education. We situate our work in the post qualitative turn in narrative inquiry (Lather, 2013). Then, we each provide Amor Fati narratives. We conclude with implications for narrative inquiry. We understand that there is an interest in a focus on methods and methodology in qualitative inquiry; we, however, wish to explore the ontoepistemological perspective may prove useful with narrative inquiry. In short, we pursue how philosophical inquiry via narrative inquiry can be linked with the ontoepistemological concerns in qualitative inquiry.
This article pushes the field of narrative inquiry to consider the possibilities endemic in the theoretical tools of New Materialism and examine more closely the material aspects of the changing modalities related to life and death. We want to examine those modalities of life and death not as binaries, but as interrelated capacities based on specific practices, materials, and their relationship to our bodies. To be sure, narrative researchers examine issues of life and death all the time; however, our article explores how narrative inquiry can help us explore a philosophical concept that reappears in the present moment as a response to social and technological changes. We hope that this article will evoke a conversation about the changing materiality of life and death.
Amor Fati
To consider more closely the relationship between Amor Fati and its potential for narrative inquiry, we examine the understandings of this term in relation to the philosophical projects of Rosi Braidotti and Frederich Nietzsche. We want to contextualize the term Amor Fati to tease out the relevant concepts and practices that could potentially be associated with it. For Braidotti, Amor Fati represents an ontological stance in the face of unpredictable biopolitical forces. Braidotti invites readers to explore and appreciate both the material and nonmaterial of life. For Nietchze, Amor Fati represents a certain attitude or perspective about human beings place in the world; one that embraces and continually chooses life especially in the face of strife and arbitrary forces.
Friedrich Nietzsche refers to Amor Fati 7 times in his entire oeuvre. For him, it fosters a love of fate or, to say it another way, to love all of life: its struggles, inconsistencies, inequities, and joys. Nietzsche doesn’t say to rationalize fate, or meditate on fate, or justify fate; instead, he says to love fate. That affect of love becomes quite difficult to represent. To represent love in a gift, for example, isn’t the love itself. Thus, to love fate as Nietzsche describes is to, in our reading of his works, practice the attitude, or perspective, and embodiment of loving one’s fate. Love, here is not an amorous love based on Eros (see Hans-Pile, 2011), nor is it an agape love. The love of fate that Nietzsche refers to is “we suffer...beyond our control, and there are limits to what we can do about it; yet crucially, we can to some extent influence the manner in which we exist our pain” (Hans-Pile, 2011, p. 237). The ways in which we can influence our pain is to guard against self-pity, resignation, and self-deception. All of these possible ontological moves can be difficult, indeed, but from Nietzsche’s perspective, these three hazards can be met with gratitude, acceptance that embraces the struggle, and at-best nonreaction. As Hans-Pile (2011) remarks on this issue, Rather than being invaded and used up by negative reactions (“ressentiment, anger, pathological vulnerability, impotent lust for revenge”), it is best “not to react at all anymore” until one finds the courage and strength to measure oneself against one’s pain in a way that transfigures both the suffering and sufferer. (p. 238)
Suffering itself brings about clarity and the possibility for self-transformation. The gratitude, courage, and love Amor Fati engenders necessities human beings to embrace life, or those aspects that perpetuate life. As Hans-Pile (2011) summarizes this point, “. . . Amor Fati is meant to change our relation to our (unchanged) past, and more generally to time, in such a way that neither revenge nor despair can hold sway on us anymore” (p. 242). Amor Fati is not a once-and-for-all experience, but a spontaneous, immediate occurrence that happens for no reason at all. It is an embodied experience of one�s attitude and perspective of one’s personal limitations and the understanding that the world beyond oneself is fraught with unknowables. Chance has a say in one’s fate. Narrative writing as a contemplation of one’s fate, on one’s situation in life and in the world, can function as one way to proceed toward and experience Amor Fati. It is a tool that can be used to aid in the coming to terms with one’s limits as well as the unknowable components of chance that can alter one’s life. To practice Amor Fati is to contemplate a philosophical concept in the vagaries of daily living. It is to live through vulnerability and to stumble around in disorientation. Braidotti upgrades Nietzsche’s perspective on Amor Fati and adjusts it to the present moment but makes the same conclusion.
Advances in biotechnology and bioengineering necessitate a reorientation with concerns with biopower. Braidotti asserts that biopower can’t just be about governing the living, but the discourses and practices of biopower also alter the modalities of the body as a dying organism. Biopower functions in the social and human sciences as an all-encompassing term for the “proliferating discourses and practices that make technologically mediated ‘life’ into a self-constituting entity” (p. 201). Practices and discourses of biopower, as mediating life, have aided in the constitution of other forms of life to emerge. Debates about stem-cell research and the use of genetics in the immigration debate, for example, serve as important reminders about the gravity and intensity of the materiality of the body possesses in the social field. Hence, the body and technology exist in a symbiotic relationship; one where dying takes on a series of anxieties about annihilation. Antibiotic-resistant viruses, contaminations, and intractable bacteria stand as continual reminders about life’s precarious nature. For her part, Braidotti wishes to focus on life as productive, as positive rather than focus on the aspects of biopower that pertain to death. As she states in her work, death as the “ultimate subtraction is after all only another phased in a generative process” (p. 212). To position death as a regenerative possibility repositions the binary between life and death as opposites with contradictory functions with a more complex, nuanced, and less confrontational stance. Braidotti’s “ecophilosophical” position on biopower refashions the body as a “hybrid” identity that initiates alternative ways of belonging in the social and political fields and “. . . may constitute the starting point for mutual and respective accountability and pave the way for an ethical re-grounding of social participation and community building” (p. 204). Thus, the realization of the necessary and mobile interaction between technology and the body compels us to reconsider ourselves in relation to others. One way it compels us to reexamine ourselves is through the limits of the body.
Even within Braidotti’s conception of Amor Fati, the focus remains less so on horrific, unexplainable events, but on the generative aspects that can sprout from those events. Life-force, or Zoe, persists regardless of tragedies and death, but it’s how Zoe gets reused, reappropriated, and manifested again from death that matters to Braidotti. Her ecophilosophical approach implores readers to put Zoe to work, to keep facilitating life through hybridity. Amor Fati remains an appropriate response to the changing social conditions of the body.
We want to engage with the philosophical ontoepistemological concept of Amor Fati and think through and with how narrative inquiry may be a useful approach to work through it (Amor Fati). We want to think with Nietzsche and Braidotti to consider how narrative inquiry may be used to embrace the love of one’s fate in the singularity. Before we show how narratives based on Amor Fati could work and to ground our work in the appropriate scholarship, we provide a brief literature review of narrative inquiry.
Literature Review
The Field of Narrative Inquiry
The narrative turn in qualitative research began over 30 years ago amid a crisis in textual representation stemming from critiques of prevailing scientific, rationalist modes of thought. Although the field of narrative research has been defined in many ways, Polkinghorne (1995) locates two approaches within the field that either align with or depart from scientific, or paradigmatic, modes of thought. For Polkinghorne, (a) analysis of narratives (e.g., Riessman, 2008), which locates themes, categories, and general notions from participant narratives, aligns with prevailing paradigmatic, or logico-scientific, modes of thought; whereas, (b) narrative analysis (e.g., Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), which constructs emplotted accounts of participant narratives, aligns with a narrative mode of thought. Although both fields chiefly deal with narrative data, it is the field of narrative analysis that positions itself among the critiques of prevailing scientific, rationalist modes of thought and representation. Our question in this research concerns how the field of narrative research, specifically narrative analysis, considers and relates to a more recent turn in qualitative research, the ontological turn (Lather, 2016). First, we will survey the field of narrative research. Second, we will discuss post qualitative research and its ontological implication for narrative researchers.
Those operating within the realm of narrative inquiry approach the term narrative with various depths. For instance, some come to narrative primarily through the use of literary elements in their writings with narrative texts that might stand alone, outside of methodological explications (e.g., Coulter & Smith, 2009). Others caution against this reduction narrative research to literary construction, which loses sight of methodological commitments they see as inherent to narrative inquiry; instead, and in addition to literary construction, narrative research requires methodological attention to the temporal, continuous, and relational aspects of human experience (Clandinin & Murphy, 2009). Often drawing from John Dewey’s theories of education, they assert that human experience itself is structured narratively with temporal, continuous, and relational aspects, thus, making stories or narrative texts a primary avenue to understand this experience (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Regardless of methodological stance, this field has produced substantial research; however, some have cautioned against losing sight of “the place of the political” in narrative research (Barone, 2009).
Political narratives in qualitative research reflect tenets of narrative analysis, yet stand out for their explicit attention to social and institutional power relations. These researchers contend that empirical detail is not enough; instead, “[The] storyteller is out to prick the conscience of readers by inviting a reexamination of the values and interests undergirding certain discourses, practices, and institutional arrangements” (Barone, 1992). Some in this field approach narratives with contextual background, theoretical discourse, and authority in “explaining” a story (Goodson, 1995), whereas others aspire for narratives to generate solidarity, emancipation, and humanization (Tierney, 1993). In these realms, methods turn to process, less focused on end results or conclusions than on the ethical practices. Included are writers beyond the traditional field of qualitative research whose “narratives of struggle” speak autobiographically from marginalized groups with aims of self-actualization and emancipation (hooks, 1991). These autobiographical political narratives not only invite reexamination but also critique the place of the personal within the writing of the political, invoking a renewed attention to the self in narrative research.
With continued attention to experience, autobiographical researchers turn attention to their own experience. Often referred to as autoethnography, researchers of this strand foreground narratives of interpersonal relationships, emotional experiences, and childhood memories in a shift away from “scientific” (Behar, 1996), or “masculinist” (Jackson, 1990), understandings and methodologies. A critique of prevailing scientific, rationalist modes of thought, autoethnography tells stories of personal, raw, and private experience (Ellis, 2003), at times, descriptive and theoretically situated, cautioning against merely therapeutic writing (Behar, 1996). In its critique of scientific certainty, much of autoethnographic writing embraces authorial vulnerability. Instead of absent, silent, or author-evaluated texts (Sparkes, 2000), these narratives reveal the author the body and the experience behind the text. Although some value autoethnographic narratives for its critical and inventive functions, they question its tendency toward “emotional realism” and authentic description, which reproduces the same “scientific” methods, assumptions, and clarity of thought that is seek to critique (Clough, 2000). Similar critiques of unified, conscious, and rational interpretations of subjectivity are connected in a broader sense to postmodern critiques, which themselves have infiltrated the direction of narrative research.
Post Qualitative Narratives
For some time now, narrative researchers have drawn on postmodern and poststructuralist critiques in constructing their texts. Narrative research of this “post” sort unites under calls for multiplicity. Many “post” narratives attend to the multiplicities of life stories, one’s own and the participant(s), challenging the authentic, true, and singular narrative (Miller, 1983; Tierney, 1993). Working in opposition to “modernistic” (Miller, 1998a) and unproblematized descriptions of experience, “post” narrative researchers seek to trouble identities, practices, and genres, at times, “queering” the very spaces in which they worked (Miller, 1998b). Critiques of unified, singular narratives have expanded beyond the lives of participant subjects and researchers to the textual representation itself.
This brand of research blurs the narrative boundaries, as the text itself is disrupted and layered. For instance, Patti Lather (1997), pivotal in this movement, experimented with textual presentation by juxtaposing multiple narratives and theories side-by-side in a single text. Layers came from the various narratives and readings afforded by the layout. Others (Sparkes, 2000) experiment with theoretical gaps, stoppages, and ambiguity, with narratives that resist authoritative, final interpretation, hoping the reader fills them in. This research seeks to be critical, yet productive, as Lather calls for “practices of productive ambiguity that cultivate a taste for complexity” (Lather, 1997, p. 234). This taste for complexity has undergone Bakhtinian inspired narratives that challenge prefixed, convergent, single-voiced stories (Tanaka, 1997); Foucauldian inspired narratives that use autobiographies as genealogical exercises (Tamboukou, 2013); and Deleuzian inspired rhizome narratives with experimental connections, lines of flight, and presentation forms (Sermijn, Devlieger, & Loots, 2008). Whereas “post” narrative researchers of this type resist singular representations of subject identities and texts, they work on a critical, often cultural or linguistic, epistemological level. Only recently have qualitative researchers of this “post” sort directed their attention to the material, empirical realm, that of ontology.
In a historical overview of rational empiricism, St. Pierre (2016) argues that empiricism as a concept in qualitative research is under thought, questioning whether “the press to practice and methods-driven research . . . distracts us from first attending to the onto-epistemological formations in which empirical practices are possible” (p. 112). Whereas rational empirical thought depends on an objective ontological order with stable, inert objects, reinforcing traditional values of objectivity, new empirical studies in qualitative research address “the movement, potentiality or virtuality immanent to matter” (Clough, 2009, p. 44). Clough (2009) considers the concept “infra-empiricism” as a way to allow for “a rethinking of bodies, matter and life through new encounters with visceral perception and preconscious affect” (p. 44). This renewed attention to the material world, often termed “post-qualitative” research (Lather, 2013) for its interest beyond method, consists of scholars engaging in ontological questions and issues surrounding qualitative methods (McCoy, 2012; Ulmer, 2017), social practices (Reinertsen, 2014; Reinertsen & Borgenvik, 2015), and knowledge production (Borck, 2011). Drawing on a new cannon including Barad, Deleuze and Guattari, Braidotti, and others (Lather, 2016), these qualitative methodologists might look to movement, potentiality, or becoming of matter.
Although the resurfacing of ontological questions has rippled through parts of the qualitative research field, there has been little discussion of the ontological turn in narrative research. In part, our intention is to further this discussion. While unlike many qualitative research fields, narrative research has a tradition of addressing the ontological realm. Starting with subject experience as a storied phenomenon and asserting narrative research, itself a phenomena, as a methodology to investigate this experience implies a relational or transactional ontology, as Clandinin and Rosiek explain: . . . the narrative inquirer takes the sphere of immediate human experience as the first and most fundamental reality we have . . . and focuses on the way the relational, temporal, and continuous features of a pragmatic ontology of experience can manifest in narrative form, not just in retrospective representations of human experience but also in the lived immediacy of that experience . . . Following from this ontology, the narrative inquirer arrives at a conception of knowledge . . . of human experience that remains within the stream of human lives. (as cited in Clandinin & Murphy, 2009 p. 599)
Although Clandinin and Rosiek and others put the ontological character of narrative methodology squarely in the mind of the subject and his or her seemingly practical interpretation of an experience, we suggest a narrative method that is outside of our cognitive reach, at least consciously.
Narrative Vignettes of Amor Fati
Gray Matter
To watch someone die is an excruciating and brutal process. Everyday, when my family and I entered my mother’s nursing home bed, we became perplexed by a series of questions about her body. The dying body emerges as a text that demands being read. But reading it becomes a fruitless endeavor. The dying body mocks our readings of the body. It has a logic all its own. All we could see where the surface manifestations of the body: the density of the gray feet, the grimace on her face, the sweat on her neck and forehead, or the cold hands. The heart, the organs, the circulation of the blood possessed a different plan, one that laughed at our attempts to comfort the body. No one knew when she would die, we just knew that she would. Her Parkinson’s disease consisted of an amalgamated logic with its own time operating in its limited, yet unknowable space. When I glance at my mother’s contorted body, her hands curled and swelled, her mouth unable to move to speak, her eyes unwittingly chaotic, her legs immobile, I think about all of the things she did with her hands, the home-cooked meals, the moment she touched my face to tell me, “You’re going to be alright,” the way she sped around the house to make sure it was spotless before company came over, the way she would look at me when she laughed. Who would have known that her fate would be to spend years with her body in pain, her mind scrambled, and her hands completely useless. How unfair it seemed to me that she would have to endure so much agony for so long. But the anger I feel about her death provide a sharp contrast between her last days and her life and offer me perspective and gratitude for the women that she was and the mother she continues to be. Her life and death, with all of their limitations help me gain perspective on her fate and my own. There is a sense of freedom in letting go of things one can’t control and a certain degree of acceptance of one’s fate remains necessary to cope with the life’s changes. When I think of my own fate, it’s easy to love it when I had a mother who made great sacrifices for me and loved and cared for me so exclusively to enough of an extent that revenge and despair dissipate.
Meditation
It’s late, and after 9 hr of class, I don’t think straight. The bus ride home always makes me sick. Except, this time, the queasiness comes from comments on my work.
“Your sentences don’t make sense,” they say. “Stick with the basics for now.” Feedback burns up the ego, leaving insecurity.
Arriving home, a familiar pinch tightens my chest: a group presentation next week; data to be transcribed (requires less thought: I’ll do that first); another chapter to read (and reflect on!) before tomorrow. The semester’s end approaches fast but I don’t look at dates: It’s one way to avoid reality. The thought of conference presentations nearing and my chest gets tighter. But it’s the comments on my work that got me spinning. A quick blow to the chin. My guard was down. Now I’m stumbling. It’s okay, I tell myself. You’ve prepared for this. Breathe: you’ve got a routine.
I fix myself up on my bed. Seated, legs crossed, bookended against the wall. I know how to break this fret, I think. Breathe in. Breathe out. Eyes shut, chin up. I ask, what do I notice? (It’s an inquiry question—already distracted). What do I notice? A clenched jaw (I grind my teeth). Hips that pinch. My chest rises, and falls. This body feels old. Don’t judge, just notice. My queasy stomach: my work, my lost dog, my future. I’m isolated. Notice your breath.
Becoming a graduate student I knew was going to be hard but I have support. A counselor who teaches me affirmations. A group that lets me cry. My Canadian friend who won’t stop checking in on me. Work on the self is hard but my groundwork has been laid.
With steady breath, I notice the bed supporting my legs. With eyes now open and shoulders slouched, the night appears dark and quiet through an open window. A breeze chills my arms. It’s not hot yet, I think. This is a learning process. I’m a learner. I’m breathing. Suddenly, life is right.
I notice a dog’s chin rested on my knee and a sleepy brain. Staving off a restless night, I sleep. The mornings are for planning. For processing. For leaving some things behind, holding on to others, and more classes.
Story 2
By the time I made it to middle school, I could read one book: Dr. Seuss’s Hop on Pop. The book contains the words Timbuktu and Constantinople. I thought those words were high school words so I figured I’d be fine in middle school. The problem was I couldn’t actually read Hop on Pop. I had just memorized it and didn’t know how that was different from reading.
My older brother knew something wasn’t right. He remembers asking why I wasn’t reading real books yet? Going into middle school, it hadn’t crossed my mind: why would I want to read books? and why isn’t Hop on Pop a real book? I quickly found out Hop on Pop wasn’t middle school material. To say my middle school experience was a negative experience is an understatement.
Prior to middle school, it hadn’t occurred to me that I wasn’t doing well in school. I just showed up, went through the motions, and left when the bell rang. But in middle school, I found myself in the slow learner group where we made jokes about how slow we learned. And we all hated school.
I remember one day sitting down with the middle school principal as he told me in a complementary fashion that I wasn’t college material but if I kept playing baseball like I had for the middle school team I could make it to college. I smiled and took it as an insult. For the rest of middle school, I avoided him. My fellow slow learners hated him too but most of them were less successful at avoiding him.
On high school graduation night, I remember seeing friends from my middle school slow learner’s group in the crowd. Most of them weren’t graduating. We all ended up taking different paths. Some started families. Others traveled or stated careers. Some found themselves in an unforgiving judicial system. But I was the only one to stay in school. In fact, I might never leave the school.
Comparative by Nature
When I was 12 or 13, my dad said something to me that changed my life. One night after eating my favorite mac n cheese and steak my mother grilled for me, my dad decided to hold court. In my house, when my dad decided he knew something about anything, he got into his preacher mode and he would tell people around him what he thought. This night, I was the target. Sitting next to him at the dinner table, he turned to me and said, “You’ll always be one step behind your brother.” And I positively replied, “Why do you say that?” and he said, “You just will, that’s the way it is.” This may seem like a rather innocuous statement to make to me since my brother was older than me, but what makes this an odd statement is that he’s only 5 min older. We’re identical twins. And I also remember that sinking feeling of despair that seems to implant itself like mush in the pit of my stomach. It was quite difficult for me to think about not measuring up my entire life—what a burden, what a heavy weight to carry. To always look to see the back of my brother’s head every time I looked ahead. No vistas on the horizons, just my brother’s fat head in front of me. As my brother and I grew up, my dad fostered this comparative and competitive aspect. David is better at baseball, Daniel at basketball; Daniel is taller, David is more svelte; Daniel makes more money than David, he’s bigger and stronger and healthier than David. I can see from my Dad’s perspective how this arrangement would make sense to him; how having this sort of recapitulation order would help him stabilize his world and offer convenient interpretations of our lives. Over the years, I’ve had to face the view that I was my brother’s “other,” the lesser of the two, or as he says, the “defective twin.” From my perspective, my brother has had an easier go at life. He did better in college, has always made more money, traveled to more places, submerged in the in-crowd, did more interesting things, has seen every gay icon in concert, maybe twice, and has had longer lasting relationships. He’s someone who can move to a city and immediately be part of the A-list crowd. As I have aged, it seems very clear to me that from the womb, my fate was to be the biological leftovers, the discarded material, and the scrap. Yet, beauty can be assembled with trash and some meals taste better a day or two later. The death of the comparative generates other material life forms. Zoe persists in the discarded. Over the years, I have learned that being compared with my brother has shaped me in productive ways. I am more inclined to tackle difficult challenges, to be creative in my approaches to my scholarship. It has also helped me to develop empathy, which permits me to collaborate and work well with others. Early bouts with lung disease and allergies make me more conscious of the health of my body. Remaining fit has always been a conscious decision. It has also required that I examine situations from multiple perspectives. It has, and perhaps most important, helped me to see how limitations generate focus. To continually strive to meet my brother’s expectations, or to “measure up” to him became an exhausting endeavor; coming to terms with fact that I could never be him allowed to understand my place in the world. And the goodness that my place generated. I still think of myself as a twin, that’s a fact that remains, but not so much as an “identical” one.
Conclusion
To compose narratives of Amor Fati can be a difficult proposition. They force the writer to consider immortality and the limitations and constraints of one’s life. They also compel the writer to think about the potential ways in which one’s life is constructed, determined, or otherwise shaped by elements beyond their control. It is an exercise in narrative writing based on honesty and vulnerability about the materialities of life and death. Narratives of Amor Fati aid the writer to consider the agonistic relationship between limitations and possibilities, between writing and speech, of the intimate relationship between jouissance and the death worship, and the persistence of Zoe or, to say another way, how to worship life in the face of death and to compose a life in spite of death.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.