Death as the Unnamable

Certeau's (In)ability to Explain The End

Photo by Hoach Le Dinh on Unsplash

The setting of the scene: the hospital, a place where the sick go for care. But what about those who are dying? This place isn’t for them. They fall out of the category of this place in a physical sense, in what actions they can take, and so they also fall out of the language for this space. Their status — on the verge of death — renders them incompatible with the hospital.

“[T]he dying man falls outside of the thinkable, which is identified with what one can do. In leaving the field circumscribed by the possibilities of treatment, it enters a region of meaninglessness” (190), so Certeau explains when one is dying in a hospital where patients come for care and treatment in Chapter XIV, “The Unnamable” from The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press: 1988). As s/he lies dying, staff cannot name what is happening to her/him; their lips remain motionless, unable to utter the right words for their (final) condition. Instead, they suggest, as Certeau notes, that s/he needs “rest” and “sleep.”

They do not speak of what is truly happening: the dying (wo)man is, as some say, thus still avoiding it, at death’s door, at the end of one’s rope, giving up the ghost, and so forth. In other words, one who is not quite there yet, at the unnamable place. When we speak of death, the dying are only on the cusp of the beyond.

Certeau also calls the person who is dying an “immoral man.” S/he can no longer labor and can no longer be labored upon (190). “In our society, the absence of work is non-sense” (191). The machinations of capitalism are rendered useless; the dying person makes a mockery of its inner workings, as Certeau points out, “there is always something to be done,” except when one is dying, and certainly when one is dead!

S/he must then be sequestered, away from society and his family. Excommunicated from these spaces, the language to describe dying and death dissolves, again, making it unnamable, meaningless, devoid of any ties to the living. “Death is an elsewhere,” Certeau concludes.

Shrouded in this gauzy, dark, nameless beyond, the living don’t dare commune with the dying or the dead. They keep it at bay. Even worse, the spatiality of that chasm between the living and the dead becomes so enormous that the language of death rots, only to be carried in the cadavers that once held life. It is extinguished with their final breath.

When death is extinguished to this degree, it can only return in an “exotic language,” and has to be “invoked in foreign dialects.” Certeau continues:

[I]t is as difficult to speak about it in one’s own language, as it is for someone to die ‘at home’: these are the marks that define an excluded element, one that can only return in disguise. It is a paradoxical symptom of this death without words for a whole literature designates the point where relations with the meaningless are focused. Texts proliferate around this wound on reason. Once again, it supports itself on what cannot be mentioned. Death is the problem of the subject (192).

But as Certeau insists, the subject — the dying person — wants to speak of his/her death. S/he wishes to speak of her/his becoming¹ what has been deemed as unnamable. To whom, however, is the dying person speaking? For they’ve been isolated, so the speech act has been rendered useless. Here, too, again, death is an alterity (194).

Certeau, too, admits that in writing about death, he is “participating in an illusion,” adding, “I make it the place where I am not” (194). For when he writes of death, it is the other, it is not his death. It is elsewhere, just as I am writing about it now, relaying Certeau’s remarks on the subject, it remains somewhere else. Thus, death itself eludes us in our language and writing about it.

I, too, cannot even write about my own death. Again, it is removed from the “I” that currently writes about it. Perhaps the only possibility of getting close to it is to write of walking on “death-dealing soil,” upon which the land of life resides, but, naturally, diminishes over time, and leaves traces of ourselves behind, all the while being aware of what we march towards: death.

1. Despite what many believe, death is a type of becoming of sorts.