The Aporia of death: Communication between the living and the dead

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to approach the social construction of death from some contributions of Jacques Derrida, who originated deconstruction as a writing and analysis strategy. The main objective is not to exhaustively explore the author's work - exhaustiveness that would go against his ontological proposal -, but rather to take some analytical categories and make them available to communication between the living and the dead. The theoretical-methodological strategy is based on a qualitative research design from the analysis of stories within an interpretive biographical framework. It starts from interviews that narrate personal experiences of any communication with the dead or reflections on the belief about the possibility of this contact in order to problematize the life/death communication register and account for the operability of the Derridian logic. The paper is part of a research process that verifies the main assumptions that shape the social meaning of death, whose preliminary results emphasize the need to transcend binarism and dichotomies to accommodate contradictory and paradoxical aspects of life and death. The conclusion, and hence the contribution of this approach that advocates spectral becoming, is that life/death polarization provides substantial elements to reintroduce the reflection on communication understood as a hermeneutical device; that is, death becomes a metaphor for thinking about communication.