Abstract

This essay represents an initial attempt to understand the interrelationship of mortality and subjectivity, passion and death, as they are explored in the works of Sartre, Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. From the very first discussions of the passions by Greek philosophers such as Aristotle, passion has held a liminal position: manifested in both body and soul, it transgresses the boundaries of psyche and soma and is especially difficult to categorize. It is not possible to work on passion without exploring the mind/body relationship; and the question of human mortality is the paradigmatic locus where this relationship is most intensely exposed. In this essay, I examine these questions through a few selected texts, and in particular Nancy's Corpus and ‘L'Intrus’.