Gabriel Rockhill

I certainly sensed at some point that I was already in the afterlife, since my existence could have easily ended long ago
[...]

In looking back from this immanent afterlife on my earlier terrors, and how they have been slowly buried over time, I see now that they were overly fixated on my own biological death. Since I recognized eternal transcendence as nothing more than a comforting illusion, the only thing left was my finite life in the here and now, which was destined to disappear forever in an instantaneous blackout.


It is now patently unclear to me, however, that we ever actually die in this way. Our existence has numerous dimensions, and they each live according to different times. The biological stratum, which I naïvely took to mean life in general, is in certain ways a long process of demise — we are all dying all the time, just at different rhythms. Far from being an ultimate horizon beyond the bend, death is a constitutive feature of the unfolding of biological life. In other words, I am confronting my death each day that I live.
[...]

If biological death appears to some as an endpoint to existence, there is nevertheless a longevity to our physical, artifactual and psychosocial lives. They intertwine and merge with the broader world out of which we are woven. This should not be taken as a form of spiritualist consolation, however, but rather as an invitation to face up to the ways in which our immanent lives are actually never simply our own.

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Gabriel Rockhill is an associate professor of philosophy at Villanova University and founding director of the Atelier de Théorie Critique at the Sorbonne in Paris. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, “Interventions in Contemporary Thought: History, Politics, Aesthetics.”