10 In Life and in Death 2003–2004
On 12 February 2003, at the sixth session of the second year of the
seminar on ‘The Beast & the Sovereign’, Derrida fi nally tackled a
subject that he had been promising to deal with for several weeks:
the choice between burial and cremation. This was a theme that,
curiously, had been little explored in philosophical discourses on
death.
One of the diff erences between burial and cremation is that
the fi rst pays due regard to the existence of a corpse, to its
persistence and its territory, whereas the second spirits the
corpse away. [.. .] if the dead person has passed away [est un
disparu], the corpse of a person who has passed away does
not pass away, it is not destroyed, as corpse, as it is by crema-
tion. This not-passing away permits hope for the ghost, so to
speak. Buried, I do not pass away [je ne disparais pas], and
I can still cling to something, my ghost can still cling to my
corpse, to the not-passing-away of my corpse after my own
passing.^1Derrida then analysed at length what was at stake in the principle of
cremation, described as a sort of ‘irreversible murder’ if it is decided
on by the dead person’s entourage and ‘a sort of irreversible suicide’
if it’s the dying person who requests it.
When the fi re has done its work, and in the modernity of its
gloomy theatre, one that is technically infallible, instantane-
ously eff ective, invisible, almost inaudible, the corpse of the
person who has passed away will, to all appearances, have
passed away from its very passing away. [.. .] The dead person
is at once everywhere and nowhere, nowhere because every-
where, outside the world and everywhere in the world and
in us. The pure interiorization, the pure idealization of the
dead person, his spiritualization, his absolute idealization, his