Book Review: One Beat More: Existentialism and the gift of mortality

One Beat More: Existentialism and the gift of mortality

Kevin Aho, 2022. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Making Death Thinkable

Franco De Masi. 2004. London: Free Association Books.

No one sees death,
No one sees the face of death,
No one hears the voice of death,
But cruel death cuts off mankind.

The Epic of Gilgamesh

Surely, by now, a few thousand years after the Mesopotamians started writing about it, we must be running out of things to say about death. Amazon suggests there are over 60,000 books that have something to do with death. Google offers a more daunting 302 million books. Even if you weed out those just using the word metaphorically or incidentally, it is a very big number. And of course, that does not include all the academic papers, magazine articles, poems and podcasts. Or book reviews.

This started me wondering if there might come a time when, as a species, we have nothing more to add to death literature. Perhaps that will be in the year…let's say…5317. It may be that by then there are 681 million books about death. Or thereabouts. The last book, or blog, or TikTok on the subject will be published and humanity will finally just give up on it. Of course, by then, perhaps people will not die anymore; or we will be eternal ghosts in some machine; or we will have long since become extinct following a catastrophic global event.

Well, we are not there yet. And death remains enough of a universal preoccupation to keep us writing and publishing words about death as if there were no tomorrow.

The two relatively slender books reviewed here represent different approaches to thinking about death. In Kevin Aho's case, he weaves together a personal account of his own heart attack with other individual stories of death and dying, framed by the perspectives of the usual suspects of existentialism, as well as other writers and thinkers. For Franco De Masi, the style is not personal (though he brings in several case studies) and his conceptual universe is largely psychoanalytic, even though Nietzsche, Heidegger and Jaspers make some brief appearances. Together, they offer the contrasts one might expect from the phenomenological and psychoanalytic discourses.

Aho's book, One Beat More, considers his heart attack in the context of a human living, embedded in our frequent preoccupations with control, activity, identity, aloneness, physical health, meaning and time. His writing

Andrew Miller