Sheikh, Shela. 2015. '“‘Take This Instant’: Sacrifice, Testimony, and the Gift of my Death”'. In: Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture Forum. Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, Westminster University, United Kingdom. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Abstract or Description

In Aporias: Dying—Awaiting (One Another at) the “Limits of Truth”, Jacques Derrida poses the question: ‘My death—is it possible?’ How is this question to be understood, and who can pose it? And if my death is properly mine, how am I to account for—in fact, to give an account of—this? This paper responds to these questions by turning to accounts of both being-towards and surviving death in Maurice Blanchot’s fictional/autobiographical récit, ‘The Instant of my Death’, but also the phenomenon of pre-recorded video-testimonies in which the subject announces his/her own death, and does so from a temporality that is at once past, present and futural. Through a reading of technically-mediated performances of accounting for and bearing witness to one’s ‘own’ death—and with this a consideration of the logic of sacrifice, radical passivity, the gift of death, and the contemporary conjunction between religion, geopolitical conflict and media—Sheikh proposes that such accounts bears witness to what Derrida identifies as the anachronistic ‘history of death’ in the Christian West, before supplementing this focus on the West with further consideration of what Nelson Maldonado-Torres names ‘the coloniality of being’.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Talk)
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Centre for Cultural Studies (1998-2017)
Dates:	Date Event 9 December 2015 Completed
Event Location:	Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, Westminster University, United Kingdom
Item ID:	16886
Date Deposited:	17 Feb 2016 12:05
Last Modified:	01 Nov 2018 10:52
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/16886

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