This is not the jungle

Emergency medical services are available in almost all urban areas in the developed world. While it is always good for everyone to have some first aid and basic life support training, EMS is readily accessible in most cities for most foreseeable medical emergencies. In the jungle, however, even at a center near a city such as Iquitos or Pucallpa or Puerto Moldanado, you might be hours by boat away from medical services that may be less than optimal for many medical emergencies. Even further into the jungle, you may be days away from a local medical center that is ill-equipped, staffed with poorly trained non-medical personnel, and without such basic supplies as sterile syringes or IV starter kits. Under those circumstances, it may be important to know what provisions have been made for the emergency wilderness care of such foreseeable but potentially life-threatening medical emergencies as burns or lacerations and their often concomitant infections.

Is the center prepared to treat wounds and prevent infection?

My thinking about risk management at ayahuasca retreat centers began with the by now well-known and tragic death of Kyle Nolan at the Shimbre retreat center near Puerto Maldonado. As of this writing, we do not know the exact cause of death, but the death may well have been — and the panic-stricken attempt to hide the body almost certainly was — the result of inadequate planning, preparation, and training — that is, the lack of a risk management plan.

For many people, the experience of drinking ayahuasca in the jungle, perhaps for the first time, perhaps with strangers, is enhanced rather than reduced by the knowledge that they are in the care of people who are concerned for their safety, have made plans for emergencies, and have protocols in place to rescue them if they get into trouble. For others, the experience of being far in the backcountry, with all its attendant risks, may enhance the ayahuasca experience considerably. What we are seeking is a way to provide such potential clients with information, so that they can make informed choices about what center matches their preferred level of risk.

A kereosene lamp tipped over. What happens now?

That is why, below, I have set out a risk management plan against which potential clients can measure the preparations of a jungle retreat center. I do not believe there should be anything compulsory about such a risk management plan, and I am emphatically not recommending that such a plan be imposed by any government or regulatory agency. I suggest instead that ayahuasca centers might want to provide this sort of information about their risk management programs to prospective clients, and prospective clients should feel emboldened to ask ayahuasca retreat centers about the risk management programs they have — or do not have — in place.

In that way, consumers could determine which centers matched their own level of desired risk and choose accordingly. And centers might also bear in mind that their own risks — risks of legal liability, bad publicity, loss of business, and even criminal charges — may be reduced, along with the risks of their clients, by having in place and meticulously following an appropriate risk management plan.

I. An Introduction to Risk Management

A responsible ayahuasca retreat center should have a comprehensive risk management program in place. A risk management program includes a systematic analysis of risks, a plan for minimizing those risks, and protocols for dealing with any risks that in fact materialize. A risk management program protects both the center and its clients. It minimizes the risk of physical and other harms to clients, and it helps to protect the center from legal liability and damage to its reputation in the event that harm occurs.

Central to risk management is the creation of a Risk Management Committee. A risk management committee should be able to draw on expertise in emergency care, local environmental hazards, wilderness safety, legal liability, insurance coverage, and the risks peculiar to the use of ayahuasca and other psychoactive substances.The risk management committee is ultimately responsible for three phases of risk management — prevention and planning; immediate response; and documentation and control.

• Prevention and planning means undertaking a comprehensive review of potential emergencies or accidents, taking steps to prevent them, and developing written protocols to handle and control them when they occur.
• Immediate response means putting into action the protocols developed in the planning phase in order to handle and minimize the harm of an emergency or accident.
• Documentation and control means managing the consequences of an emergency or accident, including record keeping, public relations, potential legal liability, and interaction with public authorities.

II. A Draft Risk Management Plan

1. Medical emergency personnel

• There should be on staff and in residence at least one person certified as a Wilderness First Responder or its equivalent. The written risk management plan should include the names and qualifications of all such medical emergency personnel.
• One person so certified should be made responsible for implementing the protocols and procedures established by the risk management committee and for carrying out any emergency action plan as required.
• The written risk management plan should include the names, addresses, contact information, and routes to clinics, hospitals, and physicians who are prepared to treat the center’s clients on an emergency basis.
• If the center plans to use indigenous healers for foreseeable emergency situations — for example, broken bones, childbirth, or snakebite — then this information should be included in the written risk management plan, including the names, locations, contact information, and routes to such indigenous healers.

2. Emergency action plans

• There should be written protocols for dealing with foreseeable medical emergencies, including burns, lacerations, heart attacks, allergic reactions, broken bones, snakebite, animal attacks, hyperthermia, infections, drowning, dental emergencies, gunshot wounds, choking, lightning strikes, treefalls, emergency childbirth, hernias, crush injuries, seizures, and others. A workable list can be derived from a general text on wilderness first response.
• There should be written protocols for dealing with non-medical and environmental emergencies, including fire, flood, intruders, sexual assault or molestation, theft of client property, assaults by or on staff or clients, and sudden unexpected deaths, including suicide. These protocols should include contact information for local emergency service providers and public safety personnel.
• All staff should be familiar with all emergency action plans, and resident medical emergency personnel should conduct in-house reviews of the medical emergency protocols.
• The risk management committee should review the list of foreseeable medical, non-medical, and environmental emergencies to determine which can be reduced or eliminated by discontinuing or avoiding certain activities, or by providing safety equipment, such as personal flotation devices for travel by canoe. Each center must determine the level of risk consistent with its values and potential liability and the wishes of its clients.

3. Client risk management

• The center should provide potential clients with written medical criteria for participation in the center’s program, and should perform medical screening by written questionnaire, personal interview, or both, in order to exclude potential clients who fail to meet those criteria.
• Potential clients should receive a standard written disclosure form that provides them with full and complete information about medical, environmental, and other risks that are inherent in participation in the center’s program.
• Clients should have signed an appropriate waiver of liability, acknowledging the risks set forth in the disclosure form and giving informed consent to undertake those risks in order to participate in the center’s program.
• The center should distribute a document that sets forth, and thereby seeks to prevent, behavior that would be hazardous in the unfamiliar jungle environment, including, for example, approaching animals in the wild or touching colorful caterpillars.
• Clients should be provided with a clear statement of the rules of conduct governing their participation in the center’s program, including, for example, the use of drugs or alcohol, sexual misconduct, theft of property, or disruptive behavior.
• Clients should be provided, a reasonable time before arrival, with a list of clothing and equipment the center recommends for their stay, including clothing and equipment for insect and sun protection.
• Each client should provide the center with contact information of a friend or family member for notification in case of accident or injury.

4. Emergency communication and transportation

• The center should ensure that it has adequate and alternative modes of transportation available for emergency patient transfer or evacuation, including motorized boats and vehicles where applicable.
• Patient transfer and evacuation routes should be prepared ahead of time, maintained in written form along with relevant with maps and directions, and periodically traveled in test runs.
• The center should ensure that it has adequate and alternative modes of communication — including, where applicable, cell phones, satellite phones, and landlines — for emergency reporting and receipt of advice and instructions.
• All contact information for all emergency service providers should be posted prominently and reviewed periodically.

5. Insurance

• The risk management committee should make sure that there is sufficient primary and excess liability coverage for the level of risk in the center’s program. The risk management committee should perform this insurance audit in consultation with a knowledgeable broker.
• The risk management committee should review any exclusions from coverage that may be part of the center’s general comprehensive liability policy, and undertake to fill with additional coverage any gaps in liability protection.
• The risk management committee should determine whether the center’s liability coverage extends to staff and officers and directors of the organization, and steps taken to fill in any gaps in coverage.

6. Equipment and facilities

• The risk management committee should develop a list of contents for a first aid kit suitable for foreseeable emergencies at the center. The center should provide a first aid kit with adequate supplies of the contents recommended by the risk management committee. The first aid kit should be properly stored, readily accessible, and periodically inspected, and all staff should be familiar with its location and use.
• The center should develop and post a written plan for the maintenance and inspection of critical equipment, including boats, vehicles, ropes, emergency supplies, fire extinguishers, insect netting, and client accommodations. Staff should be assigned these maintenance and inspection duties on a fixed schedule, posted prominently and periodically reviewed, along with checklists to be submitted for the center’s records.
• The center should develop and post a written plan for food storage and preservation and for the provision of purified or uncontaminated water to clients. The center is responsible for providing food that is consistent with the use of ayahuasca or other psychoactive plants or substances.

7. Staff risk management

• The center should develop a protocol for screening staff prior to retention, including review of prior employment, prior employer references, criminal history, and history of complaints at prior employment.
• The center should establish a regular program of reviewing all emergency action plans with all staff to ensure familiarity in the event of an emergency.
• The center should establish a written protocol, posted prominently and reviewed periodically, that assigns specific emergency tasks to specific staff members, including such tasks as accessing fire extinguishers or first aid materials, preparing transportation for patient transport or evacuation, or contacting emergency service personnel or offsite medical providers.

8. Documentation

• The center should develop and have readily available preprinted accident and emergency medical report forms and witness statement forms. Complete documentation should be prepared and maintained for any emergency or medical incident that requires more than simple first aid, such as a Band-Aid, requires offsite follow-up care, or significantly interferes with the client’s continuing active participation in the center’s program.
• When an emergency has occurred, the center should appoint an incident coordinator to provide interested parties, local public safety personnel, and the press with accurate information, notify the center’s legal council and insurance carrier, and gather and maintain all proper documentation of the incident.

Soundwalk Collective — founded by Stephan Crasneanscki and including Dug Winningham, Simone Merli, Kamran Sadeghi, and Jake Harper — is an international art collective based in New York City. Since 2000 they have traveled from Bessarabia to the Rub’ al-Khali desert to the strait of Gibraltar, exploring and documenting the world around us through its sounds. The collective then abstracts and recomposes these sound fragments of reality to create audible journeys — soundwalks.

These creations can be presented over the radio, or in installation spaces, or in live performance, using a combination of custom-cut vinyl records with multiple turntables, laptops, and various FX-processing pedals and mixers, along with video projection specific to each performance piece. Installations may use custom-made turntables that are programmed to move automatically based on a musical score.

Jeremy Narby

Stephan Crasneanscki made his initial reputation by producing cutting-edge audio guides to particular cities, combining fiction and nonfiction to create a poetic discovery of the city — as he puts it, on the bridge between a Baudelairian stroll and cinematic experience. Among other awards, he won the Audie Award in 2004 for a tour of the Bronx with Jazzy Jay and Afrika Bambaataa, and the 2005 Dalton Pen Award for his Ground Zero Sonic Memorial with Paul Auster.

The Soundwalk Collective has also created soundwalks not of places but of journeys, retracing Ulysses’s journey on the Mediterranean, and the journey of Jason and the Argonauts on the Black Sea. The audio composition Medea is based on fragments of sound recorded by Soundwalk Collective during a two-month crossing in a sailboat specially equipped with scanners, microphones, and antennas, sailing to Turkey, Georgia, Russia, Crimea, Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Romania.

An excellent review of Crasneanscki’s work in The New York Times is here, and an interview — in French — is here.

In May 2012, Stephan Crasneanscki and a small crew traveled to Peru to record the icaros of Shipibo shamans Victor Nieto and Ushamano Walter Martinez. The result is Ayahuasqueros, a mixture of jungle sounds, textual narration, and ayahuasca songs, with a text by anthropologist Jeremy Narby, that soundwalks us through the ayahuasca experience. The entire 55-minute soundscape is here:

And this is what its creators say about it:

In their visions, ayahuasca shamans say they see the essences that animate living beings, the first property of which is to emit melodies. These essences are considered powerful beings, and ayahuasqueros learn their melodies by singing along. Singing like powerful beings, they learn to see like them, and this gives them knowledge. The melodies that shamans bring back from their visions are called “icaros”; they help navigate the space of ayahuasca consciousness, and can also serve as lifelines when overwhelmed by visions. Grab onto the icaros: these songs are made of knowledge.

In addition to the soundwalk, Crasneanscki produced this short promotional film based on his work with the Shipibo icaros:

But first a little background. At a meeting of the Native American Church, after a long night of singing and praying, the participants are served a sacred breakfast of small amounts of water, parched corn, and pemmican — pounded meat, fruit, and nuts — at the close of the ceremony. This is then followed by an informal breakfast where people eat, stretch their cramped legs, chat, and tell funny stories, often having to do with peyote and peyote ceremonies. James Howard, a professor at the University of North Dakota, calls these stories peyote jokes, and it is from his blog that I took the story I told to my eager grandchildren.

Well, my little moppets, I said, there once was a young Indian who had made some money from a land sale, and, being young, he was eager for some female company. So he bought a new suit of clothes and got on the bus for the big city of Anadarko, the county seat of Caddo County.

When he got off the bus, he saw an old Indian man standing on the corner, his hair in braids wrapped with blue and green yarn, a dark shirt and pants, moccasins, and an old blanket. “Aha,” the young man thought. “This is a real old-timer who can help me out. These old guys know a lot about love medicines, and that’s what I need right now.”

So he approached the old man, introduced himself, and in Indian fashion invited the old man for a meal. He took him to a fancy restaurant, bought him a big steak, offered him pie with ice cream, and gave him a cigar to smoke after the meal, all of which the old man gladly accepted.

When the meal was over, the old man said, “You have been very kind to me, and I appreciate what you have done for a poor old man. But I cannot help thinking that, in the Indian way, this means that you need my help in some way.”

“That is very true, Uncle,” the young man said. “I do need your help. I am here to meet some young ladies, and I know that you old people are wise in the ways of the old Indian medicines. Could you get me some love medicine?”

So the old man smiled, reached under his blanket into his pants pocket, and pulled out four peyote buttons. He handed then to the young man and said, “Here, take these and love everybody!”

“Thank you, grampa,” said my wonderful grandchildren. “We see now why you are so wise.” And they all scampered off to their iPads to look at my blog post on the experiential typology of sacred plants.

José Carlos Bouso

Clinical psychologist José Carlos Bouso of the Human Experimental Neuropsychopharmacology group in Barcelona, in collaboration with researchers from several Spanish and Brazilian research centers, has published a new epidemiological study of long-term frequent users of ayahuasca in two Brazilian churches. This study expands upon previous work in four important ways.

• First, the study examined a much larger cohort of subjects and controls than any previous study. The well known and often cited 1996 study of the União do Vegetal by Charles Grob and his colleagues examined fifteen long-term urban ayahuasca users and fifteen controls matched for age, ethnicity, marital status, and level of education. The 2008 study of members of an American Santo Daime church by John Halpern and his colleagues examined 32 ayahuasca users and no matched controls. In contrast, the current study enrolled and tested 127 ayahuasca users and 115 controls matched for age, sex, and years of education.
• Second, the current study enrolled and tested members of two different Brazilian ayahuasca churches — the Centro Eclético de Fluente Luz Universal Raimundo Irineu Serra, a branch of the Santo Daime church, and Barquinha, neither of which had been studied before in their Brazilian context. This choice additionally allowed the study to compare a rural cohort, the CEFLURIS community at Céu do Mapiá in the Brazilian State of Amazonas, with an urban one, the Barquinha community in the city of Rio Branco, the capital of the State of Acre.
• Third, unlike previous work, the current study followed up after one year by retesting all available participants. There was, as expected, some drop-out: in total, 49 ayahuasca-using subjects and 47 controls were lost to follow-up. No statistically significant differences were noted on subsequent testing.
• Fourth, the current study expanded upon the body of tests which have been administered to ayahuasca-using church members, utilizing a very wide range of personality, psychopathology, life attitude, and neuropsychological performance measures, which differed from the instruments used in previous studies.

The findings

Centro Espirita Daniel Pereira de Matos, a Barquinha center in Rio Branco (photo by Luis Veiga)

So what did the study find? Ayahuasca users were found to measure significantly lower than the controls on all nine psychopathology scales, including significantly less somatization, depression, anxiety, hostility, paranoid ideation, and phobias. The ayahuasca users scored significantly lower than controls on measures of worry, shyness, and fatigability and weakness. And ayahuasca users scored significantly higher than controls on measures of self-transcendence and spiritual orientation, including on such items as transpersonal identification, self-forgetfulness, sacredness of life, altruism, subjective well-being, and mission in life. “Taken together,” the authors state, “the data point at better general mental health and bio-psycho-social adaptation in the ayahuasca-using group compared to the control subjects.”

The authors conclude:

The assessment of the impact of long-term ayahuasca use on mental health from various perspectives (personality, psychopathology, neuropsychology, life attitudes and psychosocial well-being) did not find evidence of pathological alterations in any of the spheres studied. Although ayahuasca-using subjects differed in some personality traits, differences did not fit with a pathological profile. Furthermore, ayahuasca users showed a lower presence of psychopathological symptoms compared to controls. They performed better in neuropsychological tests, scored higher in spirituality and showed better psychosocial adaptation as reflected by some attitudinal traits such as Purpose in Life and Subjective Well-Being. Overall differences with the control group were still observable at follow-up one year later.

The findings here are consistent with those of the two earlier epidemiological studies. This study thus adds weight to the claim that no evidence has yet been found of psychological maladjustment, mental health deterioration, or cognitive impairment in human adults who ingest ayahuasca regularly, frequently, and over long periods of time as committed members of the Brazilian ayahuasca churches.

Two cautions about interpretation

But two cautions apply to any interpretation of such claims. First, we must be very cautious in attempting to generalize the results of this study — or either of the two earlier studies — outside the specific cultural and institutional settings in which the studies were carried out.

Welcome to Céu do Mapiá, the CEFLURIS community in Amazonas

And, second, we must be very cautious in drawing from this study any inference that drinking ayahuasca is somehow the cause of the lower psychopathology and higher spirituality scores of the ayahuasca church members as compared to the controls. Such a conclusion would be subject to a form of error called selection bias.

Here is how selection bias works. In order to be enrolled in the study, all of the ayahuasca-using subjects had to have been taking ayahuasca at least twice a month for a minimum of fifteen years — that is, to have been conscientious, consistent, and meticulous in their church attendance over a long period of time. Such subjects were therefore selected for such personality traits as orderliness, compliance, and socialization into church values.

On the other hand, the controls are described simply as followers of traditional Christian religions, either Protestant or Catholic, apparently by self-description. While the authors state that the majority of individuals in the comparison groups were actively practicing their religion, we are not told what that practice required in terms of, say, frequency or duration of church attendance. The ideal control group would have been matched for long-term and highly regular churchgoing in a non-ayahuasca church. To the extent that the ideal is not achieved — or is unachievable — the underlying personality traits remain an uncontrolled variable.

There is in fact evidence for this differential in the test scores. The subject members of the ayahuasca churches scored significantly higher than the controls on measures of attachment and dependence, and significantly lower than the controls on measures of responsibility, purposefulness, resourcefulness, and self-acceptance. This creates a picture of participants who have been well integrated into a relatively rigid institutional structure — just as we would expect of people who attend religious ceremonies at least twice a week for more than fifteen years. The disorderly, the noncompliant, the depressed, the anxious, and the disturbed were excluded from the ayahuasca-using cohort by virtue of the enrollment criteria.

Oração in the CEFLURIS church

In addition, the ayahuasca-using subjects were selected for having had no serious early physical or mental problems with ayahuasca, or having had no problems with conforming to the often restrictive behavioral rules and institutional strictures of the church. Presumably persons who attended either of the churches, tried ayahuasca, and had an adverse reaction, or found the church rules uncongenial, would then likely have stopped attending, and would not have been included in the ayahuasca-using cohort.

It is probably worth pointing out that this bias is not a conceptual defect in the study design, but rather appears to be inevitable in the study of long-term ayahuasca use in any of the settings in which it is likely to be found. The same selection bias would affect a study, say, of elder ayahuasca shamans in the Upper Amazon.

And it is also important to point out that the neuropsychological tests — the Stroop Color and Word Test, the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, Letter-Numbering Sequencing, and the Frontal Systems Behavior Scales — are independently normed. On all of these tests, the study “found no evidence of neuropsychological impairment in the ayahuasca using group,” which I take as meaning that the ayahuasca-using subjects all fell within the normal range for those tests. Since the tests are independently normed, there would be no selection bias in the results, which indicate that fifteen years of regular, frequent ceremonial use of ayahuasca is not associated with any deterioration in cognitive function.

There is an additional consideration. The study demonstrates an apparent association between drinking ayahuasca and significantly higher scores than controls on measures related to spirituality. But the data do not allow us to tell in which direction this association runs. Perhaps these higher scores are the result of drinking ayahuasca; or, instead, perhaps those who scored high on these measures were preferentially attracted to the ayahuasca churches, as opposed to other more traditional congregations. The data simply do not allow us to say.

A Barquinha healing ritual

The same is true for the psychopathology scores. The study shows an apparent association between ayahuasca consumption and lower scores on measures of psychopathology. The study cannot tell us if there is a causal connection, or, if there is, in which direction it runs. It may be, for example, not that long-term ayahuasca drinking causes better mental health, but rather that people with better mental health are more likely to drink ayahuasca long term, or even that some third factor — socioeconomic status, for example, or deeply held spiritual beliefs, or particular institutional environments — is causally related to both.

Conclusion

But none of this detracts from the study itself, or from the inferences that can legitimately be drawn from it. Leaving aside the informal but informative study of ayahuasca and psychopathology among the Shuar that I discuss here, we now have three different epidemiological studies that have looked at a total of 184 long-term adult ayahuasca users, both Brazilian and American, utilizing a wide variety of psychological and neuropsychological test instruments. All studies agree in reporting no finding of psychological or neurological harm from frequent long-term ceremonial ayahuasca use by committed adult members of the Brazilian ayahuasca churches.

Ayahuasca, as cultural critic Erik Davis puts it, is now “swimming in the cultural water supply.” Ayahuasca crops up in the oddest places — the latest is in a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Aniston — and I continue to watch with fascination as ayahuasca slowly infiltrates American popular culture. As I have said before, ayahuasca now shows two faces in the popular media and on social networks: on the one hand, it is presented as healing and transformative and redemptive; on the other, it has become a trope for the edgy, the transgressive, the seriously cool. So I suppose we should not be surprised that ayahuasca has now been incorporated — if only briefly — into rap culture.

Vodka & Ayahuasca

Gangrene is a hip-hop duo composed of producer The Alchemist and rap figure Oh No. Their song Vodka and Ayahuasca is part of an album by the same name that was released in January 2012. But why a rap song about ayahuasca? “The thing is there’s a lot of cool drugs in rap right now and a lot of cool stuff,” they say, “but who is doing ayahuasca? You know what I mean. We just want to be different so we’re just gonna bring a new drug to the game.”

During the same interview, when asked to explain what ayahuasca is, they say, “I really can’t even get into that because it’s so much deepness to it that they gotta go on their own journey.” The conversation continues:

OK, so do you feel like ayahuasca is a spiritual journey for you?
A: Absolutely. And if you mix vodka with ayahuasca, I think you might die.
Oh No: This music is like a near-death experience.
A: But you live through it and you’re better.
O: You wake up.
A: The levels of serotonin are found to be lower in the body after hard drug use, you following me. If you take ayahuasca, the levels of serotonin are heightened after use. So this actually makes you feel better when you buy this album.

They explain the relationship of their music to indigenous spiritual traditions:

I think the title track, Vodka & Ayahuasca, embodies the full, enriched flavor of the product. I think you should stare at the album cover and try not to blink the whole time. Get really close to the album cover and put on the song, Vodka & Ayahuasca, and slowly, as the song progresses, slowly not blink and back up. Then you’ll experience a little bit of an enriched state. It’s like meditation kinda. That’s why we use loops because loops are repetitive. Like when the shaman is giving his ahh, it’s repetition. That’s what we’re doing, we’re bringing you repetition. It’s mad hip-hop. I’m looking out the car right now and I see cows. Just to give you an idea of the kind of shit we’re giving.

And, in another interview, they explain the relationship between vodka and ayahuasca:

Well I think basically vodka is your modern day party livener. I think we dug deeper. Me and Oh went on a couple excursions. We were out in the rainforest for a while buggin’ out and we kind of encountered different medical, herbal elixirs. Not your average thing but everyone talking, “Hey we got the loud, we got loud.” But do you have a cup of ayahuasca? Not a lot of rappers can say that. You know what I’m saying, they’re not really posted up with ayahuasca in the party so we’re bringing a new element but I think vodka represents now. So we mixing the now with the ayahuasca and it’s psychedelic.

It is easy, I think, to be dismissive of all this, but things may not be so simple. Rap music — provocative, incorporative, improvisational — can certainly be self-referentially ironic, and I suspect that is the case here. The rap music and lyrics, and the rappers’ own outrageous commentary, reflect — may be intended to reflect — the cultural ambiguity of ayahuasca itself — its popularization, the spiritual claims made for it, its transgressive edginess, and, ultimately, its status as just another hipster fad. Hey, dude, do you have a cup of ayahuasca?

The album has been generally well received. One critic writes that “the album’s thrust is drug-induced transcendence, and the beats are crafted with a like-minded mentality. Psych-rock samples make up most of the tracks: electric pianos, tambourines, fuzzy guitar riffs, and sitars all come together for grimy, dense landscapes full of trippy cross-fade.” Another critic writes that “the beats here tend to be swathed in buttery bass lines, spacey psych-rock guitar samples, and obscure dialogue from archaic-sounding TV shows, plus dozens of other subtle textures… Gangrene plies a weirded- and weeded-out aesthetic that, when done well, can make a listener want to spend hours with nothing else.”

You can judge for yourself. Here is the video:

And here are the lyrics:

[VERSE 1: Oh No]
This is a acid trip, rancid spit
Psychedelic capsules with some packs of shit
Vodka and ayahuasca to capture a glimpse of ecstacy
You won’t need a tiny pill in this bitch
Now overdose over the doses prescribed for Doc Nova
The pot smoker, too high to be sober
I bleed smoke, my weed smoke is keef-soaked
Then re-broke, then re-rolled
Enough to make three choke
One pass out, two re-smoke
When all’s gone we re-roachin it, re-toast
We boast about that kush we roast, best gross
Top dollar, top of the chart, that’s the West Coast
If I ain’t high then I musta just woke up
I stay high into the moon till the sun rose up
Then I made clouds appear, the gas is massive
I’ll clash your gastric, smash your glasses
Back from the ashes spread like rashes flashes
That man to man this be a classic
With new cuts, fuck that
Gashes active, you are now inactive
Bastards bend your back, it’s action
Double G

[DJ Romes]
(So high, I must be out of my mind) –> Nature
(In yo system with extra strength) –> Hieroglyphics
(Travel at magnificent speeds around the universe) –> Rakim

[VERSE 2: The Alchemist]
Mix the vodka with the ayahuasca
Indian shaman, the witchdoctor
Leave your whole body stoned like Jimmy Hoffa
No stoppa
Cause once I go under water I go lower than Davy Jones’ locker
Double G’s a showstopper
Headbanger, the dome rocker
Fix your noodle like pasta fagioli
The one and only Gang bacteria
So quarantine the immediate area
And it only gets scarier
Aerial attack, mosquito malaria
There’s no sparin ya
Don’t procrastinate, I’ll assassinate your character
Palm a Derringer, ‘Shoot to Kill’ like Tom Berenger
Yeah if I ain’t high I’m not woke
Still dreamin, still flyin through clouds of pot smoke
Blunt steamin, marihuana mixed with brocco
Places you can not go, waffle or birds like Roscoe’s
What you expect, though? It’s a psychedelic expo
What I’m poppin is not a Mentos
So tune in and drop out and let the best flow
Ballistic on the tempo
Madman Mike, Dr. Demento
Alan The Chemist fill up the jars, now it’s replenished
Mix the dimethyltryptamine with the Guinness
Double G Society’s Menace
OX tenants, hell up in Venice
Time for me to handle my biz
Hide women and kids
It’s Double G

[DJ Romes]
(So high, I must be out of my mind) –> Nature
(In yo system with extra strength) –> Hieroglyphics
(Travel at magnificent speeds around the universe) –> Rakim

But there is more to this story.

Jason Goldwatch

The director of Vodka & Ayahuasca is American artist, director, filmmaker, and photographer Jason Goldwatch, cofounder and executive creative director of the production company Decon. His work has included long- and short-form videos, documentary films, and experimental performance art, as well as commercial spots for major corporations. “For me, it’s about constantly breaking new ground and going further,” he says. “That’s been the basic premise of everything I do. Traveling through time and space in shock and awe, documenting it all.” And, relevantly, his upcoming projects include a collaborative long-format piece shot in conjunction with ethnobotanist Wade Davis, the renowned National Geographic Society explorer, student of Richard Evans Schultes — and expert on ayahuasca.

Goldwatch is also fascinated with found footage. He scours the Internet for odd pieces of evocative video, and he has created a series of psychedelic experimental shorts utilizing, among other things, the music of Gangrene to create new works of art out of discarded content. Here is his own visual commentary on Vodka & Ayahuasca:

And, speaking of self-referential irony, here is a promo video for the Gangrene album that Goldwatch created out of similar found video footage:

If you have decided that this rap is your new absolute favorite, or if you just want to burnish your hipster cred, you can buy a Vodka & Ayahuasca Deluxe Bundle here, which will get you the album on vinyl or CD, a limited edition Gangrene T-shirt, a Vodka & Ayahuasca velvet blacklight poster — really — and, best of all, a Vodka & Ayahuasca shot glass.

The study

Wistar rat

In many ways, this was a pretty typical design for a toxicology study. There were two groups of twelve Wistar laboratory rats each. Over a period of twenty-one days, the control group was given, by gastric gavage, two mL of water, and the treated group was given, by the same means, two mL of an ayahuasca drink diluted half-and-half with water. At the end of the twenty-one days — this is considered to be a subacute study — the rats were killed, dissected, and their organs given a variety of tests, to see if there were any statistically significant and toxicologically relevant differences between the two groups. The study reports two such differences.

Increase in apoptotic neuronal cells

Apoptosis is a form of programmed cell death in multicellular organisms. As opposed to necrosis, which is a form of traumatic cell death that results from acute cellular injury, apoptosis is often useful. If cells do not die off in an orderly way, the result can be a number of cancers, autoimmune diseases, inflammatory diseases, and viral infections. On the other hand, out-of-control cell death can lead to neurodegenerative diseases, hematologic diseases, and tissue damage or atrophy. The TUNEL or terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase dUTP nick end labeling assay is one of the main methods used to identify cells in the last phase of apoptosis.

In this study, the author reports, the rats given ayahuasca showed a statistically significant increase in apoptotic neuronal cells as measured by the TUNEL assay in comparison with the control group.

Decrease in serum glutathione and hepatic vitamin E

Chemically reactive molecules, such as oxygen ions and peroxides, are a natural byproduct of the normal metabolism of oxygen and, at low levels, play an important role in a number of cell functions. However, under some conditions, the level of such molecules can increase dramatically, resulting in damage to cell structures. This higher level of reactive oxygen species is called oxidative stress.

Oxidative stress can occur for either or both of two reasons — an increased production of oxidizing molecules, or a significant decrease in the effectiveness of antioxidant defenses, such as glutathione and vitamin E. This inability of the cell to detoxify reactive molecules or repair the harm they have caused can damage all components of the cell. Even moderate oxidative stress can trigger apoptosis. Low levels of antioxidant molecules may indicate that detoxification of reactive oxygen species is impaired.

In this study, the author reports, the rats given ayahuasca showed a statistically significant decrease in serum glutathione and hepatic vitamin E in comparison with the control group.

The conclusion

The author ties together these two statistically significant differences by concluding that the findings “suggest the presence of a neurotoxic process in Wistar rats treated with ayahuasca tea over a subacute period, probably triggered indirectly by oxidative stress factors.”

Limitations of the study

There are several limitations in this study relevant both to its conclusions and to any attempt to extrapolate those conclusions to human beings. Some of these limitations are common to any rodent bioassay, while others appear to be unique to this study.

Method of administration

Administering ayahuasca by gastric gavage (photo by A. R. Melgar Figueroa)

First, we should note that in this experiment the rats were dosed by gavage — that is, a tube was stuck all the way down their throats into their stomachs and the ayahuasca was pumped in. Presumably this was done because intravenous or intramuscular injection might bypass relevant gastrointestinal metabolic and detoxification processes. Gavage also has the advantage of ensuring that a measured dose actually enters the stomach. But still, gavage is very different from the usual way that humans ingest ayahuasca, and it is unclear what effect — if any — this method of administration had on the outcome.

The rats

The rats used in the study were standard albino male Wistar laboratory rats, currently one of the most frequently used rat strains for laboratory research. Such rats have proven to be useful models for human neurological deficits. Researchers have identified rat equivalents of akinesia, tremor, postural deficits, and dyskinesia, all relevant to Parkinson’s disease in humans. Rat models of hemiplegia, visuospatial neglect, and tactile extinction have been useful in assessing the outcome of ischemic or traumatic brain injury, and in monitoring the effects of therapeutic interventions for these conditions.

But there are certainly differences between rats and humans. Rats do not have gall bladders. All the bile they use is produced by their liver, which is proportionately much larger than that of humans. The rat gastrointestinal tract has a much smaller absorptive surface area than that of humans, and thus absorbs materials more slowly and to a lesser extent. Rats, unlike humans, cannot vomit the contents of their stomachs.

And the rats in this study seem to have had some significant problems of their own.

First, in an earlier pilot study to test the dose originally planned for the experiment, ten rats were each given three mL of ayahuasca, by gastric gavage, every day for five days. Four out of the ten rats died during the course of the pilot study — a very high mortality rate. As a result, in the experiment itself, the concentration of ayahuasca was halved by mixing it one-to-one with water and the dose reduced to two mL of this diluted ayahuasca per day. No explanation is given for the death of the rats in the pilot study, and we do not know if there was something wrong with the rats, with the ayahuasca, or with the laboratory conditions under which the rats were kept.

But then, relevantly, two rats in the control group — that is, rats given only water — died during the course of the experiment. The two animals began to show signs of anorexia, lethargy, and nasal secretion approximately one day before they died. On necropsy, apart from nasal hyperemia — an unusual amount of blood in the nasal mucous membranes — there were no significant findings in any organ. The two dead rats were simply disregarded in the statistical analysis of the study, and the control group was analyzed as having had just ten rats.

Then one of the treated rats died, in the same way, on the same day it was to be sacrificed for study. As a result of this death, the treated group is sometimes statistically analyzed as having had twelve and sometimes as having had eleven rats.

There is no indication as to whether the deaths of the study rats were different from or similar to the deaths of the pilot rats.

Finally, in each of the two groups, only six of the twelve rat brains were analyzed for neural apoptosis. There is no explanation given for this, except for the statement that evaluation of the six remaining brains was, in some unspecified way, “infeasible.” No explanation is ever given as to what this infeasibility might have been.

The ayahuasca

Sample of ayahuasca used in the experiment (photo by A. R. Melgar Figueroa)

We know very little about the provenance of the ayahuasca drink used in the experiment. But there are three things we do know that can help us evaluate its results.

First, different batches of ayahuasca can differ significantly in their components. Studies of ayahuasca drinks from the Upper Amazon and Brazil have shown that the mean amount of DMT in different samples ranged from 12.5 to 60 mg/100 mL, and the mean amount of total β-carbolines ranged from 20 to 668.33 mg/mL. This is very significant variation. Without having an analysis of the specific drink given to the rats in the experiment, it is risky to make assumptions about just what was in it.

Second, we know that 40 percent of the rats in the pilot study died within five days when given 3 mL of the undiluted ayahuasca drink each day. As noted above, this may have been a problem with the rats, but it may also have indicated there was a problem with the ayahuasca. Clearly the author thought it was the latter, at least at the time, since he cut the dose from the 3 mL per day of the pilot study to the one mL per day of the experiment.

Third, we know that the ayahuasca had fermented. Due to the presence of an odor of alcohol in the ayahuasca, the author analyzed its contents and discovered that it contained 0.37 percent ethanol, an amount he considered “too low and unlikely to influence the study.” It is unclear how he came to this conclusion, and whether or in what way the effect of fermented ayahuasca might differ from that of unfermented ayahuasca, in rats or in humans.

The dose

Let’s do some math. The Wistar rats used in the study, the author tells us, weighed 200 g, which seems about right for their age of 30-45 days postnatal. The average lifespan of a Wistar rat is about two to three years — let’s say 30 months. Every day for 21 days each rat received 1 mL of ayahuasca — a dose of 0.005 mL/g.

An average human weighs about 70 kg and lives for about 840 months. Twenty-one days in a rat’s lifespan of 30 months is roughly equivalent to 20 months — or a bit more than a year and a half — in a human’s lifespan. Using the author’s own figures, the average human dose of ayahuasca in a ceremonial context is 150 mL — a dose of 0.002 mL/g.

In other words, the human equivalent of what the rats were given would be to drink two and a half doses of ayahuasca every day for more than a year and a half. Such human consumption of ayahuasca would be unusual.

Surgically removing the rat liver (photo by A. R. Melgar Figueroa)

There are several justifications given for such high-dose studies in animals. High-dose animal experiments are often justified as an attempt to to find out the effect the substance might have on the most vulnerable human populations, such as infants, the elderly, the sick, and the immunocompromised. Doses higher than any human might reasonably ingest and administered to healthy rats are used as a surrogate for lower doses ingested by unhealthy humans.

Another justification is that high doses are a surrogate for a longer lifetime — that is, short-lived rats given high doses are a surrogate for longer-lived humans ingesting smaller doses over a longer period of time.

A third justification is that a substance may have an adverse effect on a relatively small number of people who ingest it. That is why clinical trials for drugs, which may enroll only a thousand or so humans, often miss adverse effects that become apparent only after the drug has been approved and distributed to hundreds of thousands of patients. In this case, a small number of rats — pure-bred laboratory rats are expensive to buy and maintain — are given very large doses in the hope that this will turn up any relatively rare adverse effects. In other words, dose is used as a surrogate for population size.

There is huge debate over all of these justifications. The problem is that these justifications are ultimately less scientific than they are regulatory and prudential. The goal is to screen out substances that may adversely affect the sick, the elderly, infants, and the immunocompromised; to detect otherwise rare adverse effects in larger human populations; and to predict long-term low-dose effects — all in a cost-justifiable brief study with a relatively few rats.

Importantly, too, high doses of a substance in a brief time may trigger entirely different metabolic pathways than would lower doses over the same or a longer period of time. Higher doses may, for example, overwhelm detoxification mechanisms that would work just fine at lower doses. Metabolites of high-dose metabolic pathways may be more toxic than those of low-dose pathways.

Two anomalies

There are two anomalies in the study results that are worth discussing here — the negative results of the caspase-3 fluorometric assay and the statistically significant decrease of malonaldehyde levels in the treated rats.

Negative caspase-3 fluorometric reaction

Caspase-3 is an enzyme that is activated during the cascade of events associated with apoptosis, and should normally be detected when apoptosis is occurring. Given the positive result of the TUNEL assay, it is surprising that no significant difference in caspase-3 levels was detected between the treated and control rats. Another way of putting this is that the presence of apoptosis reported by the TUNEL assay in the treated rats was not confirmed by a caspase-3 fluorometric reaction.

Decreased levels of malonaldegyde

Rats in the treated group in their cage (photo by A. R. Melgar Figueroa)

In the same way, malonaldehyde levels are a marker for oxidative stress, so malonaldehyde levels should be increased if oxidative stress is taking place. While levels of serum glutathione and hepatic vitamin E were significantly decreased in the treated group — which the author takes as a failure of antioxidant defense mechanisms and thus indicative of oxidative stress — serum malonaldehyde levels were also significantly decreased in the treated group, which is precisely the opposite of what one would expect. Another way of putting this is that any oxidative stress indicated by decreased levels of glutathione and vitamin E was not confirmed by any increased levels of malonaldehyde.

Indeed, these reported results appear less consistent with runaway oxidative stress than with increasing levels of reactive oxygen species being successfully dealt with by antioxidant defense mechanisms. The author speculates that the decreased levels of malonaldehyde in the rats given ayahuasca may be due to an antioxidant effect of the β-carbolines in the ayahuasca drink. But it is hard to see how he can then argue that the ayahuasca drink is at the same time responsible for the purported oxidative stress.

Interpretation

There are four additional factors that I think need to be considered when weighing the impact of this study on possible human neurotoxicity, and before legal and regulatory decisions are made at least in part on that basis.

First, although there are equivocal indications of neuronal apoptoses, nowhere does the study demonstrate anything even approaching any behavioral indications of brain damage. There was no tremor, ataxia, weakness of extremities, or postural or balance deficits in any of the rats given relatively high doses of ayahuasca.

Second, the rats were sacrificed while still being dosed with ayahuasca. There was no washout period to allow for all of the administered drug to be eliminated from the body. If indeed this particular sample of ayahuasca administered at this dosage was producing oxidative stress and neuronal apoptoses, we would want to see if and when the animals recovered — that is, if and when antioxidant defenses returned to normal and any apoptotic neurons were replaced and reintegrated by neuroplastic processes.

Third, there was only a single treated group of rats. It is therefore impossible to say whether the reported effects are dose-related, what the shape of such a dose-response curve would look like, or whether there is any threshold for the effects reported.

Fourth, the study must be read in the context of the admittedly limited epidemiological studies of actual human beings who have in fact ingested ayahuasca over much longer periods of time — the Shuar in the Upper Amazon, Brazilian members of the União do Vegetal, and American members of Santo Daime. Such studies have revealed no evidence of psychological or neurological harm from the regular ingestion of ayahuasca under conditions of ceremonial use.

An anti-ayahuasca bias?

In Brazil, the use of ayahuasca as a religious sacrament in the various ayahuasca churches — União do Vegetal, Santo Daime, Barquinha — is highly politicized. While the churches and their use of ayahuasca are legal in Brazil, there remains considerable controversy, and studies such as the present one are likely to be cited in public debate both in Brazil and abroad. And there is certainly some reason to perceive an anti-ayahuasca subtext in the present study.

At the outset, the abstract refers to ayahuasca as “controversial because of its indiscriminate use by some groups of people,” although such groups are never identified and what makes their use indiscriminate is never made clear.

The study also appears to misread some of the current ayahuasca literature — and in an anti-ayahuasca direction. The author, for example, cites Robert Gable’s risk assessment of the ritual use of ayahuasca for the claim that we should consider “the use of ayahuasca as a positive reinforcer for potential abuse of other substances” — a claim that Gable himself explicitly refuses to make. In the same way, he cites Dennis McKenna’s article on the therapeutic potential of ayahuasca for the proposition that “the pattern of use by adherents of the syncretic religions can be classified as recreational,” whereas in this article McKenna clearly and consistently keeps religious and recreational uses distinct.

Putting these statements together, the message appears to be that religious groups that use ayahuasca do so indiscriminately and recreationally, and that the use of ayahuasca in these groups is a gateway to abuse of other substances. I am aware of no reputable study that supports such claims.

The Announcement

Deputy Minister Vicente Otta

On October 4, 2011, the Peruvian newspaper La Republica reported that, over the preceding twenty months, fourteen shamans had been murdered in the district of Balsapuerto, a small river port near the town of Yurimaguas in Alto Amazonas province. Seven of the victims had been shot, stabbed, or hacked to death with machetes; seven others had been reported missing, but their bodies had not been found, presumably because they had been tossed into rivers to be eaten by piranhas.

All those killed — as well as almost all the members of the communities from which they came — were members of the Shawi ethnic group.

Journalist Roger Rumrrill

On the same day as the newspaper article, Clemente Vicente Otta Rivera, Peru’s deputy minister for intercultural relations, told a press conference that local people had identified all of the victims as curanderos or shamans. Otta said that the murders “cannot remain in a situation of indifference and omission,” and he announced that he would travel to the area personally to monitor the investigation.

Outrage was swift. Shamanist and activist websites urged visitors to send emails of protest to the President of Peru, the Peruvian Ministry of Culture, the Peruvian ambassador to the United States, the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, and Amnesty International. “Until now the death of fourteen curanderos who are the depositaries of Amazon knowledge wasn’t worth the attention of the press,” wrote Roger Rumrrill, a Peruvian journalist specializing in Amazonian affairs. “That’s an expression of how fragmented and racist this country is — a centralized country that continues to look at its interior with total indifference.”

Doctor Rosa Giove

Gregor MacLennan, Peru program coordinator for the environmental and human rights organization Amazon Watch, said: “The death of these shamans represents not just a tragic loss of life, but the loss of a huge body of knowledge about rainforest plants and the crucial role shamans play in traditional medicine and spiritual guidance in indigenous communities.”

Rosa Giove, biomedical director of the Takiwasi Centro de Rehabilitación de Toxicómanos y de Investigación de Medicinas Tradicionales, agreed. “At the death of each shaman,” she stated, “in addition to the loss of human life, knowledge and experience in the practice of traditional medicine is lost as well… These events go far beyond common crimes, since we are losing our intellectual heritage, our living cultural reserve, which is not recognized and even less protected.”

How could such a thing have happened?

The Accusation

One answer to that question came quickly. The office of the public prosecutor in the district capital of Yurimaguas stated that the murders were allegedly ordered by Alfredo Torres Rucoba, the alcalde or mayor of Balsapuerto, and carried out by his brother Augusto Torres Rucoba, known locally as a cazabrujos or matabrujos, a hunter or slayer of sorcerers.

Mayor Alfredo Torres

The first accusations were made in February 2011 by the families of Marcelino Pizango Lancha and Mariano Apuela Inuma, who claimed that the two shamans had been murdered for being sorcerers. According to his wife, Apuela had been forced out of their home by three men, and had never returned. The mutilated bodies of the two shamans were found on different jungle paths during the next two months. Regional and local news media then began reporting similar cases. In April and May 2011, the Archbishop of Yurimaguas reported the death of seven shamans, whose bodies had not been recovered.

At the end of August, a news story on a Lima television station reported that a man named Solomón Napo Moreno had confessed on a hidden camera to having participated in the killing of Mariano Apuela. He said that he had been promised 5,000 soles — in Balsapuerto, a truly remarkable amount of money — by Augusto Torres, the brother of the mayor. Napo gave two reasons for coming forward at this time. “I cannot stay in hiding,” he told the television crew. And he was angry because he had never been paid.

Solomón Napo Moreno

In addition, there was an eyewitness survivor of an attack. Bautista Inuma Andona — an apu or community leader of the Paradise Shawi — was allegedly mistaken for a shaman and attacked with machetes on a road near his home, where he was shot and had his arm hacked off before he could escape. Inuma identified Augusto Torres as one of the attackers.

The last attack apparently occurred in early September 2011 in the community of Santa Rosa, when fifty-year-old shaman Yume Chanchari Silverio was shot in the back and killed instantly. In the wake of subsequent widespread publicity about the killings, beginning the following month, there have been no further reported murders.

The Investigation

Prosecutor Jorge Guzmán Sánchez

Peruvian law enforcement agencies claim that it is difficult to investigate crimes in remote and insular areas of the jungle. Jorge Guzmán Sánchez, the chief prosecutor of Alto Amazonas, blamed the lengthy process of investigation on “logistical deficiencies and geographical constraints.” Llesenia del Mar, the deputy prosecutor in charge of the investigation, said, “Family members speak of murder, but the Navy has sought the bodies with negative results. I cannot speak of murder without a body. What happens if they are in hiding?“

According to del Mar, the main problem with the investigation is cultural difference and lack of trust. “These people are nativos,” he says. “They are reluctant to cooperate with the investigation, because they have different concepts than those of us who live in civilization.” Of the five official complaints made to the police, three have been closed for lack of evidence.

On February 23, 2012, the family of Marcelino Pizango, one of the first murdered shamans, along with representatives of two indigenous advocacy organizations, petitioned the national prosecutor’s office to reopen his case. The shaman’s daughter, Cecilia Pizango Chanchari, herself an apu or community leader in Balsapuerto, said that two men — Cecilio Mozombite Pizango and Pedro Inuma Tangoa — had confessed to her that they, together with Augusto Torres, had killed her father. Prosecutor Alcides Estela Fernández issued subpoenas for all of the accused to testify before a deputy prosecutor. There are no news reports that the subpoenas were ever served in Balsapuerto, or that the depositions ever took place. There have been no arrests.

The Accused

Augusto Torres

Alfredo Torres has denied any knowledge of self-professed killer Solomón Napo or any responsibility for the killings. He has stated that he himself does not believe in sorcery. Speaking on Radio Programas Peru on October 4, 2011, Torres said that the killings were simply revenge by families of people whom the shaman had unsuccessfully tried to heal. “For many years they have practiced the ancient custom of killing sorcerers,” he said, “holding them responsible for the death of a family member who was receiving treatment from the shaman.” In an interview on Frecuencia Latina television, the mayor again denied any role in the killings. “If anyone has any solid proof, let them show it,” he said.

Torres is an evangelical Christian. He has a bachelor’s degree in agronomy from the National University of the Peruvian Amazon. He had run for mayor against an incumbent, Orlando Vasquez Mori, who had been accused of financial improprieties, and he promised to “change the image of the district” — to complete a road from Balsapuerto to the district capital of Yurimaguas, to encourage cultural tourism, and to promote the production and marketing of local handicrafts.

Segundo Pizango Inuma

His platform also included a promise to act against “the public danger posed by sorcerers and shamans — all those who kill people at will.” Torres promised to “draw up a blacklist of the most harmful, and mobilize peasant patrols to act against them.” Torres was elected mayor in January 2011, shortly before the first shamans were reported missing.

A petition to recall the mayor has now been circulated by Segundo Pizango Inuma, head of the Federación de Comunidades Nativas Chayahuitas. Torres claims that ninety-five percent of the Shawi community oppose the recall, because the success of his projects has justified his use of public funds. “As for the death of the sorcerers,” he says, “they tried to persuade the people that I am the perpetrator of those deaths. But none of this has been proven against me… My people will say an overwhelming no to the recall.” Torres claims that the recall is being covertly funded by the previous mayor, Orlando Vasquez Mori, who is is simply using the indigenous leader — a long-time opponent of the mayor — in his campaign. A murder attempt was made against Pizango last August, and Pizango claims that he continues to receive death threats. The recall is scheduled for September 30, 2012.

Journalist Roger Rumrrill says the mayor “is a religious fanatic and Protestant fundamentalist who considers the shamans his enemies.” Seeking to boost his political campaign, Torres apparently went from village to village passing out donated medicine, which turned out to be expired and — since it had no instructions — useless, and had to be turned in to the local health centers for disposal. In August 2011, Torres and his two bodyguards beat up a reporter, fracturing the man’s wrist and injuring his ribs, while Torres shouted — perhaps understandably — that he wanted nothing more to do with the press.

It may well be true that Torres is something of a blowhard and bully. But the question remains: Did he orchestrate the murder of fourteen shamans?

A Community in Distress

Balsapuerto is one of six districts of the Alto Amazonas province in the Department of Loreto. It has a total population of approximately 18,000 people, living in perhaps a hundred small village communities. The population is comprised almost entirely of the ethnic group known as Shawi or Chayahuita.

If we want to understand why these killings happened, we have to put them in the context of the Shawi community of Balsapuerto — a community suffering under an almost unimaginable burden of economic and cultural stress.

Isolation

Yurimaguas

It is not easy to get to — or out of — Balsapuerto. The nearest town is Yurimaguas, the district capital, a typical medium-sized jungle town — chaotic, noisy with mototaxis, and with a plaza de armas dominated by a church. The town abuts the Río Huallaga, which is the primary means of travel upriver to Tarapoto in the south or downriver to Iquitos in the north. Yurimaguas is also connected to Tarapoto by a traversable road, at least when it is not raining.

To reach the various communities of Balsapuerto, you can take a mototaxi for about 45 minutes to Nuevo Arica, which is the end of the road; then it is at least a two-day hike through the jungle into the Balsapuerto district. By raft you can reach Balsapuerto district in a day and a half, or by outboard motorboat in about six hours, but at prices ranging from several hundred to more than a thousand soles — far beyond the means of most people in Balsapuerto. A satellite image at the end of this article may be helpful in visualizing this.

A Shawi village

Balsapuerto is not only physically isolated, but culturally and politically isolated as well. Crimes committed here in the jungle have little political resonance even in Yurimaguas, much less far away in Lima. Jungle Indians are chunchos, not worth thinking about. The Shawi are derisively called balsachos by the mestizos in Yurimaguas. They are under great pressure from the dominant culture to abandon their traditional dress, their language, their masato, and, for the women, painting their faces with the juice of the huito fruit.

Inadequate Health Care

According to the Fondo de Cooperación para el Desarrollo Social, Balsapuerto is at the top of the list of the fifteen poorest districts in Peru, with high rates of extreme poverty, lack of basic social services such as health and education, and alarming rates of maternal and infant mortality. As one newspaper report put it, “What the inhabitants of Balsapuerto have is extreme poverty and little attention.”

The road from Tarapoto into Yurimaguas

There is a hospital in Yurimaguas and a network of puestos de salud — health posts or local clinics — in just twelve of the hundred or so Shawi villages, each staffed by a single often poorly trained and overwhelmed promodor de salud and offering only the most basic health services. Because it is so difficult to reach these villages, bad weather often makes the health posts inaccessible, leaving the staff isolated to treat patients as best they can. In the event that local care is not sufficient, it can take two days or more to navigate the meandering Paranapura to the hospital.

According to a September 2010 report by Yrma Quinteras, the governor of Balsapuerto, the district health posts often lack even basic medical supplies. An August 2010 report by the Instituto Nacional de Defensa Civil says that seven of the twelve Balsapuerto health posts “do not have staff, equipment, or infrastructure.”

Loss of Language

Shawi children

More than half the population of Balsapuerto is illiterate. Schools teach only in Spanish, and the instructors most often do not speak or understand Shawi. In many areas of Peru, there is bilingual education in both Spanish and the local language, but not in Balsapuerto. The specialists of the Unidad de Gestión Educativa Local claim that the people prefer education to be in Spanish, in case they have to go to to Yurimaguas. Serafin Cárdenas, principal of a Balsapuerto secondary school, says that entering Shawi students are inadequately prepared for seventh-grade work, perhaps because they have been taught in a language they do not understand.

There is no systematic effort to preserve the Shawi language. Robinson Pinedo, apu of the Shawi village of Fray Martín, remembers the first teachers that came in the 1960s. They were mestizos, who immediately banned the Shawi language from their schools, and forced students who spoke Shawi to kneel painfully on raw kernels of corn. Robinson now goes fishing with his children every night and speaks Shawi with them. His Shawi wife — like an increasing number of Shawi who live near Yurimaguas — speaks only Spanish.

Proselytization

Missionaries with Shawi women

The Shawi have also been heavily proselytized by missionaries, particularly those from Grace Church, with headquarters in Arvada, California, which has “targeted the Chayahuita Indians in the Amazon jungle as our global mission field.” The missionaries preach strongly against traditional Shawi healing and spiritual practices, urgimg the Shawi to “to renounce all practices contrary to the Word of God.” A missionary to the Shawi from the New Covenant Christian Community Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which is affiliated with the Grace Church, wrote in a letter dated April 2, 2012:

This eventually led us to discuss the women’s belief system and what practices they perform to complete their religious obligations. It was revealed that they make sacrifices to Mother Earth, rain, certain trees believed to have power and some other things. As we talked the women told Maria that they don’t sacrifice to the trees anymore since they’ve been hearing the Word of God… I suggested that they gather up all their idols and everything they use to perform the sacrifices and burn them as an act of repentance and commitment to make the Lord their only God.

Anthropologist Jeremy Narby points out that evangelization — even with the best of intentions — creates community stress in two ways: it isolates people from their own traditions, and it can split the community into rival factions. As puts it, “The people themselves have absorbed the outside ideology, in this particular case, the Evangelical Christian one, which goes explicitly against their own culture… And then communities are divided between those who are members of the Evangelical Church and those who aren’t.”

Sexually Transmitted Disease

The Shawi people also suffer from a very high rate of HIV infection. According to a 2007 study, cited in the 2008 Latin America AIDS Epidemic Update Regional Summary published jointly by the United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS and the World Health Organization, national adult HIV prevalence in Peru has been estimated at 0.6 percent, while HIV seroprevalence among adult Shawl was found to be 7.5 percent, and that of syphilis to be 6.3 percent. According to the report, none of the study participants had ever used a condom, and sex between men appeared to be relatively common. At the current levels of HIV prevalence, the authors conclude, “there is the risk of a negative impact on the survival of the Chayahuita ethnic group as a whole.”

The Cachiyacu Poisoning

Perhaps more immediately relevant to the shaman killings is the disaster of the Cachiyacu river, which took place at the end of August 2010, six months before the first reported disappearances.

Fishing with barbasco

Like many other peoples in the Upper Amazon, the Shawi catch fish using a poison called barbasco, generally made from the milky sap of the plant Lonchocarpus urucu. The active ingredients of barbasco are rotenone and deguelin, which affect gill function in fish, hindering their ability to breathe, and thus causing the fish to rise to the surface where they can be gathered.

Rotenone is classified by the World Health Organization as moderately hazardous. It is only mildly toxic to humans but highly toxic to fish, and for that reason humans can normally eat fish harvested with barbasco. The Shawi had traditionally used barbasco for fishing without incident.

Río Cachiyacu at Balsapuerto

But in August 2011 two things went wrong. An unusually large amount of fish poison was put into the Río Cachiyacu for fishing — apparently with the permission of Yrma Quinteras, the governor of Balsapuerto — just at the time the water level in the river was dropping rapidly, causing the river to stop flowing and leaving pools of water where the rotenone had become concentrated. Thirty-five children from eight Balsapuerto communities in the Cachiyacu valley developed acute diarrhea from drinking this water, including at least two, ages eight and twelve, who died under the care of local shamans.

It appears from the report issued by the Red de Salud de Alto Amazonas that part of the disaster was that the health posts in these communities did not have any antidiarrheal medications on hand.

Killing Sorcerers

Shawi men

Mayor Alfredo Torres, in denying any responsibility for the killings, claimed that the murders had been carried out instead by the families of patients who had died under the care of the slain shamans, presumably as a result of the shaman’s own sorcery. Such a position is, in fact, not implausible. Accusations of sorcery and the killing of accused sorcerers is widespread in the Upper Amazon. “Sorcerers are still murdered in the Upper Peruvian Amazon,” writes anthropologist Françoise Barbira Freedman. Two Lamista suspects were recently killed in revenge, shot dead at night: “‘People got tired of their evil doings,’ I was told.”

In 1978, anthropologist Jean-Pierre Chaumeil did a survey of Yagua shamans in eastern Peru, including which shamans had died during the preceding decade. All eleven deceased shamans reportedly had been killed, either by other shamans, using sorcery, or by villagers, in reprisal for sorcery of their own. Yagua shamans, he writes, are often blamed for the suffering of others, and may be attacked at any time by the relatives of a victim or by a rival shaman. The shaman must constantly be on guard to prevent and to be instantly aware of this type of attack.

Shuar shaman Alejandro Tsakimp describes the murder of a shaman named Tséremp, who boasted of his power to kill and was suspected in the illness of a relative:

Then we went to see where they killed him — they killed him in his own bed! Everything was shot up! And my uncle, my father’s own brother, Pedro, had cut Tséremp in the chest with a machete. The shotgun hadn’t killed Tséremp, so Pedro cut until the machete penetrated the heart.

Tséremp was a powerful shaman, Alejandro concludes, but he fell because of the many bad things he had done

A Shawi shaman

Among the Shuar, when a person in the neighborhood falls ill, the shamans are the first to be blamed. Moreover, because shamans control spirit darts, people fear that shamans may be tempted to use the cover of healing as an opportunity to bewitch their own clients for personal reasons. The clients therefore expect results; and, if such results are not forthcoming, the shaman may be suspected of sorcery, and punished for it. If the shaman declines to treat people, if the shaman is reluctant to work hard at healing, if too many patients die, the question arises: Is the shaman really a sorcerer? Is the shaman pursuing sorcery under the guise of healing?

The Amazonian shaman is thus, in the words of anthropologist Pierre Clastres, a person of “uncertain destiny” — a holder of prestige, but at the same time responsible in advance for the group’s sorrows, and held accountable for every extraordinary occurrence.

Every shaman, then, is in a precarious position. As anthropologist Steven Rubenstein reports among the Shuar, when the veteran shaman Tséremp would not — or could not — heal Chúmpi’s son, Chúmpi concluded that Tséremp was a killer — a conclusion that led finally to the murder of the shaman, described above. And when Alejandro Tsakimp, as a novice shaman, was asked to perform a healing, Tsakimp could not refuse; although he was terrified of failing, Rubenstein writes, he was more afraid of saying no.

Shawi mother and child

Similarly, among the Desana of the Upper Río Negro, a shaman will never propose to attempt to heal a sick person, lest the shaman be suspected of intending harm — indeed, will claim not to know what the illness is or how to cure it, even to the extent of letting the sick person die. If asked, however, the shaman cannot refuse, and then, after the curing session, will explain in some detail exactly what was done and used to heal the sickness — again, to protect against suspicions of sorcery in case the sickness gets worse. As shamans get older and their occasional therapeutic failures accumulate, they find themselves increasingly vulnerable to suspicions of no longer being willing to heal or of causing sicknesses themselves.

The same is true among the Shawi. Anthropologist Aldo Fuentes Chacón lived among the Shawi for years, married a Shawi woman, and wrote a classic ethnography about them, entitled Porque las piedras no mueran: Historia, sociedad, y ritos de los Chayahuita del Alto Amazonas, published in 1988. He commented on the recent killings: “In this area, epidemics occur due to lack of health care, and hundreds of children die each year. So people think that the deaths are caused by the revenge of shamans. They hold this ancestral belief that they have held for centuries.”

But note the converse. Accusations of sorcery become potent weapons in personal, political, and territorial disputes. If your enemy is also a shaman, that just makes the accusation more difficult to deny.

The CORPI Interviews

Mamerto Maicua Pérez

In February 2012, the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research & Service — commonly known as ICEERS — sent a small team to Yurimaguas to investigate and make a photographic record of the killings and to see how the affected communities could be supported. In the course of this project, photographer Preyer Huamán Torres had the opportunity to speak with representatives of the Coordinadora Regional de Pueblos Indígenas, or CORPI, an organization whose function is to protect the rights of indigenous people, their territories, and their natural resources. According to the final report, compiled and written by medical anthropologist Rosario de Pribyl, what these representatives told Huamán — probably very much to his surprise — was that the people murdered had in fact very likely been sorcerers, and that they had gotten pretty much what they deserved. Mamerto Maicua Pérez, the current head of the organization, told Huamán:

We have to take into account the difference between shamans and sorcerers… Sorcerers are bad, harm people, people seem to die from nothing, fall ill unexpectedly in a moment. People know who they are and are afraid because they are powerful… And it is just this sort of person who is disappearing. In this area, executions of this sort are normal. It is the way things are resolved if someone in a family has cursed someone, and someone in that other family identifies him and kills him — if so the problem is over and normal life resumes.

Marcos Sánchez, former head of CORPI, agreed, saying that the execution of sorcerers is traditional in Balsapuerto villages.

In our villages people are dying every week, become sick quickly and die… Each time those sorcerers appear in the villages, one or two a year, they are seen and known, because people die for no reason, they are walking home and fall down in a faint… Rare incurable sicknesses appear, which had not been seen in the area. They go to the health post and they do not know what to do. Of course, the health post is also very limited, sometimes there are no doctors there. So the families of those harmed eradicate them, kill them.

And he added: “If you have a snake that comes into the village and bites people, you have to kill it. This is the same. Kill him and the problem is finished.”

A Shawi kitchen

Sánchez said that he had reviewed the records received by CORPI about the Balsapuerto killings, made his own observations, and corroborated information that had been gathered by others. On that basis, he said, it is without doubt true that those who were killed were in fact sorcerers. Indeed, Sánchez said that he had talked with Cecilia Pizango Chanchari, the daughter of Marcelino Pizango, one of the first victims to disappear. Pizango had been accused of being a sorcerer; the press had called him a healer. But his daughter had admitted to Sánchez that her father had in fact been a sorcerer — someone, she said, who “was in those dark places.”

The Theories

Indigenous activists have focused their blame for the killings on outsiders, foreign entities, strangers — evangelical missionaries, pharmaceutical multinationals, the timber and oil industries. Journalist Roger Rumrrill has blamed “the capitalist materialism of global cultural uniformity.”

Traditional clothing and huito-juice face painting

A significant part of this drive to global cultural uniformity, according to Rumrrill, are the evangelical missionaries who had converted mayor Alfredo Torres. Deputy Minister Vicente Otta, too, pointed to the accused mayor and his brother’s evangelical affiliations as a motive for the killings. “For these protestant sects,” Rumrrill wrote, “the shamans are people possessed by demons, so they have to be killed.” Rumrrill claimed that the mayor ordered the killings on hearing that the shamans planned to form an association to share their knowledge collectively. The mayor is an evangelist, Rumrrill said, “and when he learned that an association of healers was forming in Balsapuerto, this sparked his anger.”

Segundo Pizango Inuma, president of the Federación de las Comunidades Nativas Chayahuitas, poses the issue in terms of the ongoing conflict between indigenous wisdom and religion on the one hand, and, on the other, economic and political interests, primarily of multinational pharmaceutical companies. These companies, he believes, systematically kill shamans — with the collusion of the authorities, who “dislike shamans because of their power” — because “their plant recipes replace medications in the pharmacy.”

Alberto Pizango Chota

Alberto Pizango Chota, Peru’s top indigenous leader and president of the country’s most powerful indigenous organization, the Asociación Interétnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peruana, and himself a Shawi shaman, blames cash and pressure from legal and illegal industries in the Amazon who poach natural resources from indigenous lands.”This work, I would say, is done in a very subtle way by the extractive industries,” Pizango said, naming the timber and oil industries as well as those involved in producing illegal drugs. “What is happening now in my community is organized crime,” he said. “The bottom line here is that there’s a purpose… a political purpose.”

Pizango explained that Shawi tradition used to allow sorcerers to be killed by others in the community. Now, he said, a bad interpretation of that tradition has been used to cover up corruption and greed. “These industries get away with killing because they accuse their victims of being sorcerers. That was ancestral justice,” he said. “Now it is just organized crime.”

But it is not at all clear that there was a single plan behind all the killings. According to the list provided by the prosecutor’s office in Yurimaguas, the shamans were killed in different villages, their bodies were found in different places, and they were killed by different means — by shooting, by stabbing, by hacking with machetes. Nor was there necessarily a single motive. Although international outrage has focused on the killing of shamans, it is also true that some of those killed during this period were not shamans, and also that shamans have political and economic lives of their own.

Making masato

Indeed, when the murders were first reported, Deputy Minister Otta voiced suspicion that religion or tradition were mere cover for family and political disputes in the area, as well as political differences with Mayor Torres. He acknowledged that there are several possible explanations, including jealousy among shamans and land disputes. One of those killed was a former mayoral candidate; there was the attempted murder of activist Segundo Pizango, and the beating by unidentified persons of teacher Adán Cervantes, both of whom opposed the mayor’s administration.

Political alliances and enmities are complex in the Upper Amazon. During the first month of his administration, Torres began to keep at least one election promise — building a road from Balsapuerto to Yurimaguas. Together with apu Cecilia Pizango Chanchari — daughter of shaman Marcelino Pizango Lancha — and representatives of two indigenous activist organizations, Torres met with Alto Amazonas officials and agreed to allow a technical team from the regional government of Loreto into their territory, to begin surveying the route for the missing road section between Nuevo Arica and Balsapuerto. Less than a month later, Marcelino Pizango disappeared, accused of being a sorcerer. Was the murder of Marcelino Pizango somehow directed against his daughter? Was Cecilia Pizango an ally or a rival of Alfredo Torres? Or was the sorcery accusation based on something else entirely? Who else had Marcelino Pizango allegedly harmed?

Anthropologists Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern, in their book Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip, write that

the idiom of witchcraft or sorcery is used in all cases as a persuasive way of explaining sickness or death, relating these to the patterns of jealousy and distrust between people. It is always some misfortune that triggers accusations. Whether someone is a witch or not does not matter until people cast around for explanations of misfortune. When they have suffered some setback, people at once begin to generate or to tap into the mills of gossip. Sickness (physical or economic) in particular may set these mills rolling in the absence of other convincing explanations of it, or even in spite of them. The same human envies and jealousies feed into gossip generally and witchcraft accusations in particular.

Making traditional pottery designs

Thus, the various theories put forward to explain these killings themselves function essentially as accusations of sorcery. On the one hand, they accuse large, vague, foreign entities which have obscure or hidden motivations. On the other hand, they blame Alfredo Torres as the tool of these entities. He certainly was easy to accuse, and the larger world was quick to accuse him, perhaps because he seems to be something of a blowhard and a bully, or because of his position of authority — an attempt, in a situation of stress, when the unthinkable has happened, to single out that one person who can be blamed, the sorcerer who is responsible for the community disaster.

What these theories do not blame, I think, is what is actually found at Balsapuerto — disease, poverty, isolation, illiteracy, loss of cultural identity, a tradition of sorcery accusations, and a lack of access to justice.

The Shawi community in Balsapuerto has a shockingly high rate of maternal and infant death. The health posts are ill-equipped and understaffed. Sick people turn to the shamans for healing, and then — just like the children poisoned by barbasco in the Cachiyacu — they die.

Children had died uselessly from a disastrous contamination, a failure of both institutional health care and shamanic healing. There were pre-existing disputes over property and politics. Old scores, some long-standing, were waiting to be settled. Perhaps the election of Torres, with his platform explicitly attacking sorcerers, engaged the people’s anger and despair at the death of their children. In a deeply stressed community with a tradition of sorcery accusation and the killing of sorcerers, perhaps all it took was a trigger for all hell to break loose.

Balsapuerto (A) is on the Río Cachiyacu, and Yurimaguas is on the Río Huallaga, connected by the Río Paranapura; the dirt road heading west out of Yurimaguas, indicated by a yellow line, ends at Nuevo Arica. The white dashed line is the boundary between the regions of Loreto and San Martín. Route 8 connects Yurimaguas to Tarapoto, Moyobamba, Chachapoyas, and Cajamarca.

” I misstep, I slip, I misjudge the weight of my pack…”

Death, to me, is a bullet in the back of the head. Let us look at the scene — the bullet, almost spent, perhaps just starting to tumble, unexpected; a mile away, the sniper, already putting away his weapon, perhaps having intended to hit someone else, bored with his job, thinking about his next assignment, already thinking about dinner. Here is a true story:

Death, to me, is capricious, a mistake. Death is always late, or early. Death is overworked, disorganized, not very bright. Death goes home to dinner and frets about the paperwork. We laugh when we narrowly escape from death, because death is stupid.

There is a special narrative of almost-being-dead, which may perhaps shed some light on death and the way in which we should understand our understanding of death. I am not claiming that almost-being-dead provides any kind of privileged access to an understanding of death; but I think that how we read a story of almost-being-dead is a challenge and test of any claim to understand.

Yalom the prescriptivist

Irvin Yalom

My thinking about the narrative of almost-being-dead began with an odd remark by Irvin Yalom in his classic Existential Psychotherapy (1980). Yalom is reviewing conceptions of death in children — such ideas as that death stabs you with a knife, death is white as snow, death has a key to everywhere, death leaves footprints behind, death comes and takes people away. Yalom sees these stories — he calls them personifications — as a form of denial, reassuring, he says, in contrast to the truth. “As long as a child believes that death is brought by some outside force or figure,” he says, “the child is safe from the really terrible truth that death is not external — that, from the beginning of life, one carries within the spores of one’s own death” (p. 99; emphasis in original).

Yalom is here making reference to Heidegger’s famous description of death as that possibility “which is one’s ownmost (eigenste), which is nonrelational (unbezügliche), and which is not to be outstripped (unüberholbare)” (1927/1962, § 50, p. 294) — a description which, Yalom says, is the truth. The children are already, in Heidegerrian terms, tranquilized, inauthentic, irresolute, lost.

Yet what is striking about this discussion is the degree to which the children are expressing the alterity of death, the extent to which the children seem to recognize that death threatens from beyond. As Emmanuel Levinas puts it, “This unknown that frightens, the silence of the infinite spaces that terrify, comes from the other, and this alterity, precisely as absolute, strikes me in an evil design or in a judgment of justice” (Levinas, 1969, p. 234; emphasis added). And again:

In the being for death of fear I am not faced with nothingness, but faced with what is against me, as though murder, rather than being one of the occasions of dying, were inseparable from the essence of death, as though the approach of death remained one of the modalities of the relation with the Other. The violence of death threatens as a tyranny, as though proceeding from a foreign will. The order of necessity that is carried out in death is not like an implacable law of determinism governing a totality, but is rather like the alienation of my will by the Other (1969, p. 234).

Heidegger’s Being and Time was available to Yalom in English in 1962, and Levinas’s Totality and infinity was available to him in English in 1969. Yet, in 1980, Heidegger’s view of death is the truth from which the children hide, and Levinas — who sheds a remarkable light on these naïve responses — is not mentioned at all.

The story of Carlos

Yalom talks about his therapy of a patient named Carlos, who was dying of lymphoma and what Yalom considered to be a really bad attitude. Carlos was pugnacious, combative, crude, and selfish. His aim in life, he told Yalom, was to screw as many different women as he could. Rendered impotent by his chemotherapy, his sexual life consisted entirely of masturbating while watching sadomasochistic pornography. He expressed a desire to rape women if only it were legal to do so (1989, p. 77, 81).

Carlos, Yalom writes, “was so preoccupied with women that he seemed to forget that he had a cancer that was actively infiltrating all the crawl spaces of his body” (p. 79). Yalom “often thought that if I could find a way to keep him continually aware of his death and the ‘clearing’ that death effects, I could help him make some major changes in the way he related to life and to other people” (p. 83; emphasis added). You will, I suppose, be pleased to learn that Yalom did in fact guide Carlos toward an acceptance of his impending death, whereupon Carlos became a good father to his estranged children and a supportive and sensitive member of his therapy group.

I am not so sure. I rather liked the old Carlos — crude, nasty, full of fury. Everything he said told the story of his voracious clinging to life, a stubborn refusal to acknowledge his ravaged and emaciated body, his rage against the dying of the light. What Yalom saw as “pathetic cosmetic efforts — a wide-brimmed Panama hat, painted-on eyebrows, and a scarf to conceal the swellings in his neck” — could be read instead as an obstinate refusal to go gently into that good night. Yalom saw Carlos as inauthentic; but perhaps Carlos was in fact a wild man, a berserker in the face of death — a death that threatened him from beyond, that he fought against, with furious rage.

The argument from almost-being-dead

Leo Tolstoy

Yalom supports his prescription of Heideggerian authenticity by citing several stories of life-changing encounters with death — that is, narratives of almost-being-dead. He gives two examples from Leo Tolstoy — Pierre in War and Peace (1931), whose life is transformed from meaninglessness to purpose when he is unexpectedly reprieved from imminent death by firing squad; and the protagonist in The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1960), whose fatal sickness and extraordinary pain lead him, in his final days, to transform his life.

And Yalom mentions, in a footnote, the case of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was in real life reprieved at the last moment from death by firing squad, although his personal transformation was apparently delayed until some time later, when he began to study the New Testament at the gulag to which he was then sent (Yalom, 1980, pp. 33-40; see also Gelven, 1989, p. 141).

Yet, to the extent that Yalom, or Heidegger, asserts that an encounter with death — that is, almost-being-dead — is either a necessary or sufficient condition for authenticity — or, as Yalom puts it, “making some major changes in the way one relates to life and to other people” (1989, p.77) — then the claim is empirically false. As philosopher Julian Young points out, many people face up to death in the most vivid, direct, and literal way possible without it making any appreciable difference to their lives at all. Conversely, people make all sorts of life changes — including becoming authentic and resolute — for all sorts of reasons, not only by coming to terms with death, but for love, anger, hatred, or sheer stubborness (Young, 1998, pp. 114-115).

Woody Allen on almost-being-dead

Woody Allen and friend

Woody Allen has his own story about almost-being-dead. In his short play Death Knocks (1966) — a parody of the famous chess game with Death in Ingrid Bergman’s The Seventh Seal — Nat Ackerman, a bald, paunchy fifty-seven-year-old dress manufacturer, is confronted by Death, who has climbed a drainpipe and crawled into Nat’s apartment through the window. Nat challenges Death to a game of gin rummy, which Nat wins easily, getting twenty-eight dollars and an additional twenty-four hours of life. After Death leaves, despondent, with no money and no place to stay for the night, Nat calls his friend Moe Lefkowitz and says:

Hello, Moe? Me. Listen, I don’t know if somebody’s playing a joke, or what, but Death was just here. We played a little gin … No, Death. In person. Or somebody who claims to be Death. But, Moe, he’s such a schlep!

Blanchot’s death

In 1994, Maurice Blanchot published one of his typically odd, elliptical, obscure stories, entitled The Instant of my Death (L’instant de ma mort). The story takes place in the closing days of World War II, when a young Frenchman — who may or may not be Blanchot himself — is dragged from his castle and is about to be shot by a Nazi firing squad. Facing the firing squad, he achieves a peculiar exaltation:

I know — do I know it — that the one at whom the Germans were already aiming, awaiting but the final order, experienced then a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of beatitude (nothing happy, however) — sovereign elation? The encounter of death with death?

In his place, I will not try to analyze. He was perhaps suddenly invincible. Dead — immortal. Perhaps ecstasy. Rather the feeling of compassion for suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal or eternal. Henceforth, he was bound to death by a surreptitious friendship (2000, p. 5).

At the last moment, the young Frenchman — like Dostoevsky — is reprieved. Describing the reaction to this reprieve, Blanchot writes the following utterly remarkable passage:

There remained, however, at the moment when the shooting was no longer but to come, the feeling of lightness that I would not know how to translate: freed from life? The infinite opening up? Neither happiness, nor unhappiness. Nor the absence of fear and perhaps already the step beyond. I know, I imagine that this unanalyzable feeling changed what there remained for him of existence. As if the death outside of him could only henceforth collide with the death in him. “I am alive. No, you are dead” (pp. 7-9).

There is a blank page. Then the young man returns to Paris, speaks with Malraux, commiserates over a lost manuscript. “What does it matter,” writes Blanchot. “All that remains is the feeling of lightness that is death itself or, to put it more precisely, the instant of my death henceforth always in abeyance” (p. 11).

Impossible stories

Jacques Derrida

Can we even tell such stories of almost-being-dead? In 1995, Jacques Derrida, at an international colloquium on Passions de la littérature, gave one of his typically odd, elliptical, obscure close readings of the rich Blanchot text. Derrida does not, of course, clarify. But he does point to the special and ineluctably private nature of the narrative of almost-being-dead: “This surviving speech must be exemplarily irreplaceable as the instance of the instant from which it speaks, the instant of death as irreplaceable, as ‘my death,’ on the subject of which no one other than the dying person can testify. I am the only one who can testify to my death — on the condition that I survive it” (2000, p. 45).

And, indeed, for Blanchot, all story, all narrative, partakes of the narrative of almost-being-dead. In The Writing of the Disaster (1995b), a meditation on the Holocaust, Blanchot says, “To write one’s autobiography, in order either to confess or to engage in self-analysis, or in order to expose oneself, like a work of art, to the gaze of all, is perhaps to seek to survive, but through a perpetual suicide — a death which is total inasmuch as fragmentary” (p. 64). And Derrida comments: “Allow me to call to mind an essential kind of generality: is the witness not always a survivor?” (2000, p. 45).

Derrida states, “I cannot, I should not be able to, testify to my own death, only to the imminence of my death, to its instance as deferred imminence. I can testify to the imminence of my death” (2000, p. 46). He connects that instance with the very last words of Blanchot’s story — “the instant of my death henceforth always in abeyance (en instance)” (2000, p. 11) — and that imminence of that impossible dying with Blanchot’s words, “Impossible necessary death: why do these words — and the unexperienced experience to which they refer — escape comprehension?” (1995b, p. 67). Derrida says: “Dying means: you are dead already, in an immemorial past, of a death that was not yours.”

What is special about the unexperienced experience of death, the impossible necessary death, “the incessant imminence whereby life nonetheless endures by desiring” (Blanchot, 1980/1995, p. 41), the narrative of almost-being-dead, is this: “Death will come, there is a suspension, a last suspensive delay, an interruption of the death sentence. But what will come, what is coming at me, this is what will already have taken place: death has already taken place. I can testify to it, because it has already taken place. Yet this past, to which I testify, namely, my death itself, has never been present” (Derrida, 2000, pp. 49-50).

But this “imminence of what has already come to pass,” (Blanchot, 1980/1995, p. 41) is sharply different, Blanchot says, from any sort of Heideggerian being-toward-death. “This uncertain death, always anterior, the vestige of a past that never has been present, is never individual, just as it overflows the whole” (Blanchot, 1980/1995, p. 66) — a statement that Derrida says is “troublesome even to the Jemeinigkeit, the ‘mine every time,’ which according to Heidegger essentially characterizes a Dasein that announces itself to itself in its own being-for-death” (Derrida, 2000, p. 51).

Blanchot on death

Maurice Blanchot and his lifelong friend Emmanuel Levinas

It is apparently true that Blanchot, at the age of 36, was captured and almost executed for Resistance activities during the war, but was miraculously saved at the last minute (Hill, 1997, p. 12; Mole, 1997, p. 163). But The Instant of my Death is filled with slippery identifications. The text begins, autobiographically, “I remember…,” but the speaker remembers, not himself, but “a young man,” who may or may not be Blanchot. And this young man is saved because of a further confusion of identity: the executioners are not Germans at all, but rather Russians, who take the young man, the text suggests, for a nobleman, the lord of the Château, and spare him on that basis, choosing instead to kill some innocent peasants (Blanchot, 2000, p. 3, 5-6; Mole, 1997, p. 166).

Blanchot’s fictional writings are filled with death, but no one dies quickly: death is always a long passage through a debilitating illness, where the character “is forever dying but not dead” (Haase & Large, 2001, p. 52). Indeed, all we know is dying; death itself remains forever alien. That is why, at the instant of his death, the young man facing the firing squad, Blanchot says, was “prevented from dying by death itself” (p. 3). Death always means the death of the other; but even the death of the other remains a mystery:

The fact that we cannot experience the reality of death to the end makes death unreal, and this irreality condemns us to fear dying only unreally, not really to die, to remain as if we are held, forever, between life and death, in a state of non-existence and non-death, from which our whole life perhaps takes its meaning and its reality. We do not know that we die. We do not know either that others die, for the death of another remains foreign to us and always incomplete, since we who know it, we are alive (Blanchot, 1995a, p. 252).

Because we are all dying all the time, death is always imminent:

Dying means: you are dead already, in an immemorial past, of a death which was not yours, which you have thus neither known nor lived, but under the threat of which you believe you are called upon to live; you await it henceforth in the future, constructing a future to make it possible at last––possible as something that will take place and will belong to the realm of experience (Blanchot,
1995b, 65).

Yet it is precisely this unknowable imminence of death that binds us all together:

What calls me most radically into question? Not my relation to myself as finite or as the consciousness of being before death or for death, but my presence in the proximity of another who by dying removes himself definitively, to take upon myself another’s death as the only death that concerns me (Blanchot, 1988, p. 9).

And it is this imminence of death that gives our stories meaning. “My speech,” Blanchot says, “is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in the world, that it has suddenly appeared between me, as I speak, and the being I address: it is there between us as the distance that separates us, but this distance is also what prevents us from being separated, because it contains the condition for all understanding. Death alone allows me to grasp what I want to attain; it exists in words as the only way they can have meaning. Without death, everything would sink into absurdity and nothingness” (1995a, p. 323-324).

Strikingly, then, death is very much like the coming of the Messiah — never arriving, always present. “And if it happens to the question “When will you come?’ the Messiah answers ‘Today,’ the answer is certainly impressive: so it is today! It is now and always now. There is no need to wait, although to wait is an obligation. And when is it now?” (Blanchot, 1995b, p. 142).

My death, story two

The question is this. Isn’t this, not the reading, but rather the attempt at a reading which we should give to a story like this if presented by another? Isn’t our task hermeneutical rather than prescriptive? Here is another true story.

“We had been living in a Shapra village…”

Levinas reads the Talmud

Emmanuel Levinas

It is clear that Levinas considers himself to be a phenomenologist, although not a Husserlian. “I think that, in spite of everything,” he says, “what I do is phenomenology, even if there is no reduction, here, according to the rules required by Husserl; even if all of the Husserlian method is not respected” (1986/1998, p. 87). In a discussion with Raoul Mortley, Levinas said, “My method is phenomenological; it consists in restoring that which is given, which bears a name, which is objective, to its background of intention, not only that intention which is directed towards the object, but to everything which calls it to concreteness, to the horizon” (Mortley, 1991, p. 140, quoted in Moran, 2000, p. 327).

Husserlian intentionality, says Levinas, is merely an adequation with the object; what defines consciousness at its fundamental level is, instead, “the astonishing feat of containing more than it is possible to contain” — that is, welcoming the other, hospitality, where “the idea of infinity is consummated,” where one is open to the infinity of the other (1969, p. 27). As Moran puts it, Levinas believes that Husserl’s emphasis on intentionality is a distortion of human experience; the caress of a lover cannot be captured in any account of intentionality (2000, p. 329).

But this approach to “that which is given” in listening to another is precisely Levinas’s hermeneutical approach to that which is given in a text —specifically, the Talmud. For Levinas, “the capacity of these texts to signify is infinite” (Aronowicz, 1990, p. x), and only successive “secularizations,” translations into the language of the times, can bring these infinite meanings to light.

Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Shabbat 88a

Levinas explicates this text from the Tractate Shabbat, 88a and 88b: “A Sadducee saw Raba buried in study, holding his fingers beneath his foot so tightly that blood spurted from it” (Levinas, 1990, p. 31). Levinas notes what a strange sight this was. “One might have expected to see Raba meditating dreamily, while caressing his beard or rubbing his hands. Raba’s gesture is odd: he rubs his foot so hard that blood spurts out. That was the degree to which he forgot himself in study!” (p. 46).

But then Levinas draws the hermeneutical lesson. Perhaps Raba was giving plastic expression to the intellectual work in which he was engaged; perhaps “rubbing until the blood spurts out” is the way one must rub the text to arrive at the life it conceals, to tear from the words the secrets which time and convention have covered with sediment, to remove the layer which corrodes them (p. 47). To reveal these secrets is “an exertion, a battle, a tearing or wresting of meaning from the text” (Aronowicz, 1990, p. xvii), which requires not one but many interpreters. Within the text are enclosed an infinite number of meanings that require a plurality of people “in their uniqueness, each one capable of wresting meanings from the signs, each time inimitable” (Levinas, 1982, p. 136, translated in Aronowicz, 1990, p. xvi). Cannot the same be said of the infinity of human stories? Levinas says:

It all happens as though the multiplicity of persons . . . were the condition for the fullness of “absolute truth,” as though each person, through his uniqueness, ensured the revelation of a unique aspect of the truth, and that certain sides of it would never reveal themselves if certain people were missing from mankind (Levinas, 1982, p. 163, translated in Aronowicz, 1990, p. xvi).

For Levinas truth is sought within infinity in multiple readings. Prescriptivism, then, is a form of mere adequation, a totalizing of the other, rather than hospitality to the infinity of the other, as if someone were missing in the world.

My death, story three

“On the Rio Marañon, still far from Iquitos…”

How do we read a story?

What we need, then, is a hermeneutics that is humble before the story. And if the proper object of hermeneutic understanding is meaning, then the scope of hermeneutic analysis includes not only texts but also — since human action is inherently meaningful — all forms of human action as well. There is nothing humanly meaningful that falls outside of language. There is, Hans-Georg Gadamer says, “no societal reality . . . that does not bring itself to representation in a consciousness that is linguistically articulated” (1976, p. 35). Reality, he says, “happens precisely within language” (p. 35). The other speaks to us by actions — even combative, crude, and selfish actions — that we read as stories.

Gadamer emphasizes the essential linguisticality (Sprachlichkeit) of all human experience of the world; as he puts it, “Being that can be understood is language” (Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache) (1975, p. xxii). Paul Ricoeur too views action “on the model of the text” (Ricoeur, 1981a); anthropologist Clifford Geertz has compared the work of the anthropologist to that of the literary critic, “sorting out the structures of signification” in the texts we call cultures (1973, pp. 9-10; see generally Madison, 1997). Gadamer says that “reading is the basic structure that is common in all occurrences of meaning” (1997, p. 53).

Similarly, linguisticality pervades our encounters; we understand each other in terms of stories. People and narratives share teleological qualities. An episode is understood by its place in the narrative, not simply as the result of prior causal forces. An episode is meaningful because it points both backwards and forwards; it makes sense because it contributes to the future action. “It is a bad storyteller,” says philosopher David Cooper, “who introduces episodes that make no such contribution” (1999, p. 73).

The basic structure underlying a coherent life story has been called a personal myth (e.g., McAdams, 1993; Larsen, 1996; Feinstein & Krippner, 1997). Similar concepts — all invoking linguisticality — include personal fables (Elkind, 1981); nuclear themes (Tomkins, 1992); core images (Clift, 1992). Indeed, Stephen Crites (1971) says that the very organization of human experience seems to be given to us in narrative. Paul Ricoeur asks: What is it to remember? “It is to be able to constitute one’s own existence in the form of a story where a memory as such is only a fragment of the story” (Ricoeur, 1981c, p. 253; emphasis added).

What is important here is that no text, no story, no human life is exhausted by a single reading — like the Talmud to Levinas, all stories are infinite. “There is always more than one way of construing a text” (Ricoeur, 1976, p. 79); every interpretation dips into the infinite narrative, is provisional, humble. Language provides us with understandings; but they are understandings waiting to be more fully understood, as we both reflect on them and let them articulate our initial experience of things (Sokolowski, 1997, p. 228).

The text or narrative is like a musical score (Ricoeur, 1976, p. 75) or like the script of a play (Sokolowski, 1997, p. 229) — the same type among many tokens, the same object prescribing various manifolds of appearance. In telling our stories to each other, however, unlike other hermeneutical enterprises, the story talks back.

“Each person is like a poem waiting to be released,” write Richard Hycner (1991, p. 102). Here the hermeneutical task is to “resonate to the unique rhythm and rhyme,” to have a sense of wonder, “to be amazed” — in other words, to be humble before the infinite narrative, the holy text, “to allow myself to be touched by the mysteriousness, wondrousness, and grandeur of the person” (p. 103). As in any hermeneutic endeavor, the goal is to understand, to appreciate the experiential narrative (p. 106), to hear the text of the story even through the speech of the body (pp. 119-120).

Every narrative, every story, is a story of almost-being-dead, of deferred imminence. If stories of almost-being-dead — mine, or Blanchot’s, or yours — demand a special form of listening, then every story demands the same humble and respectful approach, the same hermeneutic — a sense of wonder at the infinity of the human text.

My stories

What am I then to make of my narratives of almost-being-dead, and others I have not told? What is true? What has been reconstructed by romantic memory, influenced by Levinas, Blanchot, Derrida? As I read my own texts, what do I come to understand about the meaning of death to me, or the meaning of my death?

The most striking thing in my own narratives of almost-being-dead is the way in which death constantly appears to me from the outside, but not — as for Levinas — as an evil design or judgment of justice, as tyranny, murder, a foreign will (Levinas, 1969, p. 234); rather, death comes as a mistake, stupid and blundering, coming at the wrong time or for the wrong person, because someone made a wrong move, avoidable. As long as I am still alive I have fooled death, the big schlep.

It is also striking that death becomes visible to me, in recollection and perhaps in actuality, in small things, glimpses and gestures — rocks below a cliff, a bolt on an automatic weapon. Being still alive after almost being dead is expressed to me in things to do with air — first the explosive release of laughter, but then, more important, in the intense awareness of the quiet motion of the air moving in and out of my body.

Finally, there is Blanchot’s surreptitious friendship with death, the incessant imminence of death. How do I read Blanchot’s infinite text, or my own infinite text? Almost being dead means, sometimes, not often, when stopping to think, that death has somehow been incorporated into life. Almost being dead means, paradoxically, that I have lived most fully, and that I am therefore most able to die. It is just a matter of practice.

But that is my death — not yours.

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If we were to try to invent a philosopher as different as possible from Heidegger in background and temperament, we would create Emmanuel Levinas. He was a Jew from Lithuania, home of one of the greatest of Talmudists, the Gaon of Vilna. Levinas grew up studying the Hebrew Bible and the great Russian writers — Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy. During World War II he served as an interpreter of Russian and German for the French army, became a prisoner of war, and served as a forced laborer. His book Existence and Existents (1978), with its descriptions of anonymous existence, insomnia, sleep, horror, vertigo, appetite, fatigue, and indolence, was begun during his captivity.

Emmanuel Levinas (photo by Bracha Ettinger)

His wife and child were hidden during the Holocaust in a French monastery; most members of his family in Lithuania were murdered by the Nazis. According to his own words, the forebodings, the reality, and the memory of the Holocaust have always accompanied his thinking (Hand, 1989a, pp. 1-2; Peperzak, 1997, pp. 2-3). Perhaps all his differences with Heidegger can be summed up in a single tellingly Levinasian phrase: “Dasein in Heidegger is never hungry” (Levinas, 1969, p. 134).

Levinas is not easy to read. His writing is metaphoric, allusive, suggestive, inconstant. He is far from being a systematic thinker; he is not, as he himself would put it, a totalizing philosopher. Indeed, among French philosophers, he is much less like Sartre than he is like Bachelard. But while Levinas does not have a system, he certainly has themes, which tie together his rich and complex work. Levinas is constantly discovering new connections among his themes. His work is like a great tangled ball of yarn. This makes him both difficult and exciting to read; but the advantage is that, no matter which thread you follow, you wind up at the center.

One of these themes is his thinking of death, where he stands directly opposed to Heidegger. This thread, too, leads to the center. Levinas’s “ultimate and exemplary challenge to the solitude of Being” turns out to be “a rigorous and moving testimony of one’s infinite obligation to the other person” (Hand, 1989b, p. v).

“Ontology is an egology”

It is clear that Heidegger’s ideal is in fact a sort of spiritual solipsism (Philipse, 1998, p. 259). All the Heideggerian virtues — authenticity, resolution, heeding the call of conscience — serve to isolate (vereinzeln) us. Thus, for example, “Death, understood in authentic anticipation, isolates Dasein in itself” (Die im Vorlaufen verstandene Unbezüglichkeit des Todes vereinzelt das Dasein auf es selbst) (1962, § 53, p. 308); “Understanding the call of conscience reveals one’s own Dasein in the dreadfulness of its isolation” (Das Rufverstehen [des Gewissens] erschließt das eigene Dasein in der Unheimlichkeit seiner Vereinzelung) (§ 60, p. 342); “The call of conscience… implacably isolates Dasein” (Der Ruf des Gewissens… Unnachsichtig vereinzelt er das Dasein) (§ 62, p. 354)

Heidegger’s philosophy is thus an egology: the relation with Being is more important than the relation with other people. But where Heidegger finds significance in existence as a project, Levinas locates it precisely in responsibility for the Other. “This is the question of the meaning of being: not the ontology of the understanding of that extraordinary verb, but the ethics of its justice. The question par excellence or the question of philosophy. Not ‘Why being rather than nothing?’, but how being justifies itself” (Levinas, 1984, p. 86).

Against ontology

Levinas at Strasbourg, 1928

Levinas holds that ontology is fundamentally mistaken, because it elevates abstract being over the relations of actual beings. Levinas states that he is “radically opposed to Heidegger who subordinated the relation with the Other to ontology” (Levinas, 1969, p. 89), who forgot that “being is enacted in the relation between men” (1969, p. 299). Ontology has it backwards. “This ‘saying to the Other’ — this relationship with the Other as interlocutor, this relation with an existent — precedes all ontology; it is the ultimate relation in Being” (1969, p. 48; emphasis in original).

Levinas’s “radical inversion” from being to beings “would take place in what I call an encounter with the face of the other.… [H]e calls to me and orders me from the depths of his defenseless nakedness, his misery, his mortality.” It is in this personal relationship, “from one to the other,” that he locates the ethical event, where “charity and mercy, generosity and obedience, lead beyond or rise above being” (1987, p. 202).

Heideggerian ontology thus subordinates justice to freedom, places freedom before ethics, “rather than seeing in justice and injustice a primordial access to the Other beyond all ontology” (1969, p. 89). Being before the existent, ontology before metaphysics, Levinas says, is freedom before justice. It is a movement within the individual before obligation to the other (1969, p. 47).

To affirm the priority of Being over existents is to already decide the essence of philosophy; it is to subordinate the relation with someone, who is an existent (the ethical relation) to a relation with the Being of existents, which, impersonal, permits the apprehension, the domination of existents (a relationship of knowing), subordinates justice to freedom.… In subordinating every relation with existents to the relation with Being the Heideggerian ontology affirms the primacy of freedom over ethics (1969, p. 45).

This inversion makes ontology as first philosophy a philosophy of power, a philosophy of injustice. “Truth, which should reconcile persons, here exists anonymously. Universality presents itself as impersonal; and this is another inhumanity” (1969, p. 46). “Heideggerian ontology, which subordinates the relationship with the Other to the relation with Being in general, remains under obedience to the anonymous, and leads inevitably to another power, to imperialist domination, to tyranny” (1969, pp. 46-47).

Ontology is, in Levinas’s telling phrase, a philosophy of the neuter. Heideggerian freedom, he says, “turns out to be obedience to insidious forms of the impersonal and the neuter” (1969, p. 272). Levinas has “broken with the philosophy of the neuter,” “the Heideggerian Being of the existent,” “impersonal neutrality,” “the neuter dimension of Being above the existent” — for, he says, “they exalt the obedience that no face commands” (1969, pp. 298-299).

Levinas and Jean-Paul Sartre

And this difference is seen precisely in their thinking of temporality and death. Adriaan Peperzak expresses Levinas’s thought this way: “The closed character of Heidegger’s Dasein follows also from his analysis of death. If nothingness is the secret of time and the authentic foundation of existence, the human person cannot rely on anything other than himself. The rejection of any reference to the Eternal and the insensitivity toward any otherness result in a tragic form of liberty” (Peperzak, 1997, p. 49). Levinas directly confronts this sort of authenticity: “But is the authenticity of the I,” he asks, “its uniqueness, contingent upon that unadulterated possessive ‘mineness,’ of self for itself, that proud virility ‘more precious than life,’ more authentic than love or than the concern for another?” (Levinas, 1988b, pp. 226-227).

Levinas is fond of quoting an epigram from Pascal’s Pensées — “‘That is my place in the sun.’ That is how the usurpation of the whole world began.” It is this usurpation of the place of the Other — this violence — which is at the heart of an ontology as a first philosophy; instead, Levinas proposes as a first philosophy an ethics, an unquestionable and primary obligation to the Other (Hand, 1989a, p. 5).

Against Heideggerian death

Levinas nowhere systematically presents his arguments against the Heideggerian conception of death. Throughout his work, however, he throws out challenges to the central themes of Heidegger — that death is my ownmost; that all relations are undone at death; that I can run ahead toward my own death; that I can be resolute in the face of death. Levinas condemns the abstract and academic view of death that is central to Heidegger — that death is clean and heroic, that death does not take place in cattle cars. Levinas — the Jew, the Litvak, the prisoner, the forced laborer — decisively rejects this romantic view of death. On the contrary, death is announced by sobbing; to die is “to be the infantile shaking of sobbing” (1947b, p. 41). Levinas remembers the graves in the air, about which which Heidegger refused to speak.

There is a romantic strain in the European thinking of death — the idea that death is somehow productive, strengthening, empowering. Thus, for Hegel, death is a necessary moment in the inevitable progression of Spirit through the different forms of consciousness to absolute knowing. Even more, for Nietzsche, the overman, free for the possibility of death, who maintains the pure essence of will in willing nothingness, is the next step beyond resentment, bad conscience, asceticism (Keenan, 1999, p. 1). For Heidegger, too, the authentic, resolute, determined, and decided assumption of death is, as Levinas says, “supreme lucidity and thus supreme virility” (Levinas, 1947b, p. 40). Taking on the uttermost possibility of existence is precisely what makes possible all other possibilities, and thus makes activity and freedom possible; death in Heidegger is an event of freedom (1947b, p. 40-41). This is the tradition that Levinas seeks to subvert.

Death and relationship

Levinas particularly disputes the Heideggerian idea of the nonrelationality (Unbezüglichkeit) of death — that death is the ownmost possibility of Dasein, that “being-toward-death discloses to Dasein its ownmost coming to be” (Heidegger, § 53, p. 307; emphasis in original), that, in the face of death, “all relations to any other Dasein have been undone” (§ 50, p. 294).

Levinas characterizes Heidegger’s view like this: “The uniqueness of the human I, which nothing should alienate, is here thought in terms of death: that everyone dies for himself. An inalienable identity in dying! The I exists in the world in relationship with others, but no one can truly die for anyone else.” Heidegger’s ideal, says Levinas, is “an originary authenticity, but with nothing more, in which, for Heidegger, all ‘relations with others’ are dissolved or ‘canceled,’ and in which the meaningfulness of being-there is cut short. Fearsome authenticity!” And he adds: “You can see what I would reject” (1988b, p. 226).

Levinas with his lifelong friend Maurice Blanchot

On the contrary, Levinas argues forcefully that the encounter with death is an encounter with the Other, that death in fact is paradigmatically relational. “Death threatens me from beyond. This unknown that frightens, the silence of the infinite spaces that terrify, comes from the other, and this alterity, precisely as absolute, strikes me in an evil design or in a judgment of justice” (1969, p. 234; emphasis added). “This approach of death indicates that we are in relation with something that is absolutely other, something bearing alterity not as a provisional determination we can assimilate through enjoyment, but as something whose very existence is made of alterity. My solitude is thus not confirmed by death but broken by it” (1947b, p. 43; emphasis added).

Death is not my ownmost; instead, it is encountered as a hostile, foreign, alien will set against me. “This nothingness is an interval beyond which lurks a hostile will. I am a passivity threatened not only by nothingness in my being, but by a will in my will” (1969, p. 236).

In the being for death of fear I am not faced with nothingness, but faced with what is against me, as though murder, rather than being one of the occasions of dying, were inseparable from the essence of death, as though the approach of death remained one of the modalities of the relation with the Other. The violence of death threatens as a tyranny, as though proceeding from a foreign will. The order of necessity that is carried out in death is not like an implacable law of determinism governing a totality, but is rather like the alienation of my will by the Other (1969, p. 234).

That is why, to Levinas, all death is murder — because in death I am faced with another, a foreign will, an evil design, a judgment of justice, a will in my will, alterity. Thus, for Levinas, we do not die in Heideggerian isolation, but face-to-face with an enemy, a powerful other who remains invisible, who intends us as victims — not before nothingness, but over against an opponent. “In death we are seized without the possibility of retaliating against our attacker. We are exposed to ‘absolute violence, to murder in the night’ (1969, p. 233).

But herein lies the great paradox of death. Precisely because it is absolute alterity, death is human, relational; death “maintains an interpersonal order” (1969, p. 234); “a social conjuncture is maintained in this menace” (1969, p. 234). “Murder, at the origin of death, reveals a cruel world,” Levinas says, “but one to the scale of human relations“ (1969, p. 236). And that is precisely why “death cannot drain all meaning from life” (1969, p. 236). Death does not subvert the interpersonal order, but is, as philosopher Edith Wyschogrod puts it, “the most fundamental experience of the personal order” (Wyschogrod, 2000, pp. 120-121). Indeed, what is common to death and social life is an encounter with radical alterity. The encounter with the alterity of death is like nothing so much as the encounter with the alterity of the other person.

Levinas quotes II Samuel 1:23, a verse of the funeral chant of the prophet weeping for the death of King Saul and his son Jonathan in combat: “Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.” And Levinas adds, “As if, contrary to the Heideggerian analysis, in death, all relationship to the other person were not undone” (1988a, p. 215).

Authenticity and virility

According to a typically Levinasian inversion of Heidegger, you cannot run toward death; death runs toward you. You can “go toward death,” Levinas says. You can “learn to die,” you can “prepare for the last extremity.” But in the last quarter of an hour, or the last second, death completes the last leg of the journey by itself, and is a surprise. In this sense, death “is not a possibility like all the other possibilities, in which there is always a preliminary, always a project.” To be “unassumable” belongs to its very quality; the “project” one may have of death is undone at the last moment. “It is death alone that goes the last leg. Not us. We do not, strictly speaking, meet it” (1982b, p. 155). Levinas calls this final gap an “infinitesimal — but untravelable — distance” (1969, p. 235).

Death is a menace that approaches me as a mystery; its secrecy determines it — it approaches without being able to be assumed, such that the time that separates me from my death dwindles and dwindles without end, involves a sort of last interval which my consciousness cannot traverse, and where a leap will somehow be produced from death to me. The last part of the route will be crossed without me; the time of death flows upstream (1969, p. 235).

In the same way, Heideggerian being-toward-death is, says Levinas, “a supreme lucidity and hence a supreme virility.” Authenticity, being-toward-death, resoluteness — what Levinas sarcastically, virility — is made possible for Heidegger only because he posits a “the hypostasis at the heart of anonymous being.” But death is never now. Levinas adopts Epicurus’ argument and, typically, inverts it: “When death is here I am no longer here, not just because I am nothingness, but because I am unable to grasp. My mastery, my virility, my heroism as a subject can be neither virility nor heroism in relation to death.” Death becomes the limit of the subject’s virility.

It is not just that there exist ventures impossible for the subject, that its powers are in some way finite; death does not announce a reality against which nothing can be done, against which our power is insufficient — realities exceeding our strength already arise in the world of light. What is important about the approach of death is that at a certain moment we are no longer able to be able. It is exactly thus that the subject loses its very mastery as a subject (1947b, pp. 40-42).

“My mastery, my virility, my heroism as a subject can be neither virility nor heroism in relation to death.” For Levinas, the limit of the possible is reached in suffering. At the heart of suffering, where we grasp the nearness of death, activity becomes passivity. “The subject finds itself enchained, overwhelmed, and in some sense passive. Death is in this sense the limit of idealism” (1947b, p. 41).

The death of the Other

Levinas with his wife Raïssa and daughter Simone, who were saved from the Nazis by Blanchot

The foundational error of the ontological analysis of death is that it looks at the wrong death. The key death is not mine. Instead, “contrary to the view of contemporary philosophy which remains attached to the self’s solitary death,” death is the death of the Other (1947a, p. 164). “Heidegger deduces all conceivable meaning from the attitude of man toward his own death. He thinks to the very end, in the senses of the term. He carries out his thought to its ultimate consequences, and he thinks that my death for me can be nothing but the ultimate self.… Is there not a manner of thinking that goes beyond my own death to the death of the other man, and does not the human consist precisely in this thinking beyond one’s own death?” (1982b, p. 161).

Levinas holds that “the Human consists precisely in opening oneself to the death of the other, in being preoccupied with his or her death.… I am persuaded that around the death of my neighbor what I have been calling the humanity of man is manifested” (1982b, pp. 157-8). Death for Levinas is something absolutely unknowable that comes at me from beyond my possibilities. The mystery of death forces me to recognize my relationship with the Other.

For Levinas, the fundamental human experience is the face, naked and defenseless, mortal, the face facing death. “To begin with the face as a source from which all meaning appears, the face in its absolute nudity, in its destitution as a head does not find a place to lay itself, is to affirm that being is enacted in the relation between men, that Desire rather than need commands acts” (1969, p. 299). I do not grasp the other in order to dominate; I respond, instead, to the face’s epiphany. “The Other does not affect us as what must be surmounted, enveloped, dominated, but as other, independent of us: behind every relation we could sustain with him, an absolute upsurge” (1969, p. 89).

As such, what is produced in a concrete form is the idea of infinity rather than totality.

Always the face shows through these forms. Prior to any particular expression and beneath all particular expressions,… there is the nakedness and destitution of the expression as such, that is to say extreme exposure, defenselessness, vulnerability itself.… It is as if that invisible death, ignored by the Other, whom already it concerns by the nakedness of its face, were already ‘regarding’ me prior to confronting me, and becoming the death that stares me in the face. The other man’s death calls me into question, as if, by my possible future indifference, I had become the accomplice of the death to which the other, who cannot see it, is exposed; and as if, even before vowing myself to him, I had to answer for this death of the other, and to accompany the Other in his mortal solitude. The Other becomes my neighbor precisely through the way the face summons me, calls for me, begs for me, and in so doing recalls my responsibility, and calls me into question (1984, p. 83).

Emmanuel Levinas (drawing by David Levine)

The relation to the face is the relation to the absolutely weak — to what is absolutely exposed, what is bare and destitute, what is alone and can undergo the supreme isolation we call death. Thus there is always, in the face of the Other, the death of the Other. This weakness cries out with a dual voice — on the one hand, to turn away, ignore the Other, neglect the Other, and thus murder the Other; on the other hand, Thou Shalt Not Kill. This Thou-Shalt-Not-Kill “is the fact that I cannot let the Other die alone, it is like a calling out to me.” And this relationship with the Other is not symmetrical. “[I]n the relation to the Face, it is asymmetry that is affirmed: at the outset I hardly care what the other is with respect to me, that is his own business; for me, he is above all the one I am responsible for” (1982a, 104-105).

The original form of openness is thus my exposure to alterity in the face of the other. I literally put myself in the place of the other, without usurpation. I put myself in the place of the other even to the point of sacrifice. In typical Levinasian fashion, Levinas writes: “In the general economy of being… a preoccupation with the other, even to the point of sacrifice, even to the possibility of dying for him or her; a responsibility for the other. Otherwise than being!” (1991, p. xii). It is, finally, the willingness to die for the other which Levinas calls holiness. “It is inscribed in the face of the other, in the encounter with the other: a double expression of weakness and strict, urgent requirement. Is that the word of God?” (1982a, p. 108). “No one is so hypocritical as to claim that he has taken from death its sting, not even the promisers of religions. But we can have responsibilities and attachments through which death takes on a meaning” (1968, p 118).

From death to responsibility

What is crucial about the death of the other is that it calls me to my responsibility for that death; and the mortality of the other is seen in the nakedness, the defenselessness of the other’s face. “The face,” Levinas says, “is the very mortality of the other man” (1986, p. 186). The I as hostage to the other human being is precisely called to answer for his death. Through the face of the other, through his mortality, “everything that in the other does not regard me, regards me” (1985a, pp. 167-168).

Emmanuel Levinas (photo by Bracha Ettinger)

“I have sometimes wondered,” says Levinas, “whether the idea of the straight line — that shortest distance between two points — is not originally the line according to which the face I encounter is exposed to death.” That is probably the way, he says, my own death stares me in the face — in a straight line — but I do not see my own death. “The first obvious thing in the other’s face is the directness of exposure and that defenselessness. The human being in his face is the most naked; nakedness itself. But at the same time, his face faces. It is in his way of being all alone in his facing that the violence of death is to be assessed” (1982b, p. 163). In this facing of the face, in this mortality, there is a summons and a demand that concern the I, that concern me, as if the invisible death which the face of the other faces were my business, as if that death had to do with me (1986, p. 186).

And the concern that is raised is precisely the aloneness of the other. “Before the death of the other, my neighbor, death the mysterious appears to me, in any case, as the bringing about of an aloneness toward which I cannot be indifferent. It awakens me to the other” (1969, p. 161). And my responsibility is not to let the other die alone. “The death of the other man implicates and challenges me, as if, through its indifference, the I became the accomplice to, and had to answer for, this death of the other and not let him die alone. It is precisely in this reminder of the responsibility of the I by the face that summons it, that demands it, that claims it, that the other is my fellow-man” (1986, p. 186).

To let the other die alone is to be an accomplice in the death. In an often-repeated passage, Levinas says that the face of the other — “before all gesture, in its facial straightforwardness, before all verbal expression, from the depths of that weakness” — commands me, orders me not to let the other die alone; “that is, an order to answer for the life of the other man, at the risk of becoming an accomplice to that death” (1985a, p. 169; 1989a, p. 148; 1989b, p. 29; see 1983, p. 130).

But that face facing me — in its mortality — summons me, demands me, requires me: as if the invisible death faced by the face of the other—pure alterity, separate, somehow, from any whole — were ‘my business.’ As if, unknown by the other whom already, in the nakedness of his face, it concerns, it ‘regarded me’ before its confrontation with me, before being the death that stares me, myself, in the face. The death of the other man puts me on the spot, calls me into question, as if I, by my possible indifference, became the accomplice of that death, invisible to the other who is exposed to it; and as if, even before being condemned to it myself, I had to answer for that death of the other, and not leave the other alone to his deathly solitude (1989b, pp. 24-25).

This responsibility is unlimited, whatever the circumstances — a responsibility one is never rid of, which does not cease in the last moment of the neighbor, even if responsibility then only amounts, in the impotent confrontation with the death of the other, to responding “Here I am” (1989a, p. 149; 1989b, p. 30). “[T]he ultimate meaning of that responsibility for the death of the other person is responsibility before the inexorable, and at the last moment, the obligation not to leave the other alone in the face of death. Even if, facing death… even if, at the last moment, the not-leaving-the-other-alone consists, in that confrontation and that powerless facing, only in answering ‘Here I am’ to the request that calls on me” (1983, pp. 130-131).

The responsibility is unlimited in another way as well. It is a responsibility for everyone. I am responsible for the death of the Other — of any other. The ethical attitude is not “the attitude toward the death of a being already chosen and dear, but of the death of the first-one-to-come-along. To perceive that we come after an other whoever he may be — that is ethics” (1982b, p. 167; emphasis added).

It is clear, too, that the command not to let the other die alone is the same as the command not to abandon the other. The command not to be an accomplice in the death of the other embraces “all the violence and usurpation my existence, despite its intentional innocence, risks committing” — “the risk of occupying the place of another, of exiling him, condemning him to a miserable existence in some Third or Fourth World, of killing him” (1989b, p. 30).

And, finally, it is this understanding of death that separates Levinas from Heidegger. “That way of requiring me, of putting me in question and appealing to me, to my responsibility for the death of the other, is a meaning so irreducible that it is on that basis that the meaning of death must be understood, beyond the abstract dialectic of being and its negation, to which, on the basis of violence that has been reduced to negation and annihilation, one reduces death” (1989b, p. 25).

From responsibility to holiness

Levinas, unlike Heidegger, stands face to face with the Holocaust. “The inhabitants of the Eastern European Jewish communities constituted the majority of the six million tortured and massacred; they represented the human beings least corrupted by the ambiguities of our world, and the million children killed had the innocence of children. Theirs is the death of martyrs, a death inflicted in the torturers’ unceasing destruction of the dignity that belongs to martyrs” (1982c, p. 98). Yet these martyrs did not perish, were not liquidated, were not inventory. “In speaking of the Holocaust,” says Levinas, “I am thinking of the death of the other man” (1985a, p. 162; emphasis added).

In the face of this sort of death — of even the possibility of this sort of death — what Levinas issues, finally, is a call not to authenticity but to holiness. “I have never claimed to describe human reality in its immediate appearance,” Levinas says, “but what human depravity itself cannot obliterate: the human vocation to holiness. I don’t affirm human holiness; I say that man cannot question the supreme value of holiness” (1985b, p. 180). This value is, finally, what separates his philosophy from Heideggerian ontology, even in the darkest times. “There can be periods during which the human is completely extinguished, but the idea of holiness is what humanity has introduced into being. An ideal of holiness contrary to the laws of being” (1982, p. 114; emphasis added). And again: “Man is not only the being who understands what being means, as Heidegger would have it, but the being who has already heard and understood the commandment of holiness in the face of the other man” (1985b, p. 180).

This call to holiness precedes the concern for existence (1988a, p. 216). Indeed, as Levinas, says, it is humanity that has introduced holiness into being, in the form of sacrifice, which is the possibility of dying for the other (1987, p. 202). “It is as if the emergence of the human in the economy of being,” he says, “upset the meaning and plot and philosophical rank of ontology: the in-itself of being-persisting-in-being goes beyond itself in the gratuitousness of the outside-of-itself-for the other, in sacrifice, or the possibility of sacrifice, in the perspective of holiness” (1991, p. xiii). The priority of the other over the I is precisely the response of the I to “the nakedness of the face and its mortality.” It is there that the concern for the other’s death is realized, and that “dying for him,” “dying his death,” takes precedence over “authentic” death — “the excessiveness of sacrifice, holiness in charity and mercy. This future of death in the presence of love is probably one of the original secrets of temporality itself and beyond all metaphor” (1988a, p. 217).

REFERENCES

Hand, S. (1989a). Introduction. In Hand, S. (Ed.), The Levinas reader (pp. 2-8). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Hand, S. (1989b). Preface. In Hand, S. (Ed.), The Levinas reader (pp. v-vi). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Hand, S. (1989b). Preface. In Hand, S. (Ed.), The Levinas reader (pp. v-vi). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time (Mcquarrie, J., & Robinson, E., Trans.). New York, NY: Harper & Row. (Original published 1927)

Keenan, D. (1999). Death and responsibility: The “work” of Levinas. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Levinas, E. (1947a). The other in Proust (Hand, S., Trans.). In Hand, S. (Ed.) (1989), The Levinas reader (pp. 160-165). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Levinas, E. (1947b). Time and the other (Hand, S., Trans.). In Hand, S. (Ed.) (1989), The Levinas reader (pp. 37-58). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Levinas, E. (1948). Reality and its shadow (Hand, S., Trans.). In Hand, S. (Ed.) (1989), The Levinas reader (pp. 129-143). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Levinas, E. (1954). The I and the totality (Smith, M., & Harshav, B., Trans.). In Levinas, E. (Ed.) (1998), Entre nous (pp. 13-38). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Levinas, E. (1968). Substitution (Hand, S., Trans.). In Hand, S. (Ed.) (1989), The Levinas reader (pp. 88-125). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity (Lingis, A., Trans.). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. (Original published in 1961)

Levinas, E. (1978). Existence and existents (Lingis, A., Trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. (Original published in 1973)

Levinas, E. (1982a). Philosophy, justice, and love (Smith, M., & Harshav, B., Trans.). In Levinas, E. (Ed.) (1998), Entre nous (pp. 103-121). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Levinas, E. (1982b). The philosopher and death (Smith, M., Trans.). In Hayat, P. (Ed.) (1999), Alterity & transcendence (pp. 153-168). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Levinas, E. (1982c). Useless suffering (Smith, M., & Harshav, B., Trans.). In Levinas, E. (Ed.) (1998), Entre nous (pp. 91-101). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Levinas, E. (1983). Nonintentional consciousness (Smith, M., & Harshav, B., Trans.). In Levinas, E. (Ed.) (1998), Entre nous (pp. 123-132). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Levinas, E. (1984). Ethics as first philosophy (Hand, S., Trans.). In Hand, S. (Ed.) (1989), The Levinas reader (pp. 75-87). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Levinas, E. (1985a). Diachrony and representation (Smith, M., & Harshav, B., Trans.). In Levinas, E. (Ed.) (1998), Entre nous (pp. 159-177). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Levinas, E. (1985b). Violence of the face (Smith, M., Trans.). In Hayat, P. (Ed.) (1999), Alterity & transcendence (pp. 169-182). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Levinas, E. (1986). The philosophical determination of the idea of culture (Smith, M., & Harshav, B., Trans.). In Levinas, E. (Ed.) (1998), Entre nous (pp. 179-187). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Levinas, E. (1987). Dialogue on thinking-of-the other (Smith, M., & Harshav, B., Trans.). In Levinas, E. (Ed.) (1998), Entre nous (pp. 201-206). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Levinas, E. (1988a). “Dying for . . .” (Smith, M., & Harshav, B., Trans.). In Levinas, E. (Ed.) (1998), Entre nous (pp. 207-217). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Levinas, E. (1988b). The other, utopia, and justice (Smith, M., & Harshav, B., Trans.). In Levinas, E. (Ed.) (1998), Entre nous (pp. 223-233). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Levinas, E. (1989a). From the one to the other: Transcendence and time (Smith, M., & Harshav, B., Trans.). In Levinas, E. (Ed.) (1998), Entre nous (pp. 133-153). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Levinas, E. (1989b). Philosophy and transcendence (Smith, M., Trans.). In Hayat, P. (Ed.) (1999), Alterity & transcendence (pp. 3-37). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Levinas, E. (1991). Author’s preface (Smith, M., & Harshav, B., Trans.). In Levinas, E. (Ed.) (1998), Entre nous (pp. xi-xii). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Levinas, E. (Winter 1989). As if consenting to horror (Wissing, P., Trans.). Critical Inquiry, 15(2), 487. (Original published in 1988)

Peperzak, A. (1997). Beyond: The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Philipse, H. (1998). Heidegger’s philosophy of being: A critical interpretation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Wyschogrod, E. (2000). Emmanuel Levinas: The problem of ethical metaphysics. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.

Das sichverständlichmachen ist Selbstmord der Philosophie.
To make oneself understood is suicide for philosophy.
     —Martin Heidegger (1989, § 259, p. 435; quoted in Philipse, 1998, p. 291)

Heidegger, says philosopher Richard Rorty, was a resentful, ungenerous, disloyal, and deceitful man (May 3, 1998). He was also a member of the Nazi party from 1933 until it was disbanded by the Allies in 1945 (Leaman, 1996, p. 66). Yet he managed to write what is probably the single most influential philosophical text of the twentieth century. In particular, Heidegger’s thoughts on death and authenticity have profoundly affected the thinking and practice of existential psychotherapy.

Particularly since the publication in English of the works of Farías (1989) and Ott (1993), there has been furious debate about the nature and extent of Heidegger’s Nazism (e.g., Neske & Kettering, 1990; Wolin, 1991; Rockmore & Margolis, 1992; Rockmore, 1992; Philipse, 1998, pp. 246-276; Polt, 1999, pp. 152-164; Collins, 2000). But there can be little doubt that his participation in the Nazi regime, and his subsequent silence and evasions — even to the attempted revision, without notice, of his Holocaust-period writings (Philipse, 1998, pp. 250-251) — have called into question not only his own personal authenticity but also the validity of his thought.

The young Heidegger

Indeed, it may be his silence, for the thirty-one years that he lived and wrote after the destruction of the Nazi state, that has damaged Heidegger the most. As Emmanuel Levinas, at one time one of Heidegger’s most important students, has put it, “But doesn’t this silence, in time of peace, on the gas chambers and death camps lie beyond the realm of feeble excuses and reveal a soul completely cut off from any sensitivity, in which can be perceived a kind of consent to the horror?” (Levinas, Winter 1989, quoted in Milchman & Rosenberg, 1996b, p. ix).

What is remarkable is this. Discussion of Heidegger’s participation in the National Socialist party has come, according to philosopher Herman Philipse, in three waves (1998, p. xiii). First, immediately after the war, on January 19, 1946, Heidegger was stripped of his professorial rights because of his involvement with the Nazis. Second, on July 25, 1953, Jürgen Habermas, writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, raised the question of whether Heidegger’s recently published Einführung in die Metaphysik was in fact an apology for National Socialism. Third, in 1983 — ironically, the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler’s rise to power — Heidegger’s 1933 pro-Hitler rectoral address at Freiburg University was republished by Heidegger’s son, motivating the publication, in 1987, of Victor Farías’s and, in 1988, Hugo Ott’s historical investigations into Heidegger’s life (Farías, 1987, in French; Ott, 1988, in German). And, in case all this might be considered simply European esoterica, on June 16, 1988, Thomas Sheehan published, in The New York Review of Books, a review of Farías (1987) entitled “Heidegger and the Nazis” (June 16, 1988).

In light of all this, one might expect that a recent standard text on existential psychotherapy, such as Schneider & May (1995), which refers to Heidegger seven times, including a laudatory exposition, would mention the question of Heidegger’s Nazism and its effect on his philosophy. One would be disappointed.

There is no question that existential psychotherapy has relied heavily on Heidegger’s thinking on death and authenticity (e.g., Yalom, 1980, pp. 30-33; May, 1983, pp. 105-108; Frankl, 1988). The question then becomes whether — and to what extent — the enterprise is tainted by Heidegger’s Nazism, and by its own silence on the issue.

Death and them

The primary source for Heidegger’s views on death is §§ 46-53 of Being and Time (1927/1962, pp. 279-311). This section has been discussed numerous times (e.g., Edwards, 1979; Gelven, 1989, pp. 136-155; Mulhall, 1996, pp. 114-120; Young, 1998; Philipse, 1998, pp. 352-374; Polt, 2000, pp. 85-88). Here is the general account.

Inauthenticity

Heidegger in 1955

Dasein — the human being, the person, the individual, me — is, ordinarily, inauthentic. It is governed not by autonomous choice but rather by them — by public opinion, popular judgment, received wisdom. When one is inauthentic, they become the self. In thought, feeling, desire, judgment, and action, the I-self is dissolved away, leaving the they-self; one becomes a mere function of them. We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they do; we read, see, and judge about literature as they do; we find shocking what they find shocking (Heidegger, 1927/1962, § 27, p. 164).

Why do we do this? From public pressure, certainly; they always seek to impose a kind of dictatorship or subjection (Botmässigkeit) upon us (§ 27, p. 164). But we do it also from our own motives, our own desire to limit our distance (Abständigkeit) from them (§ 27, p. 164). But then why would we wish to do that? Not because we are inherently social beings; not because we are moved by the face or the sufferings of the other; not because we are seized by the other or responsible for the other; but rather because by becoming a function of them, by being “tranquilized” (beruhigend) (§ 38, p. 222), we are “disburdened” (entlasten) (§ 27, p. 165) of the disturbing weight which an authentic I-self must bear — our own inexorable mortality. Inauthentic life, says Heidegger, is a flight from death. They regulate the way one is supposed to behave towards death; tranquilization keeps Dasein from thinking about its death (§. 51 p. 298). And, since death is Dasein’s ownmost (eigenste) possibility, we become authentic (eigentlich) only by relating properly to our own death.

The nature of death

This leads to Heidegger’s discussion of death. Death, says Heidegger, reveals itself as that possibility “which is one’s ownmost (eigenste), which is nonrelational (unbezügliche), and which is not to be outstripped (unüberholbare)” (§ 50, p. 294). Heidegger does not give a systematic exposition of these three key terms, which are repeated together throughout the text. It is clear, however, that the terms are interconnected parts of a single solipsistic thought. Because death is my ownmost possibility, I cannot outrun it; because death is my ownmost possibility, my death has no relation to any other; because my death is nonrelational, it belongs to me alone. Thus Dasein can only die for itself. “No one can take on oneself the dying of another,” says Heidegger. “Each Dasein must take on itself its own dying” (Keiner kann dem anderen sein Sterben abnehmen.… Das Sterben muß jedes Dasein jeweilig selbst auf sich nehmen) (§ 47, p. 284).

Heidegger, seated far right, at a Nazi rally

For the same reason, Dasein dies alone. “The nonrelational character of death… isolates Dasein down to itself” (Die… Unbezüglichkeit des Todes vereinzelt das Dasein auf es selbst) (§ 53, p. 308) “Death is just one’s own” (Tod ist je nur eigener) (§ 53, p. 309; emphasis in original). And — most important — when Dasein stands face to face with the possibility of death, “all its relations to any other Dasein are cut off” (So sich bevorstehend sind in ihm alle Bezüge zu anderem Dasein gelöst) (§ 50, p. 294). Finally, since death is my ownmost possibility, I cannot outstrip death, since beyond death there is no more Dasein. “Death is a possibility of being which Dasein always has to take upon itself,” says Heidegger. “With death, Dasein itself stands before its ownmost capacity for being” (Der Tod ist eine Seinsmöglichkeit, die je das Dasein selbst zu übernehmen hat. Mit dem Tod steht sich das Dasein selbst in seinen eigensten Seinkönnen bevor) (§ 50, p. 294).

The call to authenticity

Death is Dasein’s potential negation of itself; death “is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein” (§ 50, p. 294). The nonbeing of its own finitude gives rise to Dasein’s anxiety before the “possible impossibility of its existence” (§ 53, p. 310). But even in its tranquilized inauthenticity, Dasein hears the voice of the I-self, the call of conscience (§ 57, pp. 321-322) to accept its mortality and individuality.

Dasein can choose to reject this call and remain inauthentic. Or Dasein can choose to listen, plunge into anxiety and solipsism (§ 40, p. 233), and accept alienation from them. When the issue is death, “all being-with-others will fail us” (§ 53, p. 308); authentic Dasein is “wrenched away from them” and isolated down to itself (§ 53, p. 307). One then sees that death is not a future event, but a sign of the nullity of any being one might have beyond simply being-in-the-world: “When Dasein is resolute, it takes over authentically in its existence the fact that it is the null basis of its own nullity.… The nullity by which Dasein’s Being is dominated primordially through and through, is revealed to Dasein itself in authentic Being-towards-death” (§ 61, p. 354). One then “takes over” one’s “thrownness” (§ 74, p. 434). By being-toward-death, Dasein becomes fully autonomous, authentic — as Heidegger puts it, resolute.

When we admit that our death is “possible at any moment” (daß er jeden Augenblick möglich ist) (§ 52, p. 302), then “the possibility will have to be understood unweakened as a possibility, cultivated as a possibility, and endured as a possibility in our conduct” (muß die Möglichkeit ungeschwächt als Möglichkeit verstanden, als Möglichkeit ausgebild und im Verhalten zu ihr als Möglichkeit ausgehalten werden) (§ 53, p. 306). Heidegger calls authentic understanding of death as my ownmost possibility “running on ahead toward the possibility” (Vorlaufen in die Möglichkeit).

Running ahead toward death

If we run ahead toward our own death, we are able to be ourselves as a whole, because in anticipating death we also anticipate all possibilities of existing that will precede it; “one is liberated in such a way that for the first time one can authentically understand and choose among the factical possibilities lying ahead of that possibility which is not to be outstripped” (§ 53, p. 308). Because death is essentially individual, anxiety enables me to be myself and frees me from the bonds of them, so that being-free-for-death is the same thing as being free to become myself (§ 53, p. 308). “Becoming free beforehand for one’s own death frees one from one’s lostness” (Das vorlaufende Freiwerden für den eigenen Tod befreit von der Verlorenheit) (§ 53, p. 309).

Heidegger smiles

This Vorlaufe or running ahead reveals to Dasein that it is lost in the they-self, and brings it face-to-face with the possibility of being itself in an impassioned freedom toward death — a freedom which has been released from their illusions (§ 53, p. 311). When the call of conscience is understood, Heidegger says, one realizes that one is lost in them. Resoluteness brings Dasein back to its ownmost potentiality-for-being itself. This freedom is a lonely thing to bear. “Death, understood in authentic anticipation, isolates Dasein in itself” (Die im Vorlaufen verstandene Unbezüglichkeit des Todes vereinzelt das Dasein auf es selbst) (§ 53, p. 308). But when one has an understanding of being towards death — towards death as one’s ownmost possibility — one’s potentiality for being becomes authentic and wholly transparent (§ 62, p. 354).

The problem of the Holocaust

There is much that is attractive about this analysis. In many ways it all fits neatly into our culturally received nineteenth-century ideals of death, autonomy, vision, fortitude, salvation. Heidegger hardly earns our wrath by attacking bourgeois conformity, cowardice, and bad taste. It particularly resonates, for us, with a specifically American icon — the lone outsider, dependent on no one, living by his own moral code — although it most likely derives from the martial virtues as set forth, for example, by Ernst Jünger. And there is nothing wrong with such ontological virtues as freedom, resoluteness, authenticity, self-possession.

But here we are brought up short by exactly that which Heidegger — silent and unrepentant — refused, throughout his life, to discuss. In a world of cattle cars and concentration camps, systematic exterminations, what Heidegger called der Fabrikation von Leichen, the manufacture of corpses, the sobbing of the victims, the graves in the air — in such a world, are such solipsistic virtues adequate? Or do we need, as Levinas says, “a breach made by humanness in the barbarism of being” (Levinas, 1986, p. 187)?

Graves in the air

Paul Celan

What Heidegger’s thinking about death must confront is the smoke hanging over the ovens of Auschwitz. It is striking that even Rüdiger Safranski’s emotionally detached and noncommittal biography of Heidegger (1998) — Richard Rorty calls it “evenhanded” (May 3, 1998) — was originally entitled Ein Meister auf Deutschland. As Rorty points out, the title inevitably alludes to the chilling poem Death Fugue (Todesfugue) written in 1945 by Paul Celan (collected and translated in Celan, 2001, pp. 30-33) — a concentration-camp survivor born Pesakh Antschel in Bukovina — which has the refrain, “Death is a master from Germany” (der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland), and which refers to the pall of smoke over the crematoria in the death camps as “a grave in the air” (ein Grab in der Luft).

Heidegger just twice mentions these camps, on a single day, December 1, 1949, in statements, never published, during the course of two lectures before a select audience in Bremen. In the first lecture, lamenting the mechanization of agriculture, Heidegger said:

Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry. As for its essence, it is the same thing as the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and the death camps, the same thing as the blockades and reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs (Neske & Kettering, 1990, p. xxx; Sheehan, June 16, 1988, pp. 41-42; Leaman, 1996, p. 59; Manning, 1996, p. 20; Milchman & Rosenberg, 1996a, p. 217).

There are two things immediately striking about this passage — first, the equation of mechanized agriculture and the systematic extermination of the Jews; and, second, the implication that, whatever the Germans did, the Allies and the Communists did much the same. The remark stunned Levinas into silence. “This stylistic turn of phrase,” he wrote, “this analogy, this progression, are beyond commentary” (Winter 1989, p. 487, quoted in Manning, 1996, p. 20).

The second mention of the graves in the air came later on the same day, in a second lecture, which directly implicates our concern for a philosophy of death. Heidegger said:

Hundreds of thousands die en masse. Do they die? They perish. They become items of the standing reserve for the manufacture of corpses. Do they die? Hardly noticed they are liquidated in extermination camps.… Dying, however, means bearing death in its essence. To be capable of dying means to be capable of bearing this death. But we are able to do so only when the essence of death has an affinity to our essence (Neske & Kettering, 1990, p. xxix; Leaman, 1996, p. 60; Milchman & Rosenberg, 1996a, p. 218).

There are several ways to read this passage. Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi speaks of camp inmates “too empty really to suffer. One hesitates to call them living; one hesitates to call their death death” (Levi, 1959, p. 82). Is Heidegger conceding, as Milchman & Rosenberg propose (1996a, p. 219), that the inhumanity of the extermination camps deprived their victims even of their own death? Is this an apology — or even just an acknowledgement?

Preparing a grave in the air at Auschwitz

Context and history suggest otherwise. First, the passage syntactically expresses an almost total abrogation of responsibility. The victims perish. They are liquidated. The passive voice subverts accountability. There is no agent of these deaths; these victims simply — somehow — perish, become dead, turn from inventory into corpses. This is the reading that makes the second passage consistent with the first.

There is an additional consideration in Heidegger’s own writings. The exterminated do not die their deaths, but rather they perish, succumb; even while living they are Bestandes — inventory, holdings, assets, livestock — der Fabrikation von Leichen, for the manufacture of carcasses. The victims did not really die because they could not bear death in its essence. Who are these beings who are without authenticity, without resoluteness, and thus livestock? Who are these beings who do not die but perish like animals, their graves in the air?

In § 74 of Being and Time, Heidegger asks from where authentic Dasein draws its resoluteness, its being-free for death, its ability to die rather than perish. He answers: from having been thrown into a specific inheritance (Erbe). Resoluteness, he says, accesses its own real possibilities of authentic existing from the inheritance into which it is thrown and which it accepts (Die Entshlossenheit… erschließt die jeweiligen faktischen Möglichkeiten eigenlichen Existierens aus dem Erbe, das sie als geworfene übernimmt) (§ 74, p. 435; emphasis in original).

Authentic resoluteness, freedom for death, is a possibility that Dasein has first inherited — and then has chosen. Thus, whether one is capable of bearing this death, whether the essence of death has an affinity to one’s essence, depends on one’s fate and one’s inheritance as prior conditions to one’s choice. “Destiny (Geschick) is not put together out of individual fates (Schiksal).” Where individuals have fates, a people, a community (Volksgemeinschaft) has a destiny. Only in communicating and in battle does the power of this destiny become free (§ 74, p. 436).

The smokestacks over an Auschwitz crematorium

And this has an dreadful resonance with Heidegger’s June 30, 1933, rectoral address at Freiburg University. The battle for the university, he says, will be fought out of the strengths of the new Reich that Chancellor Hitler will bring to reality. The battle must be fought by “a hard race with no thought of self, a race that lives from constant testing and that remains committed toward the goal to which it has committed itself” (Wolin, 1991, p.p. 44-45). The outsiders in the camps, who merely perished, whose graves were smoke in the air, never had this potential for authentic existence in the first place.

Yet, despite all this, current thinking about death is suffused with Heidegger’s cold and lonely and ultimately amoral solipsism. Do we have an alternative?

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