Simone de Beauvoir's Body and the This is My Body

"...habit kills desire"---A Very Easy Death, Simone de Beauvoir



Simone de Beauvoir's account of the last month of her mother's life, A Very Easy Death (trans. P. O'Brian, NY: Pantheon, 1965) presents experiences of death and dying, patients, doctors, nurses, daughters and families, as vibrant today as when they were lived in 1963. It should not shock that the author of The Second Sex was a daughter whose ambivalences and trials might echo those of any daughter, or child, or family whose grief and profound loss would indelibly mark a moment in life. Putting aside what might have been dubious in her politics, a reader can open upon emotional, visceral,  even existential impulses within this famous daughter. What might remain somewhat abstract in the description of care at the end of life, for example, in Emmanuel Falque's piece, "Toward and Ethics of the Spread Body," comes to life in de Beauvoir's homage to her mother. The 'this is my body,' which clearly needs a fleshing out, finds a place from which to speak in the narrative of A Very Easy Death (VED).

Certainly the phrase 'this is my body' falls on biblically sensitive ears as inextricably linked to Jesus's words of institution as they appear in the Synoptics. I place the definite article, 'the', in front of it, to loosen it a bit from its biblical context, even though I concede that even this maneuver still points to the words of institution. I want the 'this is my body' to be jarring enough to permit the phrase to point elsewhere. I find biblical warrant for this 'elsewhere' in the biblical context itself. Sight, touch, smell, taste and hearing point, not to Jesus himself, his own body from which the words emanate, but to the species demonstrated by the 'this': this is my body...this is my blood. 'This' directs the senses to the actual bread and wine, smelled, touched, tasted,  etc., and in fact away from the performative voice and its speaker. Only after the disciples cope with the 'this' pointing to the bread and wine must they contend with 'my body'.

VED possibly assists in an unpacking of my awkward phrasal noun. "The sight of my mother's nakedness jarred me. No body existed less for me: none existed more...it seemed reasonable to me that her body should retain its dual nature,  that it should be both repugnant and holy---a taboo." (VED, 19-20). 'Repugnant and holy'---the eating of flesh and the drinking of blood, a scandal of the Church since John 6, and the crux of the body dying before me---my patient's body dying---in my care in the nursing home or the hospice. Falque has eloquently captured the repugnant and the sacred in his descriptions of experiences on the hospice unit in his essay. The oozing purulence exuding in and from his litanies of the 'spread body' calling forth an ethos, also conjures the pathos of the Last Supper and the Cross. So, too, does the 'this is my body' call from my patient's body, calls me away from the 'my body' and toward something else, from elsewhere. Not my patient's 'my body' which I share in a common humanity, but something uniquely my patient's and my patient's alone. It is a body that could not exist less for me, and one that could not exist more. A taboo we can no longer avoid, as Falque pleads, the middle term between the extended body and the lived body yearns to be heard, felt, seen.  We seek the secret, often silent, voice of the spread body whose lingua franca is the 'this is my body'. This tenuous call emanating from my patient's dying body locates the spread body, the topos which is the continuum of the res extensa and the 'lived body' between which Falque has powerfully described the spread body. Me voici, hineni, exhorts this body.

The experience of being-with the dying body opens upon a 'nearness' so close that it might even imprint itself upon those present to that body; de Beauvoir even tries on her mother's mouth for size. "I had put Maman's mouth on my own face and in spite of myself, copied its movements" (VED, 31). This experience does not reduce to mimicry or even a conversion reaction. The movements of the dying body etch their signature on the lips of a bereaved daughter. Even in the absence of Maman, Simone, at home with Sartre no less, begins to partake of her mother's spread body, whose call not only speaks, but writes. Simone's lips reverberate, in sympathetic vibration, an emblem of the suffering other in the mouthing of soft words, in the whispering of woes (Falque's maux and mots, a pun in "Toward and Ethics of the Spread Body" somewhat lost in English for those who lack an ear for alliteration).

The speech of the dying other, the words of the 'this is my body' sometimes present in hieroglyphics that command a hermeneutics of the spread body. "One had to listen very intently to catch the words she labored to breathe out; words whose mystery made them as disturbing as those of an oracle" (VED, 46). Why would such words be 'disturbing'? Is it simply because they fall on struggling ears, faintly and undecipherably? Perhaps it is less a matter of physics, than metaphysics. Perhaps the words speak all too loudly and clearly, but hidden by a veil supplied by the hearer, to blunt their devastatingly plain meaning of a suffering begging for meaning. Only the anamorphosis of the senses toward the origin of the call provides the proper orientation to unlock the moment whose hermeneutics tax the limits of experience.

If the spread body, through its voice as the this is my body, manifests its own hermeneutic of living and dying, of living until not living, participating in life until death, today is the first day of classes."What touched our hearts that day was the way she noticed the slightest agreeable sensation: it was as though, at the age of seventy-eight, she were waking afresh to the miracle of living" (VED, 50). To experience the dying patient requires a loss of the mind and a coming to the senses. Ordinary rationality can only deny the spread body  because it has yet to think the categories of knowledge that might find a portal to the call. Just as we do not know the transubstantiation of bread and wine through pure reason, we do not know the call of the spread body though objectification. What can we know of a 'waking afresh to the miracle of living' in someone dying of cancer? Only a theopoetics, a phenomenology at the border of theology, can open a 'miracle' inside a death by cancer.

A good amount of touching goes on in Maman's room: mostly clinical touching, the routine care of the human body--- cleaning, dressing wounds, positioning. With a daughter's touch, Simone touches her mother's face because her mother senses she is falling into 2 halves. Her right side feels as if in a dream, her left, 'real'. Perhaps because de Beavoir mentions Sartre a few times, or because Falque speaks of him in a discussion of the caress, I wonder about Falque's distinction between the medical touch and the caress. Falque quotes Sartre: "I incarnate myself  in order to realize the incarnation of the Other (The Wedding Feast of the Lamb, 164; n. 280). Here, Falque also permits the 'lived body' a triumph: "the erotic takes precedence over the medical, and lived bodily experience recovers its right over the extended or spread-out body" (WF, 164). Tortured by the torments wreaked upon her mother's body, Simone muses, "I was not worried about her nakedness anymore: it was no longer my mother, but a poor tormented body" (VED, 53). What has become of repugnance and the holy here? A daughter has attempted to suppress what cannot be suppressed through an evanescent rationalization. Touch, even the caress, speaks in tender tones, but in clear and undeniable tenor.

Repugnance recurs thematically at the end of life, so much so that it never really stays 'repugnance' but becomes transformed through the daily rigor of continuous revaluation."And with a frown and a look of determination on her face she said, as though she were uttering a challenge, 'The dead certainly do it in their beds.' ...And Maman felt no shame...it was a form of courage to take on our animality with so much decision" (VED, 54). What shall we say of the 'courage to take on our animality' [emphasis mine]? Certainly this text does not encourage an incarnational hermeneutic in the same vein as Falque does in those exceptional pages in WF (chapters 4 and 5, "The Animal that Therefore I Am" and "Return to the Organic"), but neither does it discourage such a reading. Many characteristics unite members of the animal kingdom, but perhaps the most compelling is the gut.  The little miracles that occur between the mouth and the anus unite man and the other beasts. My argument does not call for a medical knowledge of gastrointestinal physiology. Simply put, what goes in must come out: that fact unites all the beasts, including any and all bipeds, and for animals the inputs and the outputs are similar. The learned 'shame' in de Beauvoir's telling undergoes transformation into nothingness, except perhaps a certain kind of courage to be the animal that each human is. What fascinates here, though, goes beyond mere transformation: Maman does not just 'take on' her own animality, but ours as well. It must be a divine courage to take on animality, as that precisely is what the Incarnation takes on. Simone could never 'take on' this motif explicitly; instead she let's her mother's body speak it. Yet, we would be stingy readers indeed were we not to allow Falque's analysis and de Beavoir's narrative meet somewhere in a kind of existentialism, if not a phenomenology.

Though our experience of the dying is simply that, our experience, sometimes we catch a glimmer of how the dying experience their own experience of dying."Maman had not been in the habit of taking notice of herself. Now her body forced itself upon her attention" (VED, 59). The spread body spends its time on a continuum, somewhere between the extended body and the lived body. Where does Maman's attention direct her; does she, like either the palliativist or the surgeon, shift toward one end of the continuum? Is there a violence in this 'force', and does this force oppose in some way the life-force, the will to live, conatus, as it were? A close reading suggests that the wisdom of Maman's body enjoys a midpoint that grants a clear view to either end. Perhaps I am being a bit sentimental. Whether there is safety in the midpoint, where a middle term like the spread body can resist or postpone interpretation, or not, it remains a locus of refusal, of deferral. "The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die" (VED, 60). Maman often thought 'eternal life' very far away. Man stirbt, just not Maman, until she dies. Man stirbt. Auferstehen. Memory makes present the past."And the early tenderness that I had thought dead for ever came back to life again...in[to] simple words and actions" (VED, 76). These words are as close as Simone de Beauvoir could get to a theopoetics of resurrection. 'Words and actions' are for her the liturgies and sacraments of sacred memory. With rosaries and crucifixes safely stored in a drawer, the ritual of mother and daughter come onto the stage of death. These actants of life play on until the grim stage director puts out the lights and pulls down the curtain. Still, the actions play out the awesome changes within all the players, as the transitions at the dramatic peripety point toward an all-to-fast falling action and denouement.

The transition from bios to zoe, from a person dying to an organic body (the spread body) that lingers as bios moves into a distance---the release of the flesh, the yielding to mere organicity, while not a universal event for everyone at the end of life, manifests strikingly (if not stereotypically) when it does occur and enter the experience of those at the bedside. "Her mouth opened, her eyes stared wide, huge in that wasted, ravaged face: with a spasm she entered into coma...already she was no longer there---her heart was beating and she breathed...with glassy eyes that saw nothing" (VED, 88). This phenomenological moment draws the limits of the spread body. A person is 'no longer there' as the organic body stays awhile longer. The perception of a vacancy and also of something remaining diacritically pushes conatus before me. Something stubborn, something bodily, something cellular, and even molecular now, at this moment, can only echo the voice that directed it toward me. I am  directed still toward something, but now it is a virtual presence, already emptied of the flesh but goes on, barely, as a tenacious reserve of chemistries and mechanics. Here I find something familiar: the objective, anesthetized, animal, extended body of the gaze of a surgeon (cf. WF, 42), who cuts boldly (not necessarily bodily) into medicalized bare life (zoe); yet here, the anesthesia cannot lift---bios makes no return. It breathes and pulsates (as it did before) but in a strange automaticity: the beating of a simple animal's heart outside its body. A flesh is all around me, but its locus is elsewhere; it is loosened from the spread body tout court, hovering perhaps, about to flee. A soul? No, the echo of a voice, a voice no longer able to emerge from the throat of a body now dis-inhabited, exhibiting the unsupressible residue of embodiedness and animality (WF, 40). Repugnant? No, but ever so holy: not a separation looking forward to metempsychosis,  but the irreducible residua---my patient's own residual me when the other part of her me removes to a distance. These are both my patient's own me, which now enters my experience of her at this moment. The voice lives in my ear, but where does it come from? It still calls and directs me toward the body engulfed in the white linens under the blanket brought from home, my patient's own blanket palliating the whiteness of clinical white. She is there and elsewhere, and I am present in and to this moment, the moment of care.

Bereavement begins early for the dying and their loved ones. After the death, the living relive the past. To be a human being fully alive is to have a past. "When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets...With regard to Maman we were above all guilty, these last years, of carelessness, omission and abstention. We felt we atoned for this by the days that we gave up to her, by the peace that our being there gave her...She had a very easy death" (94-95). 'A very easy death' does not make its first appearance here; interestingly, a nurse first utters them shortly after Maman's death, the moment the automatic engine that kept her alive ceased its moribund functions (88). The memory of medicine, or the interface with the clinic, the hospice, the nursing home, leave stigmata on those who move on. Medicine must take responsibility for the nature of the marks it leaves on the living and the dead, as it must note the varied anticipations of grief and loss. Medicine must begin to think the ebb and flow, the to and fro that govern the intercourse of bed and bedside, of room and hallway, of resident and visitor, the the living and the dying, of life and death.

In her final remarks, de Beauvoir offers a departing salvo: "You do not die from being born, nor from having lived, nor from old age. You die from something" (105). There something wonderfully poetic in this assertion, something even worth savoring; but it is, by and large, untrue.  While it is certainly true that some die from disease or trauma---a direct cause of death, some others simply die by falling in their tracks or in the midst of a dream. Unless that something is finitude and facticity, some do indeed die from nothing, nothing at all, nothing---in particular--at all. When someone who dies in her sleep at 117 years of age, what shall I declare---what shall I certify---as her cause of death?

Still, I give the final word to Simone de Beauvoir, which came to her as she lived with Francoise de Beauvoir's living and dying, living until she died. A defiant word,  it is a word that challenges the goals of care and the very heart of the hospice and its practitioners:

"There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation" (106).

Death of the Flesh: The Way of All Flesh as the Calling of Religious Community

The natural disposition of the flesh rejects non-self. Auto-immune disease results from the flesh's self mistaking itself for non-self: the flesh rejects itself. Since I provisionally accept that the body can become diseased, but we always suffer in the flesh, the self never finds itself in the body. The self and the flesh form a unity. Immunology, though, occludes the possibility of any kind of dualism in this state of affairs.

When we declare the death of the body, the body, or parts of the body often remain viable; transplant medicine bases its project on this condition. Transplantation poses problems for the flesh, as it sets up a collision of two selves. The donor's self remains in the organ (the graft) that survives the death of its body, and when transplanted into the body (the host) of another imbued with flesh, self and non-self reject each other, in the clashes of host versus graft and graft versus host. The solution to this problem is to alter the host (and graft), via immune-suppression, so that it does not recognize non-self.

As we keep the matters of the self (or selves) in mind, we can return to death. That the body, or parts of the body remains viable, we continue to note that the body experiences disease and dying, but only the flesh experiences death. Dying of the body implies cessations of functions, shutting down of systems resulting from disease. But death never completely comes to the body until every process within it ends. Such is death for the body: absolute cessation of processes. I think HAL had it right as it flashed: "life functions terminated."

The flesh suffers, and it eventually suffers death. This death is the death of the self, as the flesh and self saturate each other: there is no room for another flesh or self: relationality, saturated with the flesh, in its very excess precludes another self in the same place. Self rejects non-self.

Which is the richer phenomenon, the living on of the body, with all its life-processes and genetic coding for more function and more life, albeit in the flesh of another, or the "living on" of the flesh and self, in their excess of relationality, after the suffering of death? We cannot speak here of an "afterlife," for otherwise we would not be speaking of a saturated phenomenon: we speak therefore of the life of the flesh, and the death of the flesh. The saturated phenomenon of the flesh achieves a negative certainty that the death of the flesh and death of the body are different phenomena. Better we should speak of something like an "afterdeath," or come up with a more robust understanding of death as it applies to the flesh. The reader should abandon this reflection now if she expects a discussion of 'consciousness after death' to ensue.

The event of death forecloses on disclosure. We defer any exploration of the relationship between self and consciousness. Instead we maintain the location of consciousness in the flesh and body of living creatures. So our question[s]: does the givenness of death constitute the self of the recipient in the phenomenological moment? Is that constitution fatal, or does it itself impart 'mortality?' Because we do not experience death as the death of our own flesh as a counter-experience, we are open only to the experience of the death of the other as death of the flesh. This is not to say that we do not have some experience of some aspect of death as our own, and in this regard, imaginative variations of the reduction can be in play; but because of the foreclosure of the event to us, that is, the necessarily incomplete 'reportage' of this event, the reception of death has no place to project itself.

If the flesh grounds Dasein's being in the world and its authentication through its being toward death, then at least one response of the self to the givenness of death is expectation. This is the way of all flesh: to receive formation of the self from the givenness of death, not in its lethality but in its invitation to authenticity, albeit in the manner of a special case of expectation: of advent and a messianism. The givenness of death calls the self into being, the self into a formation. The community, grounded in the experience of the self as the witness of phenomenality of the death of the other, arises in response to the same call.

The death of the other discloses terror or hope; if terror then a community of magic and superstition arises. If hope, a community of advent, of a messianism of an anonymous religion, an unthematic religion, arises. The former community is poised for a pantheon, the latter for Mashiach. The former is poised for rejection of non-self; the latter is poised for the self of the other as another in the flesh that is the image and likeness of my flesh. In this manner the phenomenality of death, the event of death, recapitulates the call of a community into the event of religion in each and every death; as the 'called' community recapitulates the givenness of death in the phenomenological moment. It is through religion that expectation, the response to the givenness of death, opens upon the possibility of revelation.

The Givenness of Death

Death comes.


Hospices across the universe manage death and dying, often without the slightest idea of death as it is in itself. As a specialist in hospice and palliative medicine, I am often part of a team dedicated to death, or more accurately, to the looks of death when it is happening. When death is happening, a human being is dying, which is the process through which a living being exits life,  a life lived in a world of living and non-living things. The living and the dead. The dead are things formerly living, having gone through the process of an exit from life. The hospice team specializes in the death of a human subject; there is no palliation for fishes and trees. Every living thing dies (despite the odd and remarkable life cycle of turritopsis dohrnii); but we only manage the death of humans---it is the human thing to do.


We pronounce death. We declare that a human has died and has exited life. We even speak of the 'remains,' a thing left behind,  such as after a departure. A presence is exchanged for an absence. The official declaration is a matter of ownership and the public health. We protect the living from the dead. We protect the dead from accidental life by embalming or cremation, lest life creep back in, a very rare occurrence. Such is the final act in the management of the dead. The dead really must stay dead. It is the human thing to do.


Dying is the human thing to do. We all do it. Death is manner of the human condition. It is also the least examined thing we do. Thanatology does not begin to touch death; not even in its most morbid observations (turritopsis, not thanatopsis). When does death make an appearance: how does the phenomenality of death enter experience as it is in itself? Neither Addie Bundren nor Agamemnon get to report back to base camp, and the tales they do tell are for the lips of the living, the logoi of the dead; which is not to say they do not speak---they are given their lines.


As our patients lay dying, we minister to lives woven into the death-in-coming. Death presents itself to the life it entangles, and to those eyes that dare to manage it. Just what or who is managing what or whom? This death at a distance is the very hermeneutics of death, if we dare to experience its givenness. This hermeneutics of death is the space between the living and the dead, the call of death in its givenness to the one who would read its hieroglyphics. Even when we paint over dying with morphine and other opacities, death shines through in its phenomenality and givenness. We can know of the givenness of death by the response to its call. As the ones who want to know, we know death in its insistence to be heard, its command to interrogate it, through the hermeneutic that cuts a gap between we who would know and a death who would speak.


The symptom is death in its lowest degree of givenness. To understand it as a metaphor is to already read it, and misread it at that. The symptom is not a mode of similarity. Death's symptoms are extensions of itself; their reach is metonymy, and they foreclose on death's wholeness. We tend to know death by its parts. The 'death rattle,' the coalescence of secretions in a throat betraying the personhood of the dying, chills its hearer. For some, the sound is the very voice of death, gripping a loved one by the throat. By the time this symptom makes its appearance, the dying are oblivious, so it is a gift only for the hearer. It is a symptom more often treated to 'treat' a family member, than to alleviate suffering in the dying. The secret is to dry the secretions and quiet the sound of death, denying it embodiment. Another symptom, 'air hunger' or dyspnea, is horrific for the dying and their witnesses. Morphine blankets air hunger, subdues it, gives it rest; the body relaxes as this finger of death loosens it grip on everyone in the room.  We add to the massive presence of death in every intervention; we give death a shape and a rhythm, and make its invisibility visible, if only in outline.


Our own presence to death invests it with meaning, the meaning it calls to us as it beckons us to display its self. This the moment of two selves: reading and being read, interpreting and being interpreted. We so want to abbreviate death, we would close it off with a signature on a death certificate. But if we want to know death, we must allow it to appear, to makes its presence known to our own presence. What is in the room when the last breath, the last beat of a broken heart, has had its say? I am in the presence of death, now without a symptom, without a metonym to make it all a bit more palatable. I am present to death as death. What is becoming visible? Death is an idol created by my gaze upon the invisible. Death is in life's place, a complete transubstantiation symbolized in the lifeless body before me: the accidents of the flesh, which give death its metaphor.


Death does not mean the absence of life. Death, in its pure givenness, means the change in substance. That is the difference to which I bring my own presence. Death wants to present itself in its whole givenness, which we are wont to foreshorten through its metonymy, our very desire to keep it at arms length. But we do not let death appear through the perspective of foreshortening, which distorts it to fit it into a frame, our picture of death. To be with death is to stand in death, the space in the room that wants to mean as it wraps its cellophane self around my presence and the lifelessness before me. Death embraces the living and the dead with its difference that builds its cathedral to house a sacred space.




Death sacralizes all things and erases every profanation in the event that is death. Death is the difference that cuts a gap in the space of my hermeneutic attitude  that give it a voice in which to whisper its call. This eventive gap cuts into the lack that reshapes my reader's self, now something also different, and new.  This death is the event of my own death as a movement from the profane to the sacred. It is the same death that I will die. The wholeness of death is in the difference it makes for everyone. It is the same difference. I know death because I am as human as the dying and dead before me. Death appears before me as I appear before death. I do not sign so fast: I sign for myself when I sign for the dead. I tarry, for I do not certify death; I ratify it with the signature that I use to sign off on what we all do.

Liturgies in the Corners of the Day

Common parlance locates 'liturgy' within the practices of religion, and further locates those within the public practices of faith communities. In Catholicism, for instance, one finds the Liturgies of the the Word, of the Eucharist, the Hours, Matrimony and of other sacraments. In this post, I would like to talk about liturgies with a lower case 'l', a small "L". I will retain the public nature of these small liturgies, but not so public as to include great crowds, but perhaps with a smaller group. I retain the public nature of these little liturgies lest I miss the mark and fall into the abyss of private rituals, wholesome or less so, accidentally witnessed. But the ritualistic component of liturgy should not be missed either. But, here, too, I speak of a lower case 'r', a small "R".


I am also speaking of the sacred, of sacred space and sacred spaces, which provide the stage on which little liturgies sanctify the corners of daily life. As a specialist in hospice and palliative medicine I have come to understand that for many patients a sense of sacrality and ritual is a source of comfort and peace. The hospice wing itself is the sacred space sanctified by the humanity of patients and families, and by their suffering. Loss is the grammar of days on a hospice unit; but no less so are re-humanization, joy, narratives of living and dying, human touch and a respectful and reverent human voice. The solemnity of human death and dying pulsates in the corners of the hospice wing, in each patient's room, and in the hearts of all. The liturgy of the nursing assistant working with the patient to achieve personal care needs censes both space and time, like music filling a room. The whole team rounding on each patient to listen, to be present to this distinctively human moment, has a rhythm and time signature. There is a joyful wisdom in such work.


Joy is a bridge from the kind of solemnity one lives on the hospice unit, to the kind of solemnity one experiences in one's own living room. Friends, family and other visitors sacralize our homes. Good cheer even after a bad day or a bad week is a liturgical gesture of welcome and hospitality. A smile, an attentive ear, a laugh provide bridges of trust and foundations of relationships. Let the day's troubles be sufficient for the day, and the time of friends, family and others becomes a celebration of humanity right in our own backyards. Let the music out from wherever music comes from, and it will sanctify every corner and moment of these days. 


How could we begin to understand the liturgies of the capital "L" if the liturgies of the small 'l' go unnoticed or undone?