MORTALS

being’s being. Death is ontologically promoted into an interest of being and nothingness alike.

a. The Shrine of the Nothing

Etymologically, the German “Schrein” is similar to the English word “shrine,” naming a box or coffer that would typically contain the relics of a saint, as with a reliquary chest.⁴² “Shrine” also names a case for a dead body, i.e., a coffin or even a tomb. The corpse within such a coffin is not available for the viewing. And the relic, too (often simply the body part of an extraordinary corpse), is likewise hidden within its case, for even when encased in glass the power of this reliquated finger or tooth is encased somewhere still further within, inaccessible to sight.

In Phillipe Ariès’s history of death in the west, The Hour of Our Death (L’Homme devant la mort), he writes of the practice of concealing the body after death, emphasizing the power of what is so concealed: “the dead body, formerly a familiar object and an image of repose, came to possess such power that the sight of it became unbearable. Now [the 13th century], and for centuries to come, it was removed from view, hidden in a box, under a monument, where it was no longer visible.”⁴³ For him this move to concealment is a “major cultural event” and a “major development in the rituals of death.”⁴⁴ By concealing the unbearable body, an attempt is made to paradoxically ward off the death that had already befallen the person. In Ariès’ words, “the refusal to see the corpse was not a denial of physical individuality but a denial of physical death.”⁴⁵ Understood in a Heideggerian manner, the “denial” of death that Ariès sees is a denial of the death that would be unqualifiedly opposed to life. Concomitant with this “denial” is a preservation as well, and thus a break with the very opposition of life and death, even of being and nothing. Sallis notes this in commenting on Heidegger’s invocation of the shrine: “A shrine is also, especially as the German Schrein, a case or casket in which, most notably, the dead one would be enclosed, sealed off, and in a sense preserved as one who would be dead, who would—if it were only possible—both be and not be, producing a coincidence of being and nothing.”⁴⁶ The point of the coffin is not to secrete away the body, or, rather, this was not the point of what the coffin arose from, not the point of the Totenbaum or “tree of death” that Heidegger envisions as part of a peasant household.

Burial in hollowed trees dates back to the Bronze Age. The use of “treetrunk coffins” or death-trees, Totenbäume, was a practice continued through the middle ages.⁴⁷ Peasant life as construed by Heidegger places the “death-tree” within the house. Far from trying to hide the body, the

⁴² See the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “shrine,” and Grimms’ Deutsches Wörterbuch, s.v. “Schrein.”

⁴³ Ariès, Hour of Our Death, 168.

⁴⁴ Ariès, Hour of Our Death, 168, 172.

⁴⁵ Ariès, Hour of Our Death, 171–72.

⁴⁶ Sallis, Echoes, 136.

⁴⁷ For a general history of tree-coffin burial see Philipp Weiß, “Eine kleine Geschichte des Sarges,” in Zentralinstitut und Museum für Sepulkrakultur, ed., Vom Totenbaum zum Designersarg, 10–22, and Karl Zimmerman, “Bemerkungen zur Geschichte der Holzsargbestattung,” in Zimmerman, Baumsarg und “Totenbaum,” 28–36. Interestingly, coffin burial was forbidden in some areas and highly taxed in others due precisely to its lengthening of the decay process; cf. Joachim Diefenbach and Reiner Sörries, “Pestsarg und Ausschüttruhe: Kurzer Abriß der Entwicklung des Holzsarges,” in Zentralinstitut und Museum für Sepulkrakultur, ed., Vom Totenbaum zum Designersarg, 37–42, 37, and Zimmerman, Baumsarg und “Totenbaum,” 28–29. Zimmerman also provides a helpful history of textual references to death-trees (including citations from J.P. Hebel), “Schriftenquellen zur Baumsargbestattung und zum Mundartbegriff ‘(Toten)Baum,’” in Zimmerman, Baumsarg und “Totenbaum,” 54–81.