Universitätsbibliothek
Weimar Open Access

Ekkehard Coenen

• How can society be thought of as something in which the living and the dead interact throughout history? In Being with the Dead. Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness, Hans Ruin turns to the relationship between the living and the dead as well as ‘historical consciousness’. He is referring to the expression ‘being with the dead’ (Mitsein mit dem Toten). Rather enHow can society be thought of as something in which the living and the dead interact throughout history? In Being with the Dead. Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness, Hans Ruin turns to the relationship between the living and the dead as well as ‘historical consciousness’. He is referring to the expression ‘being with the dead’ (Mitsein mit dem Toten). Rather en passant, Martin Heidegger (1962: 282) shaped this existential-ontological term, which so far has hardly received any consideration. But for Ruin, it now forms the starting point for his “expanded phenomenological social ontology” (p. XI). By illuminating history and historical consciousness with the category ‘being with the dead,’ he gains remarkable insights into the meaning of ancestrality. Concerning ‘necropolitics,’ Ruin shows that the political space includes the living as well as the dead and how they constitute it. The foci of his considerations are the human sciences, above all sociology, anthropology, archaeology, philology and history. Ruin’s book aims at a “metacritical thanatology,” which he elaborates as “an exploration of the social ontology of being with the dead mediated through critical analyses of the human-historical sciences themselves” (p. XII). As a result, in a total of seven chapters, he succeeds astonishingly in emphasizing the political and ethical importance of a scientific gaze that cultivates the interaction of the living and the dead.…