Death and Mourning is the Origin of Human Culture
A short reflection on a particular passage in Françoise Dastur's Mourning as the Origin of Humanity. Dastur draws on the likes of Heidegger, Husserl, and Aristotle to delineate human mortality as a foundation of all human culture.
"This virtual community of life with the spirit of the dead and the not yet born is in fact the basis of all cultures, for there is no culture except where a certain mastery over the irreversible flow of time has become possible, and this implies the use of various kinds of techniques in order to overcome absence [...] This is why it is not illegitimate to see in mourning the origin of culture itself." (Dastur, 8)
Dastur portrays culture as a virtual community in which the living are always accompanied by the irretrievably absent dead and the not-yet-born, contending that our earliest cultural acts arise from the need to master this flow of time through mourning.
From this perspective, every human technique, whether carving gravestones or writing epics, serves as a bridge that makes absence inhabitable. Thus, converting loss into shared meaning.
The dead lend gravity to the present while the unborn beckon one towards unfinished possibilities. So, each ritual or artifact becomes a hinge connecting remembrance with anticipation. Mourning thus emerges as a creative labor that fashions time into palpable form, turning human mortality and weakness into the engine of symbolic life.
Culture, in this light, is an unceasing craft of re-presence, a collective resolve to hold open the conversation that mortality would close.