What do you think?
Rate this book
The Dominion of the Dead
How do the living maintain relations to the dead? Why do we bury people when they die? And what is at stake when we do? In The Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison considers the supreme importance of these questions to Western civilization, exploring the many places where the dead cohabit the world of the living—the graves, images, literature, architecture, and monuments that house the dead in their afterlife among us.This elegantly conceived work devotes particular attention to the practice of burial. Harrison contends that we bury our dead to humanize the lands where we build our present and imagine our future. As long as the dead are interred in graves and tombs, they never truly depart from this world, but remain, if only symbolically, among the living. Spanning a broad range of examples, from the graves of our first human ancestors to the empty tomb of the Gospels to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Harrison also considers the authority of predecessors in both modern and premodern societies. Through inspired readings of major writers and thinkers such as Vico, Virgil, Dante, Pater, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Rilke, he argues that the buried dead form an essential foundation where future generations can retrieve their past, while burial grounds provide an important bedrock where past generations can preserve their legacy for the unborn.The Dominion of the Dead is a profound meditation on how the thought of death shapes the communion of the living. A work of enormous scope, intellect, and imagination, this book will speak to all who have suffered grief and loss.
224 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2003
32 people are currently reading
683 people want to read
About the author
Robert Pogue Harrison
15 books41 followersRobert Pogue Harrison is a critic, radio host, and the Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature at Stanford University. His most recent book is Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
May 25, 2018
Between his many wonderful books and articles, as well as his Stanford University podcast Entitled Opinions, I have learned quite a great deal with Robert Harrison! In fact, I would count him as one of my life's great teachers. Dominion of the Dead is about the cultural history of how Europeans have approached death rituals and the dead. I cannot think of any culture that does not have rituals surrounding death and you might even be able to say that this has been a universal human trait --this care human beings show to the dead.
The main approach to the subject is not anthropology but philosophy with an intense reading if Giambattista Vico and Heidegger. This is extremely interesting and his reading of Heidegger's Being and Time alone makes this a 5 star book! But I was also really intrigued by this idea that our treatment of the dead could be tied to our care to the earth and toward animals. Harrison doesn't create a causal argument but eludes to concepts of care suggesting how care for one translates to care for the other. This is a subject near to my own heart. Having spent two decades in Japan, I was very moved by the Japanese care shown toward the dead. Like seasonal events, anniversaries of loved one's death and grave sweeping days are built-in to shared calendars. Coming back to the US, I have felt the days to be flat (Charles Taylor addresses issues with secular time in his book, A Secular Age). All this said, I guess I agree with Harrison that, if we treat the dead as dead, then we are somehow dead ourselves. Harrison suggests that in the final days of the Roman empire, when people became more and more casual regarding death rites, you saw an increased death drive in the form of organized violence in Games. One could maybe say something similar about current American society with its extremely high tolerance (love?) of violence.
"Dasein does not die until its remains are disposed of."
In some sense human culture itself is the domain of the dead since we are perpetuating the deeds and traditions of those who came before us. The dead are not dead anymore than the land or other animals are tools ready at hand. In this book--filled with poems and great works of philosophy and literature, Harrison proceeds in a very subtle and indirect manner to question in what way the dead are still with us; what obligations we have to them and they to us and what it means when this "care" breaks down. This is a great book for those who appreciate Heidegger--especially Being and Time. It's also interesting to read along with Charles Taylor. Loved learning about Vico's The New Science too.
The main approach to the subject is not anthropology but philosophy with an intense reading if Giambattista Vico and Heidegger. This is extremely interesting and his reading of Heidegger's Being and Time alone makes this a 5 star book! But I was also really intrigued by this idea that our treatment of the dead could be tied to our care to the earth and toward animals. Harrison doesn't create a causal argument but eludes to concepts of care suggesting how care for one translates to care for the other. This is a subject near to my own heart. Having spent two decades in Japan, I was very moved by the Japanese care shown toward the dead. Like seasonal events, anniversaries of loved one's death and grave sweeping days are built-in to shared calendars. Coming back to the US, I have felt the days to be flat (Charles Taylor addresses issues with secular time in his book, A Secular Age). All this said, I guess I agree with Harrison that, if we treat the dead as dead, then we are somehow dead ourselves. Harrison suggests that in the final days of the Roman empire, when people became more and more casual regarding death rites, you saw an increased death drive in the form of organized violence in Games. One could maybe say something similar about current American society with its extremely high tolerance (love?) of violence.
"Dasein does not die until its remains are disposed of."
In some sense human culture itself is the domain of the dead since we are perpetuating the deeds and traditions of those who came before us. The dead are not dead anymore than the land or other animals are tools ready at hand. In this book--filled with poems and great works of philosophy and literature, Harrison proceeds in a very subtle and indirect manner to question in what way the dead are still with us; what obligations we have to them and they to us and what it means when this "care" breaks down. This is a great book for those who appreciate Heidegger--especially Being and Time. It's also interesting to read along with Charles Taylor. Loved learning about Vico's The New Science too.
August 10, 2016
At the end of this remarkable study Harrison writes:
'The contract between the living and the dead has traditionally been one of mutual indebtedness, for reasons that Vico [New Science] probes and that I, in his wake, have sought to clarify. The dead depend on the living to preserve their authority, heed their concerns, and keep them going in their afterlives. In return, they help us to know ourselves, give form to our lives, organize our social relations, and restrain our destructive impulses. They provide us with the counsel needed to maintain the institutional order, of which they remain the authors, and prevent it from degenerating into a bestial barbarism. The dead are our guardians. We give them a future so that they may give us a past. We help them live on so that they may help us go forward.’
This seemingly simple sounding relationship, though, has become, for the reader a profoundly complex history of place, linguistics, and culture in all senses of the word. Harrison gradually adds layer after layer to our understanding of what death and the dead mean to the living as we move through space and language. It seems to me that the crux of the book is the extent to which the dead (or rather how we relate to the dead) determine or enable our future actions, in particular the concept of Heidigger’s ‘repetition’ or retrieval being either an empty attempt to precisely recreate the past or else to improve upon it in the more contemporary environment we actually live in, depending on how a person employs it.
But there are twenty other aspects of the book that could be crucial as well. The chapters treat:
1) the physical earth and its physical dead
2) architecture and the dead
3) the house centered around burial places and shrines to the dead, enabling us to look outward and contemplate, and homelessness
4) language and grief
5) the origin of our basic words; lex and logos
6) 'choosing your ancestor’; Vico, Heidigger and others on the realm of the dead and authenticity
7) Chrisianity and the empty tomb; Chrisian rituals continuing traditional Roman veneration of ancestors
8) Names of the dead, Homer, Virgil and Dante on death and the underworld; war memorials
9) The corpse--presence and absence, the ‘disappeared'
It would be helpful to start with a good understanding of Heidigger; I didn’t and it nearly did me in, but Harrison provides help. You would be aided also by a prior reading of Vico’s New Science, which Harrison relies on heavily, but quotes are included.
For example:
‘Vico’s quest for the principles of civil society led him, he says, into “the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity” (New Science, sect 331). He was obliged “to descend from these human and refined natures of ours to those quite wild and savage natures [of the first men], which we cannot at all imagine and comprehend only with great effort” (sec 338)…Yet for all the darkness of that night enveloping the earliest antiquity, “there shines [in this night] the never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind” (sec 331). I take this axiom to be crucial, not so much for the reason Vico scholars frequently draw attention to it--namely as evidence that the verum factum principle (we can know only what we make) remains the epistemological foundation of the New Science--but because it postulates that the human mind retains its prior modes of synthesis and carries them over into its subsequent modifications. Were the mind not retentive in this metasynthetic way we could neither share the words of the dead, nor understand the worlds from which those words come down to us, nor decipher the heiroglyphs in the early fossil record of poetic wisdom. Indeed, there would be no such thing as civil society at all, since it is precisely in the human mind’s vast reservoirs of retention that we find its principles, or enduring beginnings.'
Heidigger and Vico are constants throughout, but who else hasn’t Harrison read? You will discover new dimensions to almost every book you’ve read (or mean to read) as he develops insights about Shakespeare, Goethe, Baudelaire and his devotion to Poe, Leopardi, Ungaretti, Marianne Moore, Freud, Conrad, the Greek dramatists, Foscolo, Thoreau, Descartes, Rilke, Rimbaud and of course Homer, Virgil and Dante. His extensive bibliographic commentary at the end of the book could supply several years worth of critical theory/anthropology/art history/etc. reading.
Looking over the bibliography prompts the reader to realize just how much analysis is packed into this book, and what a journey Harrison has conducted his reader on. In fact he has been his own Virgil, leading the reader through aspects of the underworld as the living perceive it--through intense tutorials in which one has to wrestle with how the dead still inhabit our world, through language, structure, and literature. Some tutorials are absolutely abstract--Dasein and authenticity--others are as concrete as the Vietnam war memorial. He also challenges one on to deeper reading and memory, as in his example of how Homer, Virgil and Dante use the metaphor of falling leaves and death.
This is the kind of book one could dip back into profitably many times. I know I will reflect back on it many times as I read in the future and think about how a new (to me) book could be woven into this discussion.
To close: Harrison on Lincoln’s Gettysburg address as a sema, or grave marker, starting from Whitman’s ‘When Lilacs...':
‘Whitman addresses the dead Lincoln as a living “you,” for the corpse is still very much alive. Not only is it making an actual journey, it is also an animate force acting upon and drawing together the new nation, reborn now of the tolling bells an shadowy light. One could say that the temporal passage of Lincoln’s body across the spatial expanse of the nation effectively brings an end to, or better, “buries,” the Civil War--“buries” in the sense of becoming the enduring foundation of a nation ‘So conceived and so dedicated.” In the magnitude of its tragedy, his death became, and to this day remains, a source of unity in the Union, a unity that the Constitution, for all its elightened provisions, could not provide.'
'The contract between the living and the dead has traditionally been one of mutual indebtedness, for reasons that Vico [New Science] probes and that I, in his wake, have sought to clarify. The dead depend on the living to preserve their authority, heed their concerns, and keep them going in their afterlives. In return, they help us to know ourselves, give form to our lives, organize our social relations, and restrain our destructive impulses. They provide us with the counsel needed to maintain the institutional order, of which they remain the authors, and prevent it from degenerating into a bestial barbarism. The dead are our guardians. We give them a future so that they may give us a past. We help them live on so that they may help us go forward.’
This seemingly simple sounding relationship, though, has become, for the reader a profoundly complex history of place, linguistics, and culture in all senses of the word. Harrison gradually adds layer after layer to our understanding of what death and the dead mean to the living as we move through space and language. It seems to me that the crux of the book is the extent to which the dead (or rather how we relate to the dead) determine or enable our future actions, in particular the concept of Heidigger’s ‘repetition’ or retrieval being either an empty attempt to precisely recreate the past or else to improve upon it in the more contemporary environment we actually live in, depending on how a person employs it.
But there are twenty other aspects of the book that could be crucial as well. The chapters treat:
1) the physical earth and its physical dead
2) architecture and the dead
3) the house centered around burial places and shrines to the dead, enabling us to look outward and contemplate, and homelessness
4) language and grief
5) the origin of our basic words; lex and logos
6) 'choosing your ancestor’; Vico, Heidigger and others on the realm of the dead and authenticity
7) Chrisianity and the empty tomb; Chrisian rituals continuing traditional Roman veneration of ancestors
8) Names of the dead, Homer, Virgil and Dante on death and the underworld; war memorials
9) The corpse--presence and absence, the ‘disappeared'
It would be helpful to start with a good understanding of Heidigger; I didn’t and it nearly did me in, but Harrison provides help. You would be aided also by a prior reading of Vico’s New Science, which Harrison relies on heavily, but quotes are included.
For example:
‘Vico’s quest for the principles of civil society led him, he says, into “the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity” (New Science, sect 331). He was obliged “to descend from these human and refined natures of ours to those quite wild and savage natures [of the first men], which we cannot at all imagine and comprehend only with great effort” (sec 338)…Yet for all the darkness of that night enveloping the earliest antiquity, “there shines [in this night] the never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind” (sec 331). I take this axiom to be crucial, not so much for the reason Vico scholars frequently draw attention to it--namely as evidence that the verum factum principle (we can know only what we make) remains the epistemological foundation of the New Science--but because it postulates that the human mind retains its prior modes of synthesis and carries them over into its subsequent modifications. Were the mind not retentive in this metasynthetic way we could neither share the words of the dead, nor understand the worlds from which those words come down to us, nor decipher the heiroglyphs in the early fossil record of poetic wisdom. Indeed, there would be no such thing as civil society at all, since it is precisely in the human mind’s vast reservoirs of retention that we find its principles, or enduring beginnings.'
Heidigger and Vico are constants throughout, but who else hasn’t Harrison read? You will discover new dimensions to almost every book you’ve read (or mean to read) as he develops insights about Shakespeare, Goethe, Baudelaire and his devotion to Poe, Leopardi, Ungaretti, Marianne Moore, Freud, Conrad, the Greek dramatists, Foscolo, Thoreau, Descartes, Rilke, Rimbaud and of course Homer, Virgil and Dante. His extensive bibliographic commentary at the end of the book could supply several years worth of critical theory/anthropology/art history/etc. reading.
Looking over the bibliography prompts the reader to realize just how much analysis is packed into this book, and what a journey Harrison has conducted his reader on. In fact he has been his own Virgil, leading the reader through aspects of the underworld as the living perceive it--through intense tutorials in which one has to wrestle with how the dead still inhabit our world, through language, structure, and literature. Some tutorials are absolutely abstract--Dasein and authenticity--others are as concrete as the Vietnam war memorial. He also challenges one on to deeper reading and memory, as in his example of how Homer, Virgil and Dante use the metaphor of falling leaves and death.
This is the kind of book one could dip back into profitably many times. I know I will reflect back on it many times as I read in the future and think about how a new (to me) book could be woven into this discussion.
To close: Harrison on Lincoln’s Gettysburg address as a sema, or grave marker, starting from Whitman’s ‘When Lilacs...':
‘Whitman addresses the dead Lincoln as a living “you,” for the corpse is still very much alive. Not only is it making an actual journey, it is also an animate force acting upon and drawing together the new nation, reborn now of the tolling bells an shadowy light. One could say that the temporal passage of Lincoln’s body across the spatial expanse of the nation effectively brings an end to, or better, “buries,” the Civil War--“buries” in the sense of becoming the enduring foundation of a nation ‘So conceived and so dedicated.” In the magnitude of its tragedy, his death became, and to this day remains, a source of unity in the Union, a unity that the Constitution, for all its elightened provisions, could not provide.'
December 29, 2019
As far as I'm concerned this book was completely mismarketed and its advertising was misleading.
The book is supposedly "devoting particular attention to the practice of burial", and looks at the funeral rites of humans, and the relationship between the living and their dead throughout the world.
No!
This was a mainly theological and heavily Christian based review of the meaning of death, predominantly using Heidegger and Vico as the "go to philosophers" to structure debate and argument.
Most of the book concentrates on classical Greek and Roman history, so much so I felt I'd returned to the classrooms of my youth in Latin/Classical studies. Homeric tales were rehashed and presented in overly trite detail to support a non-existent point!
I completely bypassed Chapter 7 after realising it was essentially a Bible studies essay with a hint of philosophical overtone!
The book says very little about the actual practice of burial, and there is scant discussion of funeral rites or housing the dead.
There is nothing unique or fresh about this book. I found it to be an absolute disappointment.
I agree with reviewer Massimo Redaelli in that it wasn't what we were told it was.
The book is supposedly "devoting particular attention to the practice of burial", and looks at the funeral rites of humans, and the relationship between the living and their dead throughout the world.
No!
This was a mainly theological and heavily Christian based review of the meaning of death, predominantly using Heidegger and Vico as the "go to philosophers" to structure debate and argument.
Most of the book concentrates on classical Greek and Roman history, so much so I felt I'd returned to the classrooms of my youth in Latin/Classical studies. Homeric tales were rehashed and presented in overly trite detail to support a non-existent point!
I completely bypassed Chapter 7 after realising it was essentially a Bible studies essay with a hint of philosophical overtone!
The book says very little about the actual practice of burial, and there is scant discussion of funeral rites or housing the dead.
There is nothing unique or fresh about this book. I found it to be an absolute disappointment.
I agree with reviewer Massimo Redaelli in that it wasn't what we were told it was.
April 20, 2009
Harrison's erudite essays blend literary criticism, psychology, anthropology, theology, and philosophy to create a thought-provoking book on a subject that concerns us all. His scholarship is impressive, and his delivery is reminiscent of Gaston Bachelard. It is a book that requires time to digest each essay, for his writing calls upon the reader to think reflectively and creatively about that which has been read. Harrison's work is as important to me as a stimulus and point of departure for my own thoughts as it is for the author's opinions. A book that makes one think deep thoughts is always a book worth reading. I appreciated his insights on all of the ways in which the dead interact with the living and on the tension between the dead and the unborn which informs our existence. I am improved for having read it.
March 30, 2021
the dead are our guardians. we give them a future so that they may give us a past. we help them live on so that they may help us go forward.
it is going to take me years to wrap my head around this book. robert pogue harrison is undoubtedly a writer, scholar, and thinker par excellence.... i can't even imagine the volumes of thought and research that went into this project. the number of times i whispered oh my goodness and then had to stare into space for five minutes whilst reading it.... absolute madness luv x
it is going to take me years to wrap my head around this book. robert pogue harrison is undoubtedly a writer, scholar, and thinker par excellence.... i can't even imagine the volumes of thought and research that went into this project. the number of times i whispered oh my goodness and then had to stare into space for five minutes whilst reading it.... absolute madness luv x
November 28, 2024
I think harrison is at his best when close reading poetry - his analyses are fascinating, usually beautiful, and often quite shocking. unfortunately for this book he chooses to instead spend more than one chapter mostly trying to explain heidegger to someone who probably hasn't read heidegger before. as someone who hasn't read heidegger and feels fine about that, these sections were in fact not it.
I loved harrison's first book forests: the shadow of civilization. my only real qualm with it was that he managed to discuss the entire scope of "western" literature without mentioning a single woman, so I was pleasantly surprised when the first chapter of this book looked at two different poems written by women. sadly, in chapter 8 he fumbles violently by writing a full chapter on the vietnam veterans memorial that doesn't name maya lin. in a book otherwise scrupulous about locating authors and their writings in historical contexts (and that explicitly compares architecture to text and language) it's a glaring omission. my real guess as to why he did this is that I think if he had talked about her he would have been forced to reckon with the fact that a memorial designed by a chinese american woman is not exclusively a product of "The West" and therefore may not fit so neatly into the canonical lineage of homer and virgil and joyce that he's constructed for it. oops!
the book's not a total wash though - some excellent readings of rilke, interesting thoughts on houses and burial, and one of the more sympathetic explanaions for the christian obsession with death and salvation that I've seen. and that first chapter on the ocean goes crazy.
I loved harrison's first book forests: the shadow of civilization. my only real qualm with it was that he managed to discuss the entire scope of "western" literature without mentioning a single woman, so I was pleasantly surprised when the first chapter of this book looked at two different poems written by women. sadly, in chapter 8 he fumbles violently by writing a full chapter on the vietnam veterans memorial that doesn't name maya lin. in a book otherwise scrupulous about locating authors and their writings in historical contexts (and that explicitly compares architecture to text and language) it's a glaring omission. my real guess as to why he did this is that I think if he had talked about her he would have been forced to reckon with the fact that a memorial designed by a chinese american woman is not exclusively a product of "The West" and therefore may not fit so neatly into the canonical lineage of homer and virgil and joyce that he's constructed for it. oops!
the book's not a total wash though - some excellent readings of rilke, interesting thoughts on houses and burial, and one of the more sympathetic explanaions for the christian obsession with death and salvation that I've seen. and that first chapter on the ocean goes crazy.
March 4, 2013
"The dead are our guardians. We give them a future so that they may give us a past."
How intertwined our lives are with the dead! They built our cities; they invented and designed so many of the objects and technologies we use every day; they developed our languages and cultures; they created books, poems, music, art that are the basis of our culture; they made political decisions that shaped our countries; the list is endless.
But Harrison goes deeper than the obvious, referring to works of literature (contemporary as well as ancient: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Rilke, Joyce, Giorgio Caproni, Eleanor Wilner, etc.), philosophy, anthropology and linguistics to explore the subtle and fascinating aspects of our give-and-take relationship with the dead.
Brilliant, thought-provoking and beautiful.
How intertwined our lives are with the dead! They built our cities; they invented and designed so many of the objects and technologies we use every day; they developed our languages and cultures; they created books, poems, music, art that are the basis of our culture; they made political decisions that shaped our countries; the list is endless.
But Harrison goes deeper than the obvious, referring to works of literature (contemporary as well as ancient: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Rilke, Joyce, Giorgio Caproni, Eleanor Wilner, etc.), philosophy, anthropology and linguistics to explore the subtle and fascinating aspects of our give-and-take relationship with the dead.
Brilliant, thought-provoking and beautiful.
November 20, 2021
A fascinating philosophical inquiry into death and all the cultural baggage that accompanies it. Harrison really breaks apart and thinks about what it means to bury (“human” is related to “humus”), to commemorate ancestors, to lament/mourn, to regard our own impending deaths (is it even possible to conceive of our own “not-being”?)….all within an immense time-scale of historical, geological, and even cosmic proportions.
December 9, 2022
I probably only understood about 60% of this book, which relies heavily on Heidegger's 'Dasein' to make its arguments about how the living relate to the dead and how both cohabit the world. But there were fascinating and moving arguments for why we humans have always found place for burial of our dead, and for how it is only possible to imagine our present and future if we acknowledge the place of the dead in our earth.
December 1, 2022
A very thought-provoking exploration and reflection of the dead and their influence on the living. While it dances on the edge of romanticizing death and the deceased themselves at times, this work still provides a far wider perspective of both the nature and effect of death and the dead than I have ever come across before.
July 8, 2021
I found this a difficult book. I’m away that this may say more about me than it. I’ve not got a background in philosophy, classics or literature, and it relies a lot on what has been written, rather than that has been done.
Read
January 21, 2022Mr. Harrison was writing for his peers, not someone like me who is interested but doesn't have a background in philosophy or philology. Or all the associated terminology. It was quite the slog although there were some interesting parts. I don't feel I can rate it, I didn't get enough out of it.
June 10, 2022
A bit heavy on the unnecessary vocabulary (that is, another, more efficient and accessible word could be used at times for the esoteric terminology), yet a thought-provoking survey of the dead in culture, literature, tradition, philosophy, etc.
November 30, 2017
I did not actually finish this book. I made it about halfway through and then skimmed the rest. I thoroughly enjoyed what I did read...his writing is challenging and rewarding.
May 21, 2019
Immensely suggestive -- but a v. reductive understanding of grief in the Christian tradition, reading the new testament very selectively
April 6, 2022
Don’t read all in one sitting
It’s profound…but needs time to grow and take shape in your mind…sometimes I would only read 10 pages at a time and think…but trust me it’s worth it
It’s profound…but needs time to grow and take shape in your mind…sometimes I would only read 10 pages at a time and think…but trust me it’s worth it
August 11, 2024
This book was lovely in both concept and execution. The author makes you feel like you are discovering along side him which was an added experience I very much enjoyed
May 22, 2016
Harrison, a professor of Italian literature, takes us on a wandering, meditative journey through an idiosyncratic selection of his preferred cultural habitats – Thoreau’s cabin at Walden, Vico’s philology, Aeschylus’ Xerxes in The Persians, the Italian poets Leopardi and Magrelli, the Vietnam memorial in Washington, lesser known works by Rilke and Conrad – along with some of the usual suspects: Homer, Joyce, Dante, Virgil and Shakespeare. Included too is Heidegger, whom he clearly admires, but with whom he picks a few small bones.
Harrison’s scope encompasses the nature of place, earth, home and grave, and their relation to burial; mourning and grieving and how these are vocalized; philology as an excavation of the authority of the dead; Heideggerrean existential guilt as a form of debt to the dead; Christian theology and attitudes toward grief; the way in which our species is an object of thought and how cultural representations of this incorporate or express our mortality; and the role of the corpse and its relation to the afterlife. The aim of all this wandering – if there is one – appears to be to trace all the ways in which the living and dead depend upon one another.
Harrison is extremely well read, and he drops in for brief visits with a very wide range of literary, historic, anthropological and philosophical sources and ideas. This scholarship is impressive. His writing tends to the ‘poetic’ and aphoristic – which seems equally impressive to start with, but gradually loses its impact, despite the flair for the elegant well-turned phrase.
Some of my discomfort with this ruminative rhetoric may not be simply the relentlessly clever and elegant language, but the assertiveness or conclusiveness of his statements. I suppose we can read these as provocation for our own thought, and helpfully so at times. Harrison says of his book that it is a net with ‘empty spaces for the reader to enter and wander about in.’
Overall this is an impressively scholarly book, but in its wandering and aimless quality, and the seductive beauty of its language at times, requires real effort to stick with, think carefully about, and to avoid falling through his net into emptiness.
Harrison’s scope encompasses the nature of place, earth, home and grave, and their relation to burial; mourning and grieving and how these are vocalized; philology as an excavation of the authority of the dead; Heideggerrean existential guilt as a form of debt to the dead; Christian theology and attitudes toward grief; the way in which our species is an object of thought and how cultural representations of this incorporate or express our mortality; and the role of the corpse and its relation to the afterlife. The aim of all this wandering – if there is one – appears to be to trace all the ways in which the living and dead depend upon one another.
Harrison is extremely well read, and he drops in for brief visits with a very wide range of literary, historic, anthropological and philosophical sources and ideas. This scholarship is impressive. His writing tends to the ‘poetic’ and aphoristic – which seems equally impressive to start with, but gradually loses its impact, despite the flair for the elegant well-turned phrase.
Some of my discomfort with this ruminative rhetoric may not be simply the relentlessly clever and elegant language, but the assertiveness or conclusiveness of his statements. I suppose we can read these as provocation for our own thought, and helpfully so at times. Harrison says of his book that it is a net with ‘empty spaces for the reader to enter and wander about in.’
Overall this is an impressively scholarly book, but in its wandering and aimless quality, and the seductive beauty of its language at times, requires real effort to stick with, think carefully about, and to avoid falling through his net into emptiness.
April 24, 2016
This is a profound work of scholarly philosophy adding a lush layer to the growing discussion about Death in the contemporary Western mindset with Right To Die laws blossoming blissfully here and there, allowing some people a way out of pain, torment, and the abject misery of life. This is an earthbound perspective rooted in prehistoric spirituality and reverence for the planet that made all life possible on such a tiny, spinning marble. "To be human means to come after those who came before. Just as we are always preceded by our forebears, so too the ground in which we lay them to rest has always already received the bones of others--'others' in the most radical sense of the term, including that of other species, many of whom have died on our behalf." And because, "human beings housed their dead before they housed themselves," this work extols the understanding and re-embracing of death, as a concept, linking the dead to the unborn in a cosmic circle of unknowing and mystery. Harrison leans heavily on Heidegger, and why shouldn't he? While my undergrad days of Ethics classes is far behind me, I was able to recall much as the book unfolded. As a former Roman Catholic who switched to Buddhist thought, I am ready for the end game. I wonder if the world would be a better place if more people truly grasped their mortality, stopped seeding the anti-aging industries with their billions of dollars, and shed the bone-deep fear of dying. It is nothing to fear.
I will miss my music, but in the afterworld of my own making, my primary Spotify list is playing endlessly. That is all I will need, be it Heaven or Hell, walking through the Elysian Fields or forever rowing upon the River Styx, or my karmic dust cast upon the cosmic wind.
Peace will finally come.
I will miss my music, but in the afterworld of my own making, my primary Spotify list is playing endlessly. That is all I will need, be it Heaven or Hell, walking through the Elysian Fields or forever rowing upon the River Styx, or my karmic dust cast upon the cosmic wind.
Peace will finally come.
December 8, 2015
Harrison is an admirable stylist and a bold philosopher. I found many striking moments and visceral thrills in his discussion of, among other things, the nature of houses, the importance of the empty tomb to Christianity, and Heidegger's failings in thinking about death, surprising as all that sounds. Well worth the time, especially if you find yourself interested in a lively (yes!) discussion of death and dying.
October 8, 2008
The chapter called "What is a house?" is a great discussion on the way the nature of our being is influenced by where we choose to place ourselves. The book discusses the influence of ancesters and how we mourn the dead but also in what surroundings we place ourselves, what objects we lay eyes on each day.
May 26, 2013
This book is a fascinating read on the nature of death as it exists in our society and has existed throughout recorded history. It was utterly wonderful to read about the importance of death and how in many ways, death and the dead are the foundation of our very lives. Sometimes the book got a bit dry and I had to struggle through, but it was very worth it.
September 22, 2014
A very dense book that traces the many ways our humanity is connected to our mortality and the mortality of those who have gone before us. “Humanity means mortality. Mortality in turn means that we repossess ourselves only in giving ourselves to ourselves.” One big idea I took away was that funeral rights allow the living images of the person escape from the dead body of the corpse.
July 24, 2008
This is one of my top ten books. I love non-fiction and Harrison is a beautiful writer. Highly recommended if you have interest in language, research, and the origin of words.
March 30, 2009
The Dominion of the Dead by Robert Pogue Harrison (2005)
July 10, 2014
Fascinating and enlightening.
August 19, 2017
Not what I was told it was (i.e., a symbolical analysis of funeral rites).
In any case, the first few pages were very powerful and fascinating. But going on, it started to look like boring repetition of mostly poorly-justified statements.
In any case, the first few pages were very powerful and fascinating. But going on, it started to look like boring repetition of mostly poorly-justified statements.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews