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Critical Discourse Studies

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On the contingency of death: a

discourse-theoretical perspective on
the construction of death
a b b
Nico Carpentier & Leen Van Brussel
a
Department of Social Sciences , Loughborough University , Room
U3:15, Brockington Building, Loughborough , LE11 3TU , UK
b
Department of Communication Studies , Vrije Universiteit
Brussel , Brussels , Belgium
Published online: 31 Jan 2012.

To cite this article: Nico Carpentier & Leen Van Brussel (2012) On the contingency of death: a
discourse-theoretical perspective on the construction of death, Critical Discourse Studies, 9:2,
99-115, DOI: 10.1080/17405904.2012.656372

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 Critical Discourse Studies
Vol. 9, No. 2, May 2012, 99 –115

On the contingency of death: a discourse-theoretical perspective on the

construction of death
Nico Carpentiera,b∗ and Leen Van Brusselb
a
Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Room U3:15, Brockington Building,
Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK; bDepartment of Communication Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel,
Brussels, Belgium

Death is frequently seen as the ultimate manifestation of materiality. Without denying this
materiality, this article will investigate the discursive character of death and its contingent
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nature, through the lens of Laclau and Mouffe’s [(1985). Hegemony and social strategy:
Towards a radical democratic politics. London: Verso] discourse theory. First, the core
elements of the (Western) discourse of death, such as end/cessation/termination, negativity,
irreversibility, inescapability, and undesirability, in combination with life as death’s
constitutive outside, will be analysed, showing the specificity of this discourse of death.
The contingency of death is argued further from a more genealogical stance, through the
changes over time in the articulation of death and good death. Finally, the political nature
of the discourse of death is illustrated by an analysis of end-of-life debates and the struggle
between the hospice and the right-to-die social movements over the exact articulation of a
good death. The article concludes by pointing to the necessary and constitutive failure of
discourse to capture the materiality of death.
Keywords: death; discourse theory; contingency; genealogy; political; good death; palliative
care; right to die; hospice

How can man, that is to say a living being, have access to knowledge of the death instinct, to his own
relationship to death? The answer is, by virtue of the signifier in its most radical form. It is in the
signifier and insofar as the subject articulates a signifying chain that he comes up against the fact
that he may disappear from the chain of what he is. (Lacan, 1992, p. 295)

Introduction
Death is one of the most pervasive phenomena of the social, and sometimes (with a slight sense
of drama) is described as ‘the only certainty in life’. This pervasiveness seems to privilege realist
and materialist approaches, leaving little room for the constructivist and idealist treatments.
Obviously, the bodily condition labelled death has a materialist dimension; it is an event/
process that exists and occurs independently of human will, thought, and interpretation.
However, we would argue that death cannot constitute itself as an object of thought outside dis-
course. Although we should be careful not to reduce death to the way it is discursively inter-
preted, death remains loaded with meaning and we cannot detach it from the processes of
social construction, and the contingency that lies behind it.
A number of arguments that support this thesis are investigated in this article. Discourse
theory (and mainly Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) variation) is used as the backbone for our theor-
etical reflection on death and its contingency, which we will firmly ground in a secular position.

∗
Corresponding author. Email: nico.carpentier@vub.ac.be

ISSN 1740-5904 print/ISSN 1740-5912 online

# 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2012.656372
http://www.tandfonline.com
 100 N. Carpentier and L. Van Brussel

We employ three lines of argument. First, that death is a discourse that tries to capture human
decay, and its meaning consists of a series of often taken-for-granted elements, such as end/ces-
sation/termination, negativity, irreversibility, inescapability, and undesirability. However, closer
scrutiny of these articulations shows the contingency of the discourse of death, with almost every
discursive element opening up a range of gaps, complexities, and unfixities.
A second argument for the contingency of the discourse of death is based on two inter-
locking genealogies that illustrate the changing meanings of the discourse of death over time.
Specific cultural and historical contexts have an impact on the discursive articulation of death
over time. In this article, we focus on the medical field, where a medical-rationalist discourse
of death was introduced that, later (to a high degree), was replaced by a medical-revivalist dis-
course of death, showing the instability and contingency of the discourse of death. The second
genealogy focuses on historical changes in the articulation of a good death. This text will show
that a late-modern good death is defined dominantly in terms of the signifiers of control, auton-
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omy, dignity, awareness, and heroism, but that in other eras other articulations prevailed.
A third argument is based on the political nature of the struggle over the discourse of death.
By (briefly) analysing the struggle between the hospice and the right-to-die social movements
over the exact articulation of the signifiers of control, autonomy, dignity, awareness, and
heroism, we want to reinforce how the meaning of a concept that is very close to us, but
from which we try to keep as far away as possible, is ultimately fluid and contingent.

A discourse-theoretical framework to analyse death

In order to analyse the construction of death and dying, we use a discourse-theoretical frame-
work. More specifically, we employ Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory because their theor-
etical model provides a toolbox that can be used to analyse the articulation of the discourse of
death within the dynamics of fixity and fluidity, emphasizing the contingent while allowing suf-
ficient space for its (temporary) fixation. Note, however, that our use of this theoretical frame-
work has no ambition to explain the full complexity of the dying process. For example, a
discourse-theoretical approach does not offer a framework to study the psychological and socio-
logical aspects of the – often disruptive – human awareness that every living being will die
(Bauman, 1992). Nor is such an approach appropriate to analyse the socio-economic aspects
and implications of death and dying. But a discourse-theoretical framework is well suited to ana-
lysing the contingent construction of the discourse of death, taking account of a complex
relationship between the materialist and the idealist.
Critics often accuse Laclau and Mouffe of invoking a ‘shamefaced idealism’ (Geras, 1987,
p. 65), but in Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985, 1990) work we find a clear acknowledgement of the
materialist dimension of social reality (which is important when studying death). As Glynos and
Howarth (2007, p. 109) argue, in Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, the identities of actions,
practices, and formations are constructed in a non-idealist way. Of course, discourses remain
very necessary to attribute meaning to the material, but this radical constructivism is both
realist and materialist, as illustrated by one of Laclau and Mouffe’s (1990, p. 101) examples:
a ‘stone exists independently of any system of social relation [. . .] it is, for instance, either a pro-
jectile or an object of aesthetic contemplation only within a specific discursive configuration’.
Their discourse theory is realist in the sense that it acknowledges a world of existence, external
to thought, independent of any system of social relations. It is materialist because it questions the
symmetry between the ‘realist object’ and the ‘object of thought’. This prevents an idealist
reduction of the distance between thought and object. Indeed, a non-idealist constructivism
does not essentialize the ‘realist object’ and reduce the ‘object of thought’ to a passive recipient
of an already constituted meaning, nor does it essentialize the ‘object of thought’ by reducing the
 Critical Discourse Studies 101

‘realist object’ to the way it is thought and interpreted (Torfing, 1999, pp. 45– 48). Briefly, a non-
idealist constructivism presupposes ‘the incompleteness of both the given world and the subject
that undertakes the construction of the object’ (Torfing, 1999, p. 48). In other words, Laclau and
Mouffe’s (1985, p. 108) non-idealist constructivism opposes the ‘classical dichotomy between
an objective field constituted outside of any discursive intervention, and a discourse consisting
of the pure expression of thought’ (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985, p. 108).
An especially important instrument for our analysis of the discourse of death is Laclau and
Mouffe’s concept of articulation, which brings in the logics of contingency at the level of dis-
course itself. Articulation is seen as ‘any practice establishing a relation among elements such
that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice’ (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985,
p. 105). The articulation of elements (or moments) produces discourses that gain a certain
(and very necessary) degree of stability. Discursive stability is enhanced by the role of privileged
signifiers, or nodal points. Torfing (1999, pp. 88 –89) points out that these nodal points ‘sustain
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the identity of a certain discourse by constructing a knot of definite meanings’. Simultaneously,

the field of discursivity has an infinite number of elements which are not connected to a specific
discourse at a given moment in time. Instability enters the equation through the idea that these
unconnected elements can always be articulated within a specific discourse, sometimes replacing
(or disarticulating) other elements, which affects the discourse’s entire signification. Due to the
infinitude of the field of discursivity and the inability of a discourse to permanently fix its
meaning and keep its elements stable, discourses are liable to disintegration and re-articulation.
Contingency is both intra-discursive and generated by an inter-discursive political struggle.
Discourses are often engaged in struggles, in attempts to attain hegemonic positions over other
discourses and, thus, to stabilize the social. Through the struggle ‘in a field crisscrossed by antag-
onisms’ (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985, pp. 135 – 136), and through the attempts to create discursive
alliances, or chains of equivalence (Howarth, 1998, p. 279; Howarth & Stavrakakis, 2000, p. 14),
discourses are altered, which produces contingency. In contrast, when a discourse eventually
saturates the social as a result of a victorious discursive struggle, stability emerges. For this
reason, Torfing (1999, p. 101) defines hegemony as the expansion of the discourse, or set of dis-
courses, into a dominant horizon of social orientation and action. In this scenario, a dominant
social order (Howarth, 1998, p. 279), or a social imaginary, is created, which pushes other mean-
ings beyond the horizon, threatening them with oblivion. But this stabilization, or sedimentation,
is temporal. As Sayyid and Zac (1998, p. 262) formulate it, ‘Hegemony is always possible but
can never be total’. There is always the possibility of resistance, of the resurfacing of a discursive
struggle, and the re-politicization of sedimented discourses, combined with the permanent threat
to every discourse of re-articulation. And, again, this generates structural contingency.

Death as a contingent discourse

What is known in a society is not outside culture, power, and discourse. This applies also to
knowledge about medical-sociological categories such as illness and death. They, too, are con-
structed through discursive practices (Lupton, 2010, p. 12). To use Derrida’s (1993, p. 22)
words: ‘“My death” in quotation marks is not necessarily mine; it is an expression that
anybody can appropriate; it can circulate from one example to another’. Support for this assump-
tion can be found also in the radical constructivist approaches that have entered medical soci-
ology – a field of analysis occupied with the sociological study of categories of health,
illness, and death – as part of a broader approach that seeks to question a whole range of appar-
ently self-evident and stable realities (Bury, 1986, p. 140).
In more traditional (medical) approaches, conditions of illness and dying are seen as located
in the body as physical objects that can be identified objectively and approached using scientific
 102 N. Carpentier and L. Van Brussel

medical knowledge. A constructivist framework defines death alternatively as a set of discursive

constructions and as types of knowledge created through human interaction and discursive prac-
tices (Lupton, 2003, p. 50). Unlike the assumption that death is simply the working of nature, this
approach asserts that death is deeply embedded in social relations and interpretations (White,
2002, p. 20), requiring cultural analysis (Lupton, 2010, p. 12).
Although the constructivist approach is now more widely deployed in death (and illness)
studies (Seale, 1998, p. 12), it is often and severely criticized. An important critique – and
one that the constructivist paradigm in general has to deal with – posits that this approach is
doomed to lapse into extreme relativism and nihilism. These critics assert that since all knowl-
edge is constructed, there is no room for the recognition of ‘reality’. Yet this critique does not
have to be legitimate since the materiality of death and illness can be reconciled through a dis-
cursive approach. As Lupton (2010, pp. 13– 14) explains in her ‘Medicine as culture’: ‘Most
social constructionists acknowledge that experiences such as illness, disease and pain exist as
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biological realities, but also emphasize that such experiences are always inevitably given
meaning and therefore understood and experienced through cultural and social processes’.
From a discourse-theoretical perspective, death, like any other discourse, requires its
meaning to be fixated. Although the openness of the social prevents this fixation from being
total, the discourse of death gains its meaning through (a set of) specific meanings that are dis-
cursively constructed through the logics of articulation. Arguably, as Luper’s (2009, pp. 41– 48)
discussion shows, death is negatively articulated through the inversion of such signifiers as life
and existence (‘life’s end’ – ‘ceasing to exist’). Another variation can be found in Feldman’s
(1992, 2000) so-called termination thesis, which articulates death as termination (of life). For
Heidegger (1962, p. 294), death ‘is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein’.
Žižek (2006, p. 194, emphasis in original) takes an equally original approach to death, in his
case, articulating it as ‘the condition of possibility of what is human’, but death still gains its
meaning in its juxtaposition to life (and being human). Through this negative articulation,
death, in its almost pure negativity, needs life and existence as its constitutive outside. Even
more paradoxically, death can only be thought from within life, by the living. In this sense,
the discourse of death is always contaminated by its discursive outside, by life and existence,
as thinking death from within death is an ontological impossibility. Death, therefore, is
always conceptualized in ‘living’ terms. By referring to death as a place, for instance, or by
using metaphors such as sleeping and resting, life is invoked (as a constitutive outside) to
think death, which renders death, as a discourse, inescapably contradictory.
But the articulation of the discourse of death (and its contingency) does not stop here; the sig-
nifiers of life and existence are implicated through their articulation with the human body, per-
sonality, and/or consciousness. Focusing on the more organismic component, Bernat, Culver,
and Gert (1981, p. 390, my emphasis), for instance, define death as ‘the permanent cessation
of functioning of the organism as a whole. We do not mean the whole organism, for example,
the sum of its tissue and organ parts, but rather the complex interaction of its organ subsystems’.
Schleifer’s (1990, p. 16) definition of death as ‘negative materiality’ is less explicit about the body
or the organism, but contains a similar emphasis. A series of other definitions focuses more on
personality and/or consciousness, suggesting that ‘that a human person may die before his or
her body’ (Steineck, 2003, p. 239). Pallis’s (1982, p. 1488) influential definition includes a refer-
ence to consciousness in describing death as ‘the irreversible loss of the capacity for conscious-
ness and of the capacity to breathe’. Others, like Veatch (1975) with his definition of death as the
irreversible cessation of the capacity for consciousness, move away from the organismic
definition towards what DeGrazia (2005, p. 123) calls a psychological definition of death.
The articulation of the discourse of death with the end/cessation/termination of life signifiers
– whether this is seen as the functioning of the ‘organism as a whole’ or ‘the irreversible loss of
 Critical Discourse Studies 103

that which is considered to be essentially significant to the nature of man’ (Bernat, 2006, p. 35) –
opens up new questions in relation to the meaning of the concept of the end, again showing the
contingency of the discourse of death. One debate here is whether death-as-an-end should be
articulated as a process or an event. While Morison (1971), for instance, argues in favour of
articulating death as a process, Bernat et al. (1981, p. 389) defend the death-as-an-event articu-
lation, when they say that ‘Death should be viewed not as a process but as the event that separ-
ates the process of dying from the process of disintegration’. Articulating death as an event, but
also seeing death as a process, raises more questions about its exact moment, not only for onto-
logical, but also for medical, political, and legal reasons. Clearly, death itself does not commu-
nicate about its occurrence, and the difficulties to fix the exact moment of death discursively
have led to a long and still ongoing struggle among scientists and legislators. For instance,
the steep reduction in body temperature, the absence of a heartbeat and breathing (so-called
‘clinical death’ (see Luper, 2009, p. 49), referring to circulatory – respiratory or cardiopulmonary
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criteria), the lack of activity in the whole of the brain, and the lack of brain stem (or higher brain)
activity have all been used to define (or construct) the moment of death (Bernat, 2006, pp. 37–
40). There are also alternative, counter-hegemonic ways to define the moment of death. Reli-
gious discourses, such as Christian discourses, for example, emphasize the importance of the
moment that the soul leaves the body. Other approaches focus more on the lack of clear and
absolute criteria, arguing that death’s ‘essence’ may be ‘obscure’ and resistant to adequate defi-
nition. One example of this line of thinking can be found in Chiong (2005), but we will return to
this position later.
The articulation of the discourse of death based on life and existence as its constitutive
outside, as pure negativity, is not exclusive because death also gains its meaning through
other signifiers. One cluster of signifiers is related to time. Death is articulated as irreversible
and inescapable. A considerable number of the definitions referred to above articulate death
as permanent and irreversible. In his distinction between a formal/universal definition and a
material/particular definition, Bartlett (1995, p. 270) emphasizes irreversibility as a key defining
component: ‘The formal requirement is the same for every definition and, that is, irreversibility.
This is true simply as a matter of language. It is how we speakers of English have come to use the
word “death”’. This irreversibility opens up the discursive repertoires of timelessness and eter-
nity, where death is seen as endless in contrast to the life that has ended. Nevertheless, there are
symbolic ways open to overcoming this apparent irreversibility, but all are situated at the level of
the social and provide routes that obviously are accessible only to the living, not to the dead.
First, there is the logic of remembrance, which allows the dead to live on in the memories of
the living, sometimes assisted by material components, such as statues, street names, or
graves, but also by a multitude of narrations (Azaryaku, 1996; Jones, 2003; Wojtkowiak &
Venbrux, 2010, p. 19). Statements as ‘he is dead, but his work continues’ and ‘she continues
to live in our memories’ illustrate how remembrance functions as an immortality strategy
(Bauman, 1992). Second, there is the logic of procreation, where the passing on of genetic
material (strengthened by the notion of resemblance) is seen as a way to overcome the irrever-
sibility of mortality (Bauman, 1992, p. 29), which, in turn, is fed by the desire for immortality
(Chadwick, 1987, p. 13; Sandford, 2010).
Simultaneously, irreversibility itself sometimes becomes unstable and changeable. A soft
variant of this changeability is the reference to new medical developments. For instance,
Lizza (2005, p. 55) suggests ‘that the meaning of “irreversibility” in the definition of death,
just like all other terms, is not timelessly fixed [. . .] but changes with our understanding of
new realistic possibilities’. In more radical variations of this position, arguments of freezing, sus-
pension, revival, and restoration are used to question the articulation of death as irreversible.
Luper (2009, p. 46) concludes his discussion on the irreversibility of death as follows: ‘It is
 104 N. Carpentier and L. Van Brussel

best to deny that death entails the permanent ending of our lives’. Similarly, radical variations of
this survival fantasy can be found in religions that are based on the notion of the after-life, which,
in some cases, privilege the after-life over life itself, inversing the hegemonic dominance of life
over death (Ma’sumian, 1995).
The second (and related) time-based component that provides meaning to death is its neces-
sity and inescapability. Complicated by the notion of a premature, sudden, and untimely death,
death is seen as something that all human beings must face at some time, rendering unavoidabil-
ity a core defining element, softened only by survival fantasies. This unavoidability affects each
individual, or, in Derrida’s (2008, p. 44) words, death’s dative does not signify a substitution:
‘[. . .] I cannot die in her place, I cannot give her my life in exchange for her death’. From a
medical perspective this inescapability is grounded in the definition of (many types of)
human cells as ‘mortal’, in the sense that they cannot proliferate endlessly (Harley, 2001). More-
over, cells and tissues accumulate damage, which, in the long run, threatens existence by making
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the body less able to repair itself and by rendering it more susceptible to illness. But, at the same
time, a gap of contingency between aging and death exists, as, for instance, expressed by de
Beauvoir (1985, p. 105, emphasis in original) writing about the death of her mother: ‘You do
not die from being born, nor from having lived, nor from old age. You die from something’.
Slightly more down to earth, but similar, is Luper’s (2009, p. 41) explanation: ‘Aging sets the
stage for death, but is not itself a form of death’. Symbolically, ageing, with its increased like-
lihood of the actual occurrence of death, acts as a permanent reminder of human mortality and
approaching death. Old age with its bodily changes that fall outside the beauty myth is often
articulated as the preamble to the bodily disintegration that death encompasses. But the
absence of a necessary relation between death and ageing again complicates and disrupts the dis-
course of death, showing its contingency.
Human frailty, especially at old age, and also at younger ages, brings another articulation of
death, namely, as a permanent, ever-present threat. Human bodies are characterized by high
levels of vulnerability and fragility and are easily destroyed by internal causes such as illness
and external causes such as violence and accidents. Freud labelled the fear this triggers as tha-
natophobia,1 but, at the same time, saw it as a disguise for a set of deeper concerns, because ‘At
bottom nobody believes in his own death, or to put the same thing in a different way, in the
unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality’ (Freud, 1953, pp. 304–
305). A serious challenge to Freud’s interpretation of thanatophobia came from Becker
(1973) who labelled it people’s most profound source of concern. Also from a Lacanian perspec-
tive, Žižek (2006, p. 77) emphasizes the fear of death, which has as its ‘real basis [. . .] the fear of
the loss of the father’s love and, by extension, the absolute negativity experienced at the loss of
the Other’s love that would result from the destruction of the symbolic order’.
One final articulation of death is its undesirability. Within the logic of the binary opposition,
life is privileged over death, especially (but not exclusively) in Western cultures. Life is con-
sidered ultimately precious, protected by a variety of social, ethical, and legal frameworks
and, as a concept, it enjoys the advantages of normalization. This makes death a regrettable
and tragic interruption to life, a dislocation that is deeply unsettling, a loss for both the dying
person and her/his environment. The dying process is met with sorrow and mourning, and a
wide variety of ritualized practices is initiated to allow the social environment of the deceased
to come to terms with its loss. Of course, some ways of dying are considered more undesirable
than others, which bring in the distinction between the good death and the bad death. Despite the
addition of the label of ‘good’ and the explicit prioritization of some form of dying over others,
both the good death and the bad death are undesirable in the hegemonic discourse of death. Not
even the contemporary focus on dignity in defining a good death, and the articulation of a ‘dig-
nified’ death as more desirable than an ‘undignified’ existence, renders death as desirable.
 Critical Discourse Studies 105

This hegemonic articulation generates problems for those whose desire is for death, the mel-
ancholics,2 and for those who act upon this desire. Suicide, for this reason, is considered a sep-
arate category, as a blatant violation of the social norm, and thus is pushed outside the realm of
ordinary death, with its violent nature emphasized. In some languages (e.g. Dutch or German),
the signifier ‘self-homicide’ (zelfmoord or Selbstmord) is often used. Because it is a violation of
the social norm, suicide destabilizes the norm and renders it contingent, undermining the hege-
monic articulation of death as undesirable. In response to this destabilization, suicide is often
considered an unnatural rejection of the desire for survival and met with incomprehension
(and sometimes a more intense reaction, such as prosecution), which serves, in turn, to re-
establish and reconfirm the social norm. For instance, Ridley (2000, p. 54), comparing suicide
with illness, writes that: ‘It is far harder to find or create meaning in sudden death from
suicide or self-inflicted injury’. And other forms of dying that result from an explicit human
intervention, such as euthanasia, have been the object of fierce societal and political struggles
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and are only legal in a small number of Western countries. Again, the idea that death is
desired is met with considerable resistance (see, for instance, Gormally, 2000, pp. 284 –285).
Arguably, the exceptions are martyrdom, heroism, and self-sacrifice, where the societal
context provides an interpretative framework that encourages desirability of the undesirable.
This discussion shows the contingency of the discourse of death (at the level of the discourse
itself), a discussion we continue in the next part through the adoption of a more genealogical
approach. But, at the same time, this discussion also shows the impossibility to signify death
(see, for instance, Smith, 2006). While discourses are very necessary, to provide meaning to
the social (including death), the discursive is simultaneously confronted by a structural lack
when it symbolizes that same social. Arguably, death is one of the areas where the impossibility
of a discourse to completely symbolize the Real becomes abundantly apparent. In (the Lacanian
strand of) discourse theory, the Real is seen always to resist its representation. In Laclau’s (2000,
p. 70) words, we have to take the ‘autonomisation of the signifier’ into account. Death, as part of
the Real, escapes representation, as Chiong (2005) argues (using a different vocabulary). At the
same time we try desperately to capture it, and we attempt to provide it with meaning. But, in
order to comprehend and capture death, we have nothing at our disposal but discourse, a tool
whose failure is an inherent part of the practice of its representation.

A genealogy of death – contingency continued

Although the discourse of death, based on signifiers such as end/cessation/termination, nega-
tivity, irreversibility, inescapability, and undesirability, with life and existence as its constitutive
outside, can be considered hegemonic, we should be careful not to see these articulations as com-
pletely fixated, thus ignoring its contingency. For instance, the fantasy of survival, still present
despite intense processes of secularization, poses a continuous and disruptive challenge to this
hegemonic chain. But a more genealogical (and Foucauldian) approach to the articulation of
death, bringing in a historical account of the discursive changes caused by the impact of the
medical field, shows even more contingency at the level of the inter-discursive.
According to Ariès (1974, 1981), in the early middle ages (and before), death was a familiar
part of life. Death could be described as ‘tamed’. Indeed, both life and death were tamed since
identities were largely pre-programmed and remained stable throughout life. Attempting to
conform to God’s image, similarity, and conformity were highly valued in pre-modern societies
(Ariès, 1974, p. 28). The modernization process, Ariès (1981) argues in his well-known death-
denial thesis, was accompanied by a shift from this tamed death towards the denial of death.
Ariès asserts that from the beginning of the twelfth century, attitudes to death started to trans-
form alongside the emergence of individualism. He traces the history of death-related rituals,
 106 N. Carpentier and L. Van Brussel

noting another major transformation in attitudes towards death in the mid-nineteenth century,
when the dying patient was – under the control of the doctor – moved to the hospital to die
in an institutionalized setting rather than at home (see also Lupton, 2010, p. 48).
Drawing on Foucault’s work on medicine and the body, Ariès (1981, p. 562) states that death
became hidden, mystified, and ‘driven into secrecy’. He argues that the modern forbidden death
reflects a ‘brutal revolution’ in our attitudes towards death and dying (Ariès, 1974, p. 86). Illich
(1975, p. 180) similarly asserts that in modernity, the tamed death was supplanted by a death that
was consigned to medical care. And Elias (1985) echoes these sentiments, noting that the
modern individual can be cared for according to the latest biomedical knowledge, but that indi-
vidual feelings of anxiety are often neglected. Elias (1985, p. 85) remarks that ‘Never before,
have people died so noiselessly and hygienically as today [. . .]’. According to supporters of
the death-denial thesis, a new discourse of death was constructed in modernity, and death
began to be articulated as indecent, wild, dangerous, dirty, and polluting (Bauman, 1992,
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p. 136) and needing to be sanitized.

However, arguing that death was denied seems to neglect that this articulation should be
regarded as specific. Starting from this idea, Armstrong (1987) challenges argumentations of
the death-denial thesis, asserting that since the mid-nineteenth century, there has been a discur-
sive explosion around death and dying, with the removal of death from the private to the public
sphere. The death certificate can be regarded in this sense as a discursive symbol of the new visi-
bility of death and the dying subject, and the ‘increased attention paid to the documentation of
death and its causes’ (Lupton, 2010, p. 48). The introduction of the death certificate and the
removal of the dying to hospitals, Armstrong (1987, p. 652) argues, rendered death a publicly
controlled event: ‘In the old regime knowledge of death was restricted to within earshot of
the church bell: beyond there was silence, in the new regime no death was to be unknown’.
Thus, it was not the simple replacement of speech by silence; rather, a new discourse of
death emerged, which Walter, Littlewood, and Pickering (1995, p. 581) summarize as ‘Death
is publicly present, but privately absent’. This change in discourse marked a change in the
social procedures surrounding death. Death, Armstrong (1987, pp. 651 – 657) argues, has
always been surrounded by rituals. In the old regime, these rituals existed in a context of the
domestic and the family. In the new regime, the administrative authorities demanded the
ritual of death certification and registration (Seale, 1998, p. 81). Unlike the death-denial
thesis, counter-arguments assert that in the new epoch, a multitude of voices – including
those of clinicians and pathologists – subjected the corpse to in-depth scrutiny to detect the
‘true’ cause of death (Armstrong, 1987, p. 652). Seale (1998, p. 79) argues that the certification
of the death is a ritual activity of the modern epoch which symbolizes the medical construction
of death as essentially located within the body of the dying person.
Hence, instead of characterizing the modern period as an epoch of death denial, it should be
described as an epoch when death was constructed in a medical-rationalist way. Medical-ration-
alism and its strong belief in medical progress had material consequences; it resulted in extended
life duration and increased options for sustaining life in the terminally ill. But medical-rational-
ism also builds on the so-called technological imperative: for every medial problem, a purely
medicalized technical – rational solution was sought, rather than a reflexive one. Disease
became understood as caused by localized pathologies of the body (Cohen, 2007, p. 7). In the
modernist logic of medical-rationalism, dying was articulated as instrumentalist and impersonal;
the dying processes became a technical matter, bereft of their existential and personal signifi-
cance. Because of the strong belief in medical progress, death was often regarded as an
extreme example of illness (Seale, 1998, p. 77). Thus, the medical-rationalist discourse con-
structed the dying subject as no more than a carrier or an exemplar of disease. Moreover, the
dying subject was considered incompetent in not managing to avoid death.
 Critical Discourse Studies 107

This construction of death marked an important reconfiguration of what could and could not
be said about death and dying. From the late eighteenth century, there developed a tendency to
withhold the prognosis of imminent death from patients. Physicians and nurses were not trained
to care for the dying and were uncomfortable with the idea of their patients dying. This led to a
situation where the medical staff and the patient’s family knew the truth about the patient’s con-
dition, but withheld it from the dying patient (Connor, 2009, p. 3). According to Ariès, this was
‘the lie’ that dominated doctor – patient relationships between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twen-
tieth century. Again, the ‘death-denial’ thesis neglects a crucial discursive dimension; a lie exists
only in relationship to a regime of truth (i.e. the ‘types of knowledge a society accepts and makes
function as true’; Foucault, 1980, p. 131). Arguably, what is a lie now, in our society, in another
society, within another ‘regime of truth’, is not necessarily identified as such. For Armstrong, the
reconfiguration of the boundary between the truth and the lie can be seen most clearly in the dis-
covery of ‘the secret’, which represents the truth that cannot be told. To keep death a secret was
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legitimate because it was believed that patients relied on the hope that the secret allowed. The
silence was desired by the doctors who did not want to speak of death because it was distressing
to them, and by the patients who did not want their worst fears confirmed (Armstrong, 1987,
pp. 653– 654).
As the regime of truth began to transform during the late 1950s, the ‘secret’ was exposed as a
‘lie’ (Armstrong, 1987, p. 653). Arguably, there has been a major shift, from believing that it is
in the patient’s best interest to be kept ignorant of his or her condition, to believing that if
patients are to participate in the organization of their dying process, they must be told the
truth about their condition (Walter, 1994, p. 31). In many Western countries today, dying
patients’ basic human rights are often considered to be violated if they lack the knowledge to
make their own end-of-life decisions. Patients need the right to know about their condition
and to have control over their dying processes (Kearl, 1989, p. 438). This new discourse, domi-
nant in late modernity, is termed the medical-revivalist death discourse. Within this discourse of
death, death becomes something familiar, something that should be talked about in the medical
field without embarrassment. Gradually, the former ‘conspiracy of silence’ regarding death has
been condemned. This has resulted in a shift from the ‘interrogation of the corpse’ to the
‘interrogation of the dying patient’ who openly talks about his dying process without fearing
or denying death (Armstrong, 1987). From this point, Williams (2003, p. 131) asserts, ‘the
truth of death ceased to be located in dark recesses of the silent corpse, and instead became
embodied in the words and deeds of the dying patient’. Several practices and organizations
have emerged during the last decennia, which have responded and contributed to the changed
discourse of death. One of these is the provision of modern day hospices directed towards ‘mana-
ging the anguish of the dying patient’ (Prior, 1989, p. 12). Others include legal – political devel-
opments such as laws on euthanasia that stress the value of reflexive and conscious planning of
one’s dying process. This aspect of reflexive and conscious planning is central to the medical-
revivalist discourse of death which emphasizes this planning as a project of self-identity for the
dying person (Seale, 2000).
It could be argued, then, that (as in pre-modern societies) death continues to be a public
affair, but, at the same time, the medical institutions have not disappeared, which, according
to some critics (Williams, 2003, p. 131; Somerville, 2001), causes death still often to remain
hidden behind the walls of the hospital, or, more recently, the hospice and the care home.
Although the public visibility/private invisibility, in many cases, is still seen in operation,
Walter et al. (1995) make one significant correction to this equation and point to the role
played by media in representing death. Not only have we witnessed an upsurge of television
drama (e.g. the hospital dramas; see Jacobs, 2003) and reality-tv (Seale, 2005; Walter, 2009),
which have made the private death and its emotions visible, we are being exposed to genres
 108 N. Carpentier and L. Van Brussel

with a stronger truth claim, such as documentary films and news, which make death, including
the more private deaths, more visible. Regardless of (and beyond) this visibility – invisibility
debate, it seems to be clear that a number of revivalist trends that have emerged in recent
decades are seriously challenging the medicalized and rationalized death and are becoming
dominant in shaping contemporary discourses on the good death (Walter, 1994; Williams,
2003, p. 134).

The good death – a second genealogy

Although death is articulated as undesirable, there is an evaluative-hierarchical component that
distinguishes between good and bad deaths. Moreover, some of these articulations of a good
death can be considered hegemonic and universalized, and this discursive area shows some con-
siderable changes in the meanings attributed to the good death, which again bears witness to the
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contingency of the discourse of death. The more hegemonic and universalized articulations are
illustrated in the (fairly contemporary) definition of a good death provided by the Institute of
Medicine: ‘a decent or good death is one that is: free from avoidable distress and suffering
for patients, families and caregivers; in general accord with patients’ and families wishes; and
reasonably consistent with clinical, cultural and ethical standards’ (Emanuel & Emanuel,
1998, p. 21). Other circumstances, such as death following a long and fulfilled life, during
which children have been raised and provided for, and grandchildren born, and dying at home
surrounded by family and community, are valued highly by almost every culture (Seale,
2004). On the other hand, suicide, dying in pain, and dying alone and/or in the company of stran-
gers are considered bad ways of dying by most societies, and dying in an accident or from an
overdose are also usually regarded as bad deaths (Kearl, 1989, pp. 121, 134 – 135; Seale, 2004).
To show the contingency of the articulation of the good death, we can use again a genealogi-
cal strategy and look at the meaning of the good death from a historical perspective. Turning
briefly to ancient Greek and Roman times, we find an example in the work of Vettius Vales,
a second-century astrologer, who describes a physically good death as follows: ‘[. . .] falling
asleep from food, satiety, wine, intercourse of apoplexy’. The idea of a good death in pre-
modern societies was not limited to a painless exit; it encompassed a happy end, which
crowned a good life, in which education, friendship, respect, richness, political position, and
being blessed with children were highly valued. Another crucial aspect of dying well in pre-
modern times was moral perfection (Van Hooff, 2004, pp. 975 – 976). A good death was
dying at peace with God and neighbours. Being conscious of the passing into the next world
and having family and friends surrounding the death bed were of equal importance (Walters,
2004, p. 405). The religious emphasis remained dominant until the rise of modern science
and medicine in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In pre-modernity, death
was not something people feared, nor was it seen as alien, wild, and dangerous. Rather, death
was familiar; it was a part of life. The ideal of a peaceful death in the company of family and
friends and at peace with God corresponds to the pre-modern attitude to death which Ariès
described as the tamed death (Walters, 2004, p. 405), which we discussed earlier.
The process of modernization made death something to be medically prevented, and its occur-
rence to be regarded as failure (Walters, 2004, p. 405). As already discussed, there are opposing
theories regarding modern attitudes towards death. Whereas Ariès and Bauman describe a priva-
tization, which resulted in a social denial of death, Armstrong argues that death became more and
more public after the late eighteenth century. Among these opposing views, however, there is
agreement on the idea that death became highly medicalized in the modern period. This medica-
lization was accompanied by a new discourse of (the good) death characterized by the withhold-
ing of the prognosis of imminent death from the patient. Thus, a modern good death was foremost
 Critical Discourse Studies 109

a death that happened without the patient noticing it, such as dying quietly in one’s sleep. As
already mentioned, in modernity it was believed that every individual cause of death could be
avoided through adoption of a healthy lifestyle and medical intervention. Therefore, a good
death was a death that did not happen yet. Death was always projected forward, into an invisible
future (Walters, 2004, p. 405). A good death in modern times was made partially invisible in
being ‘progressively removed from home and community to the institution and there hidden
there inside rooms or behind screens’ (Walters, 2004, p. 405).
From the second half of the twentieth century, the discourses on the good death changed
again. According to Walters (2004), in most late-modern societies death is no longer a taboo
subject. Several authors describe this assumed ‘de-tabooing’ with reference to the death-aware-
ness movement (see, for instance, Bryant, 2003, pp. 53– 54). By the late 1990s, the death aware-
ness movement had become increasingly institutionalized, not only through the influence of
palliative care on the medical world and discussions on the right to die (see further), but also
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through the organization of large-scale events concerning death-related topics. For instance, it
is common practice for government agencies to send crisis teams and grief counsellors to
sites of sudden and traumatic death (Bryant, 2003, p. 54). Moreover, the new awareness – or
the revival – of death that is argued is reflected in the mass media, where death features as a
main theme in films, TV series, plays, and novels (Bryant, 2003, p. 54; Walters, 2004, p. 405).
Walters asserts that a late-modern good death is thus something that can (again) be discussed
and imagined openly, within limitations. However, the hegemony of the late-modern revivalist
death discourse is not total; its dominance continues to be challenged by medical-rationalist dis-
courses of death. Despite these challenges, the revivalist discourse is becoming generally more
dominant in constructing the good death and opposing some core values of the modernist good
death. It could be argued that this revivalist discourse is constructed basically around two groups
of nodal points: control, autonomy, and dignity; and awareness and heroism.

Control, autonomy, and dignity

One of the key differences between (pre-)modern and late-modern conceptualizations of the
good death is the element of control brought by medical science. It is widely believed that
humanity is no longer helpless in the face of death and its causes: death must be accepted as
a part of life, ‘but not as something about which nothing can be done’ (Walters, 2004,
p. 406). The price of this in modernity has been the creation of a powerful medical system
that takes decisions about the ‘bodies’ of its patients. Specific to the medical-revivalist discourse
of late modernity is the articulation of the subject position of the dying patient’s person as
someone in control of her/his own death, without detaching it completely from the medical
field. Indeed, it is believed in late modernity that if individuals ‘are to make their own decisions
about what remains of their lives, they must be told the truth about their condition’ (Walter,
1994, p. 31). A lack of decision-making power in this regard is considered a violation of the
dying person’s basic human rights (Kearl, 1989, p. 438). This does not mean that control over
death is total and that all social anxieties disappear. Somerville (2001, pp. 11– 12, 37), for
example, asserts that the need to control death – referring mainly to the practice of active eutha-
nasia – rests on an attitude of deep fear and denial.
The contemporary idea of a death that is autonomously controlled allows it to be combined
with the concept of dignity. In late-modern Western societies, dignity is mainly defined in terms
of independence, autonomy, and control, especially (but not exclusively) within the framework
of a right-to-die variation of the medical-revivalist discourse (see further). It is regarded as
highly desirable for the dying person to be free of excessive pain and to be in a state of awareness
in order to preserve independence. The late-modern emphasis on autonomy and control is
 110 N. Carpentier and L. Van Brussel

closely connected to a civilized body discourse that values self-mastery and self-care. As Lupton
(2003, p. 57) argues: an ideal (dying) body is a body which is ‘tightly contained, its boundaries
stringently policed, its orifices shut, kept autonomous, private, and separate from other things
and other bodies’.

Awareness and heroism

In order to control one’s own (good) death, it is deemed necessary to have knowledge about
one’s condition. This implies that the subject position of the dying person is articulated as
being aware and avoiding a state of denial. In contemporary Western societies, an open aware-
ness is regarded as highly desirable. This open awareness refers to open communication among
patient, the family, the doctor(s), and the professional carers (Kearl, 1989, p. 428). Open aware-
ness is required, first, for the dying person to make his/her own end-of-life decisions in an auton-
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omous way (Walter, 1994, p. 31). Second, being aware of imminent death, the dying person can
conduct reconciliations with loved ones, make confessions, and (re)tell and sometimes recon-
struct personal biographies. In this way, the revivalist dying process becomes ‘a case study in
the reflexive formation of a profoundly individualistic form of self-identity, of the sort described
evocatively by Giddens’ (Seale, 2004, p. 967).
The ideal of an aware death is closely connected to Seale’s (1995, 1998) notion of the heroic
death. According to Seale, a heroic death is highly valued in most Western societies. In a late-
modern end-of-life context, heroism becomes articulated as the deployment of skilful efforts of
emotional labour. The capacity to gather support from family and friends and to make emotional
progress in the process of denying, fighting, and accepting death (Seale, 2002, p. 185) are crucial
aspects of what Seale (1998, p. 92) describes as the ‘inner-directed heroics of the self’. This new
sort of heroic drama defines the subject position of the dying person as somebody who faces the
inner danger and engages in an arduous self-search (Seale, 1998, p. 92), and, eventually, after
initial reactions of fear, shock, anger, or unfairness, demonstrates great courage in the eventual
facing up to the final threat: death (Seale, 1995, p. 599).

Politicizing (the good) death

One other way to show the contingency of the discourse of death is to analyse its political nature,
which shifts the focus from intra-discursive to inter-discursive contingency. Following the argu-
ment that discourses are often engaged in struggle, constructions of (the good) death can still be
regarded as political. By the notion ‘political’, we refer to the antagonistic struggle for meaning
or, to use Mouffe’s (2007, p. 9) words, a space of ‘power, conflict and antagonism’ that trans-
cends every societal field. Unavoidably, this implies that private issues not generally perceived
as political (such as issues related to death and dying) can be or have been (re-)politicized. Such
a maximalist approach towards the political includes not only the actions of ‘traditional’ political
actors and institutions, but also, for instance, the power relations between doctor and patient and
the interventions of (new) social movements.
One example3 that illustrates the political struggle over the discourse of death and, more
specifically, the articulation of the good death, occurs within the field of (the struggle over)
end-of-life decision-making. This struggle has above all taken (and still takes) place between
two social movements, the right-to-die and the hospice movements (mainly), within the
context of death occurring as a result of illness. Both movements are within the framework of
the medical-revivalist discourse and their discourses are constructed on the basis of the nodal
points discussed above. But they produce different and competing articulations of these elements.
The specific articulations of these nodal points are contested and subject to a discursive struggle
 Critical Discourse Studies 111

between competing variants of the medical-revivalist discourse. First, the nodal points of control,
autonomy, and dignity are central to the discourse of the right to die movement, which calls for
the acceptance of active euthanasia and other end-of-life decisions such as assisted suicide. The
right-to-die movement claims explicitly that it is a human right for death to be at one’s own
request, and deciding for oneself that suffering is unbearable. Similarly, the hospice movement
insists on placing death in the forefront of consciousness and calls on medical science to bring it
under human control (Walters, 2004, p. 406). It is important to repeat that the nodal points of
autonomy and control are central to both the right to die movement and the hospice movement.
Both movements are a response to the conditions of ‘high-tech dying’ in which patients became
passive ‘spectators of their own decaying selves’ (Illich, 1975, p. 108), and both draw on the
broader cultural process of individualization. As Walter (2003, p. 219) argues:
Both find support in individualistic societies that promote personal autonomy – the right of individ-
uals to make their own choices about how they should live and die. [. . .] the good death is one in
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which I make my own choices about my last days.

The right to die and the hospice movements use the same nodal points, but they articulate them
differently, showing the contingency both of these nodal points and, by extension, of the dis-
course of (a good) death. Following Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) discourse-theoretical vocabu-
lary, it could be argued that these nodal points act as floating signifiers (p. 171). They are
signifiers that are ‘overflowed with meaning’ (Torfing, 1999, p. 301) and that can have different
meanings within different contexts and discourses. In this particular case, the discursive struggle
is located in the meanings claimed for these nodal points, dealing with the level of permissibility
of autonomous decision-making regarding the timing of death.
In the hospice movement, control is exercised not over the exact timing of death, but over the
symptoms that accompany dying. The discourse of palliative care in the hospice movement
focuses on the autonomy of the individual patient, of fulfilling patients’ wishes about how
and where they choose to die (Walters, 2004, p. 406). The discourse of palliative care is charac-
terized by frequent reference to the ideal of the ‘natural’ death: ‘a gradual passing away
unmarred by fear, denial or technological encumbrances’ (Banjeree, 2005, p. 4). Emphasizing
the ideal of the natural death, the hospice movement focuses less on independence, autonomy,
and awareness in defining dignity. In this way, the palliative-care variation of the medical-reviv-
alist discourse of death symbolically transforms death from a period of physical decay into an
opportunity for growth. Death, in this sense, is often seen and spoken of as a journey (Banjeree,
2005, p. 8). The hospice movement focuses on the heroism of dying naturally and of coping with
the dying process while stressing the right of every dying person to be surrounded by a caring
community. It is argued that this delays social death for as long as possible until biological
death occurs (Seale, 1995). In addition, in the heroic script of the palliative-care alternative,
the care-giver is also constructed as a hero.
The right-to-die movement acknowledges the importance of care, but argues also that the
care of other people may not be enough to overcome the suffering involved in some forms of
death. As Seale (1995, 1998, p. 190) argues, the right-to-die movement uses a different articu-
lation of some of the core values of revivalism; a request for euthanasia is a statement that the
care offered by other people is not enough to overcome suffering or that a different form of care
(in the form of medical assistance with dying) is needed. Hence, it could be argued that the nodal
point of heroism is central to both the hospice and the right-to-die movements, but that in the
latter the signifiers of heroic suffering and care-as-compassion are replaced by a heroic
choice of death.
Again, hegemonic discourses allow for resistance. Not all of those whose conditions give
them the ‘right’ to enter the late-modern dying subject position make use of the opportunity.
 112 N. Carpentier and L. Van Brussel

Resistance to the hegemonic medical-revivalist model is displayed by those who avoid infor-
mation because ‘ignorance is bliss’ (Seale, 2004, p. 967). Indeed, as Seale (1998, p. 177)
argues, some people associate unawareness with the capacity to continue ‘as normal’. More
specific, right-to-die scripts are resisted when people prefer to rely on others to make decision.
In the case of the palliative-care ideal, resistance can consist of rejection of care and the choice of
other end-of-life decisions, such as euthanasia or dying alone. Moreover, the discursive differ-
ences discussed here between the right-to-die and the hospice movements do not necessarily
translate into strict divisions in material, end-of-life-care situations. As mentioned before, prac-
tices always partially escape discourses (Laclau, 2000; see also de Certeau, 1988). Yet, it is
important to emphasize that the sphere of conflictuality in which death within the medical
field is embedded is grounded in competing variations of the medical-revivalist discourse,
which are built on either a right-to-die approach or a palliative-care approach. This shows
again the contested nature and contingency of the articulations of the good death.
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Conclusion
At first sight, death might seem a straightforward concept with which we are all familiar. Death
also has the appearance of being ultimately material, despite being termed a ‘negative material-
ity’ (Schleifer, 1990, p. 16). A constructivist, discourse-theoretical approach, however, is much
less straightforward and, in some cases, might be considered even unrealistic or disrespectful.
But, from a discourse-theoretical perspective, death plays a too significant role within the
social to be excluded from the analytical gaze of discourse theory. Its proximity to life, its ulti-
mate materiality, and the temptation to apply essentialist frameworks make it a very challenging,
and also a very necessary topic for a discourse-theoretical analysis.
Not surprisingly, the outcome of such a discourse-theoretical analysis is paradoxical. In
order for humans to make sense of death, or any other area of the social, it is necessary to con-
struct it, although death’s constructed nature at the same time remains hidden, shrouded by a veil
of taken-for-grantedness and normalization. Through discourse we bring death within the realm
of culture, and through this process in turn, we somehow domesticate death, despite the terror it
often evokes. The consequence of this enculturation is that death becomes (articulated in a) con-
tingent (way). There is no one discursive framework that fixes the meaning of death, once and for
all. In the domain that is constructed as timeless, eternal, and irreversible, we can see the sliding
of the signifier at work. Of course, there are hegemonic and (thus) stabilized articulations, but
even these articulations are shown to be more fluid and contested than might be expected.
Almost ironically, through the logics of end/cessation/termination, the constitutive outside of
death is life. Other hegemonic articulations suggested in this article include negativity, irrever-
sibility, inescapability, and undesirability, which, in turn, are permanently frustrated by fantasies
of survival. The genealogical approach we used shows, especially, how the impact of and the
changes within the medical field affect the articulation of the discourse of death, first through
a medical-rationalist discourse of death and, later, shifting to a medical-revivalist discourse,
which structurally alters the way we think death, the good death, dying, and the dying person.
Finally, some subfields of death, such as euthanasia, show the political struggle over death
and produce different articulations of (the good) death, unsettling the essentialist interpretation
of death by showing its contingency.
Although there is not one way to think death since the enculturation of death is unavoidably
accompanied by discursive diversity, death demonstrates the limits of the sense-making process.
We are in desperate need of discourse to generate meaning and to produce the cultural and the
social, but at the same time the material always escapes us. The symbolic is bound to fail in cap-
turing the Real, however much the symbolic holds the promise of perfect comprehensibility.
 Critical Discourse Studies 113

Analysing the construction of death as part of the Real shows how difficult it is for the symbolic
to capture the Real. Thinking death produces unsolvable complexities and contradictions, which
show that the discourse of death is bound to fail in its representation of the materiality of death.
At the same time, we cannot think death. This compels us to remain very human in our use of
discourse, dealing with all its (and our) imperfections.

Notes on contributors
Nico Carpentier is Senior Lecturer at Loughborough University (UK), Associate Professor at the Vrije Uni-
versiteit Brussel (VUB – Free University of Brussels), Belgium, and Lecturer at Charles University, the
Czech Republic. He is also vice president of the European Communication Research and Education Associ-
ation (ECREA). His theoretical focus is on discourse theory, and his research interests are situated in the
relationship between media, journalism, politics, and culture, especially towards social domains as war &
conflict, ideology, participation, and democracy.
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Leen Van Brussel is a researcher working at the Communication Studies Department of the Vrije Univer-
siteit Brussel (VUB – Free University of Brussels) where she is, as an FWO aspirant, preparing a PhD
thesis on the discursive construction of (medicalized) death in a North-Belgian context. Her project is
part of a larger project on the ‘Perspectives on the end of life’, in collaboration with the inter-university
End of Life Care Research Group.

Notes
1. A similar argument can be made for the related concept of necrophobia.
2. As LeBlanc (2006, p. 118) argues, the condition of melancholia can be seen as a disruption of the instinct
to live, and ‘By this intrusion of the death drive, the melancholic embodies the potential for one’s own
premature destruction’.
3. Obviously, there are other examples, such as abortion or the harvesting of organs. In discussing this one
example, we do not claim to offer a comprehensive overview of all discursive struggles in relation to
death.

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