Abstract

This article explores the role that death plays in Heidegger’s ontology after Being and Time, focusing especially on volumes 97–104 of the Gesamtausgabe. Within these volumes, death occupies a pride of place within Heidegger’s being-historical (and post-being-historical) attempts to articulate beyng, coming to play a role as significant as, and not unrelated to, the Nothing. In order to give a full accounting of the role that death plays within these texts, a number of other structurally significant terms within Heidegger’s Seinsdenken—such as Gebirg, Enteignis, Brauch, and Sage—will be examined. It is ultimately argued that these volumes, by exposing the human to the heretofore un-thought truth of beyng (as radical concealment), carry out the transition from “human” to “mortal” so essential to Heidegger’s later thinking.