JANKÉLÉVITCH (Vladimir). Autograph notes. 10 ff. of which 9 in-4 and one in-8; one of the leaves is entirely crossed out but legible; text missing from 2 of the leaves, one frayed, the other with a marginal tear. NOTES PREPARATOIRES A SON TRAITE LA MORT, published in 1966 by Flammarion. "It is doubtful whether the problem of death is, strictly speaking, a philosophical problem. If we consider this problem objectively and from a general point of view, we can scarcely see what a "metaphysics" of death could be; but on the other hand, we can well imagine a "physics" of death, - whether this physics be biology or medicine, sociology or demography: death is a biological phenomenon like birth, puberty and ageing; mortality is a social phenomenon in the same way as natality, nuptiality or criminality. For the physician, lethality is a determinable and predictable phenomenon, depending on the species in question, the average length of life and general environmental conditions. From a legal and juridical point of view, death is just as natural a phenomenon: in town halls, the death office is an office like any other, and a subdivision of the registry office, just like the birth and marriage offices; and the funeral parlour is a municipal service, no more and no less than roads, public gardens or schools. Population increases through births, decreases through deaths: there's no mystery in that, but simply a natural law and a normal empirical phenomenon to which the impersonality of statistics and averages removes any trace of tragedy. This is the reassuringly bourgeois way in which Tolstoy, at the start of a famous novel, views Ivan Ilyich's death: not just the painful death of Ivan Ilyich, but also the death of magistrate Ivan xxx, a banal and abstract administrative event which, like a simple retirement, triggers a cascade of appointments, transfers and promotions. The death of a judge is first and foremost a judicial event; and then it's a family tragedy and a private misfortune. Cosmological generalizations on the one hand, and rational reflection on the other, tend to conceptualize death, to reduce its metaphysical importance, to turn this tragedy into a simple partial phenomenon. Death is not a final judgment, a theological cataclysm which, like the "end of the world", would strike all living creatures at once; and even if the totality of mankind were to disappear at once, the possibility would remain that living humanity represented a species within an infinitely larger genus: why should unknown beings, scattered throughout the universes, not outlive the living here below? In fact, DEATH IS NEVER THE NON-BEING OF THE TOTAL BEING, BUT THE NON-BEING OF A PARTICULAR BEING; DEATH IS NOT EMPIRICAL NOTHING, BUT A SINGULAR DISAPPEARANCE, determined by circumstantial coordinates: someone and somewhere, so-and-so at such-and-such a minute. Because it's about someone's death! A place is suddenly left empty, just as an armchair is made vacant by the defection of the person who was supposed to occupy it. What's more, and if death really isn't a radical nihilization for external experience, every gap is filled as soon as it's dug out; such is the weave of perceived phenomena that Bergson describes for us: in the fullness of this continuum, there is sometimes substitution or substitution, but there are never any gaps...". RARISSIME IN PRIVATE HANDS, as almost all the philosopher's manuscripts have been deposited with the BnF.