Death is not the end: negative mysticism in Jon Fosse’s Morning and Evening

We are accustomed to thinking of death as the ultimate finality. Existential philosophy, including that of Martin Heidegger, has held death to be the absolute limit against which it is possible to think life. Even more so, he held, does death serve to define our humanity, since we, as a species, are the only ones able to contemplate our finitude. In so far as this became the rallying cry for modernist philosophy it also became a sign of its limit. If human beings are superior in their thinking ability, the pessimists asked, how come we have put ourselves on the brink of extinction, polluting our waters, creating ever more powerful weapons, now with the capacity to eliminate all life on this planet many times over, heating our small rock in space to the extent that life crumbles and withers? In *Morning and Evening* the author, critic, and recent Nobel laureate Jon Fosse tears open a rift in the hitherto sutured fabric of liminality that distinguished existentialists from other philosophers, and that has divided humans from animals, and the living from the dead. This essay discusses Fosse’s *negative mysticism* and the way it serves to offer a highly complex response to the notion of facticity. What is at stake is how what Milan Kundera called “God’s laughter” manifests itself in the polyphonic complexity of Fosse’s text, providing a paradoxical and surprising inversion of the realist doxa on singularity and difference.