I had the opportunity to present a portion of my work on art and suffering, specifically in relation to death, at the American Catholic Philosophical Association hosted at the University of Notre Dame in October 2025

Here is an abstract of the paper:

There is a kind of silence opened up by experiences of death that enters into both personal and political contexts. Because death serves as a crude reminder that there is something not quite right in this world, any effort to explain death will always fall short. We can never provide a satisfying justification for it. This inability of language to respond to death represents a silent gap uncovered in diverse encounters with death. When we lose a loved one early and unexpectedly, the loss pierces us in such a way that our first articulations are to deny that it actually happened. And, even when the death of loved ones comes after a long life, the idea that at least they lived a good, long life does not eradicate our sorrow at their absence. The injustice of death makes us struggle to come up with words to say to someone in a sympathy card or at a funeral. “I’m sorry for your loss” feels empty and cliché and yet better than not saying anything at all. On a political level, the shocking death tolls from the conflicts around us overwhelm us making us speechless. And, despite its inevitability, we avoid the topic of our own death in everyday conversation. The silence evoked by death in all its forms is thus found not only in the way we might abstain from the subject, but also in the fact that the words that are spoken feel bereft of meaning, as if they were nothing.

In this paper, I will argue that art fills in the space left empty by normal language by speaking its own language about death. And while it is no surprise philosophically or experientially that art helps us bear death, I will offer an additional perspective on this by linking the way art speaks out of a general silence to the way it speaks out of the particular silence felt in experiences of personal and political death. To do so, I will first present how art arises out of silence, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and relate this to the silence of death. Next, I will describe the powerful vocabulary that art uses to speak to death drawing on illustrations found in the art of the French existentialists. Lastly, I will conclude that it is the uncompromising message of art which refuses to soften reality while also calling us to action that makes it possible for us to bear the reality of death. As a note, when I say that art has the ability to do something, I do not mean that every single piece of art does this, but rather that art, as a practice, has this capacity. The characteristics discussed in this paper are not necessarily found (nor should they be found) in each individual work of art.