We cannot communicate with others or ourselves, and exist in a perpetual state of mutation and fluidity. Nobody can really say what it means to be human, a fact reflected by a huge swathe of contemporary theory and story - the paranoid novel, the schizoid novel, the genre of cyberpunk would not be possible without this conception of humanity. We are what we make ourselves by construction of language. Any narrative that enhances our own ideas is to be welcomed, and any that challenges is to be written off as unwelcome imposition of someone else s power over us. In this scheme existence precedes our essence - we are free to construct what we are according to our own criteria.
Death is an unwelcome subject to the literary mind at present.
It implies limitation and finitude. Hence much is written about a world with no ends or purposes to which things are moving. Doctor Who. 5. Any claim to know anything at all can only be local, temporary and contingent. And even that might be misjudged.