SOURCE: "Albert Einstein: A Necrological Approach," in The Centennial Review, Vol. 35, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 591-606.

[In the following essay, Kaplan contends that Einstein's Autobiographical Notes must be examined as a necrology-or obituary-largely because of Einstein's professional and personal connections to both the Jewish Holocaust of World War II and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, by the United States, which Kaplan considers "the twin catastrophes at the limits of twentieth-century history and its meaning. "]

1. INTRODUCTION

This essay offers a close reading of a repeated figure in the autobiographical narrative of a survivor and a mourner whose life and work are bound up with the disasters which are evoked under the impossible names of Hiroshima and the Holocaust. Upon first impression, one might not think that an autobiographical text whose stated purpose is to review the philosophical achievements and the scientific discoveries of one of the most renowned thinkers of this century could be marked as a discourse of mourning, survival, and commemoration. But the Autobiographisches/Autobiographical Notes of Albert Einstein insists upon the generic status of Nekrolog, and it asks its readers at a number of points to be taken as an obituary. Whether by a throw of the dice or a divine providence, Albert Einstein always had to live with the obituaries in mind. His name and his science are inextricably linked with the corpses of the twin catastrophes at the limits of twentieth-century history and its meaning.

Einstein's necrological manoeuvres in the socio-political and ethical realms have reached the point where they have entered into cultural mythology. First, there are his complex relations to the holocaust of European Jewry. It is clear that his avid Zionism and his Jewish nationalist politics are fueled by the threat posed to European Jewry by the fascistic regimes and by Nazi Germany in particular. His early Zionist position must be viewed as necrologically motivated—as acting out of the fear of the corpses. In countless speeches and writings, his advocacy of the State of Israel counterbalances his role as a mourner and survivor of the Holocaust. For example, this fellow-sufferer delivers an eulogy to commemorate the victims of the resistance—"To the Heroes of the Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto" (1944). "We strive to be one in suffering and in the effort to achieve a better human society, that society which our prophets have so clearly and forcibly set before us as a goal." The messianic call of a Jewish homeland and the commemorative cry of Jewish sacrifice feed upon one another in the taking up of these prophetic terms.

But the complications are even more pronounced in Einstein's relations to the atomic bomb and his necrological actions on the brink of a nuclear disaster. On the one side, he comes as the prince of peace. He strives for a world government and for the end of all militarism. He engages in political activities designed to prevent or to guard against the piling up of the corpses. In an example of preemptive mourning, he warns of the apocalyptic possibilities of the hydrogen bomb: "If it is successful, radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and hence annihilation of any life on earth has been brought within the range of technical possibilities." In this nightmare scenario, the necrologist is haunted by "the ghostlike character of this development" and he urges mankind to heed the necrological call before it is too late.

Nevertheless, it cannot be forgotten that the warning sirens directed at the H-bomb are counterpoised by Einstein's post-mortem position as survivor and mourner in relation to the A-bomb and the peculiar role which he played in both its conception and deliverance. After all, Einstein once wrote that infamous letter to President Roosevelt outlining the necrological powers of nuclear energy and encouraging the building of the atomic bomb. Even more problematic, there is the widespread opinion that Einstein's discoveries in the physical sciences provided the theoretical framework for the generation of the atomic bomb in the first place. Against this assertion of his responsibility, he will become quite defensive: "I do not consider myself the father of the release of atomic energy. My part in it was quite indirect. I did not, in fact, foresee that it would be released in my time. I believed only that it was theoretically possible." While he may deny the charges of paternity (i.e., that the bomb is his baby or his illegitimate son) or even the possibility that he could survive it in time, his self-professed assertion of the theoretical link (i.e., relativity) between the grim reaper of modern warfare and himself does not offer a complete release. Even an "indirect" theoretical involvement demonstrates how mourning and melancholy hang over this monstrous scene of the fathering of the atomic bomb as his own lost son.

There is another factor to bring into the necrological data base. That is the question of timing. Einstein wrote his Autobiographisches/Autobiographical Notes in 1946. This date is decisive for a necrological approach to the autobiography as a work of mourning. This puts history just one year after the bomb and the end of the Jewish slaughter. It is only in these dark lights that the Einstein survivor decided to give an accounting or eulogizing of his own life. It is a remarkable moment that has to be conceived in the terms of a historical rupture. In Einstein's brain, it is as if one era had ended and another one had begun. Poised between the mourning of one era and his survival into another, he writes his autobiography. The interruptive force of this inaugural year is also underscored when Einstein delivers a special message around the same time with a title that challenges the standard notions of timekeeping in the divide of the nuclear disaster: "Year One—Atomic Age—A Message."

With these catastrophic backdrops in the socio-political landscape, the cosmographic calendar, and the life and work of a unique survivor and mourner, this essay will turn to the repeated figure of mourning in the Autobiographisches. This exegetical analysis focuses on the self-image of Einstein's autobiographical narrative as an obituary or "Nekrolog." Such an approach demands a review of the dynamics and scenography of the text at these necrological sites through the implementation of constructs from the literary critical disciplines. It restages the manner in which an intellectual biography of relativity physics inscribes itself as a subset of necrology, and the manner in which the story of a life transforms itself into the obituary pages.

II. ANOTHER HISTORIC EQUATION: AUTOBIOGRAPHY = NECROLOGY

Even when he is not deriving the formulae of relativity physics in its special or general theories, he cannot help but offer astonishing equations to the world. And in his Autobiographisches/Autobiographical Notes, Albert Einstein postulates a most important equation for the human sciences. In the process of composing his own intellectual autobiography, it turns out that an interdisciplinary contribution has been made to history and to the principles and axioms whereby the science of autobiography will have to be constituted. Substituting words for numbers, the equation will be read along the following lines: "Autobiographisches = Hier sitze ich… etwas wie den eigenen Nekrolog zu schreiben" ["Something Autobiographical = Here I sit… in order to write something like my own obituary"]. This is the title and the opening sentence employed by Einstein as he begins to write his autobiography. The present interpretation deduces that a sign (=) lies between them. In consequence, it concludes that Einstein begins with a pointed and epigrammatic definition of the essence of autobiography as he begins to write the story of his own life.

The story of his own life? Yet, the reclining and ironicizing Einstein teaches that the writing of one's own life is something like the writing of one's own death. Autobiography as necrology is a science of the living body's becoming-corpse. And, what is even more peculiar—this autobiographical writing will take the form of ein Nekrolog, an obituary—a writing of one's own life, after life and upon death. In other words, even as he begins to write his life, these words are coming from a voice beyond the grave. In terms of contemporary literary analysis, this dominant figure of autobiographical discourse is referred to as prosopopeia, the fiction of the voice from beyond the grave. Another voice—a necrological voice—dictates the life and mind of Albert Einstein even as Albert Einstein describes how he sat himself down to write his own story. Defamiliarizing the opening passage, the ghostly voice of necrology whispers something deadly into Einstein's ear: "There he sits in order to write something like…"

This necrological approach helps to situate Einstein's move towards the impersonal in the Autobiographisches. In a discussion of what religion offered to him as a child, Einstein notes that it was "ein erster Versuch …, mich aus den Fesseln des 'Nur-Persönlichen' zu befreien" ["a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the 'merely personal"]. The "merely personal" depends upon a repression of the problematic science of corpses. Placed in quotations, this marks Einstein's superimposition of an "extra-personal world" ["ausserpersdnliche Welt"] as a necessary complement for the staging of himself as autobiographical subject. Setting up another necrological device, here the "ausserpersonlich" haunts even the merest of persons. The resulting neutralization provides another way to articulate the autobiographico-necrological equation. For the story of the merely personal = Here I sit in order to write something like my own (in the margins of the extra-personal).

Each of the phrases of the introductory maxim presents the paradoxes confronting the autobiographico-necrological activity. In each of its nuances, one suspects that Einstein is well aware of the black humour attending the composition of his own "Nekrolog," of the necrological forces that give and take away such awareness. First, there is the matter of one's own obituary, "den eigenen Nekrolog." Properly speaking [Eigentlich], I know of no such thing as my own obituary. Of course, there is the logical impossibility of writing before one's death what can only be written after one's death as well as the problem of writing after one's death in the first (or the last) place. Furthermore, one cannot possess ("my own") that form of inscription which attests to the dispossession and dispersion of one's own subjectivity. This oblique status of the necrological is demonstrated by the imprecise phrasing which is placed around "my own obituary." Only something like "something like" ["etwas wie"] can point to the living-dying state of the subject as necrologist composing "something autobiographical" or of the Einstein zombie. This borderline position and positioning of the subject has been set forth in the first three words of the text. "Hier sitze ich. …" The necrographer remains seated. He is to be imagined neither as an upstanding rigid rod nor as a straight line stretched to infinity, neither in the vertical nor in the horizontal. He is not the one who stands because he can do no other. In between is the only position possible for the necrological writings.

There has been an omission of a phrase from the first sentence of the Autobiographisches to be inserted at and about the proper time, "… um mit siebenundsechzig Jahren" [at the age of sixty-seven]. This is the set interval of the present measured on the clock that counts historical time in the Euclidean frame of the merest of velocities. And "um mit siebenundsechzig Jahren" certainly places it into the chronological context Out of His Later Years (published in 1950). What is the relationship between this particular linear time measurement and Einstein's autobiographico-necrological equation? The clock can be set back to any arbitrarily selected point on the time line—going back seventeen, thirty-seven, forty-seven years, and so on. This is the time for reminiscence ["Erinnerung"]. This is memory in the making or to what will be referred in the Autobiographisches in "retrospect" ["im Ruckblick"]. Einstein recalls: "… derjetztige Mensch von siebenundsechzig ist nicht derselbe wie der vonfuinfzig, dreissig undzwanzig. Jede Erinnerung istgefärbt durch dasjetztige So-Sein, also durch einen tru'gerischen Blickpunkt. Diese Erwaigung ko'nnte wohl abschrecken" ["… today's person of sixty-seven is by no means the same as was the one of fifty, of thirty, or of twenty. Every reminiscence is colored by one's present state, hence by a deceptive point of view. This consideration could easily deter one"]. At any point in the time line or in the coloring of one's present state, one can read his age as an independent variable which in no way influences the essence of the autobiographic-necrological equation. It is a measurement to be inserted in the following manner: "Here I sit [at the age of fifty] in order to write something like my obituary"; "Here I sit [at the age of thirty] in order to write something like my obituary." It is nothing but a confirmation of how every living present always carries the signature of memoirs from beyond the grave.

Now, at the age of sixty-seven, Einstein hesitates. This is not because he fears the approach or the arrival of senility. This phenomenon could just as easily happen to the autobiographer-necrographer at the age of thirty. In these ageold considerations, Einstein raises the question of the effects of time in the faults and gaps of memory that pass between the dimming of the past and the coloring of the present and that problematize his total recall of himself by himself and by others. "Nach einiger Uberlegung fuihlte ich, wie unvollkommen ein sokcher Versuch ausfallen muss" ["After some reflection, I felt how imperfect any such attempt is bound to be"]. In these opening passages, Einstein binds imperfection and the ways of error ["die Irrwege"] to the act of reflection, to the imperfections inherent in these reflections. The way of error leads to doubts about the validity of the truth claims of autobiographical writing. More importantly, these doubts radically question the identity of the autobiographical subject. What is the connection between today's person and the one of x number of years ago when the former is by no means the same as the one of ago? What is or was the truth of who he was when who he was is not who he is? Einstein's insertion of these Zeno-like paradoxes reveal that one constitutes an identity over time and the autobiographical narrative only by writing over the necrological institution of the present.

With the insertion of this deceptive variable, the equation is beginning to look much more complicated. For example, "Autobiographisches" = Here I sit [at the age of fifty] [deceptively recalling my life at the age of thirty] in order to write my obituary. While the deception factor affects the claims of the accuracy of the autobiographical record, it does not alter the essence of the equation. Rather, it shows in a profound manner how autobiography and necrology are bound to one another. The way of error demonstrates how the necrological forces invade the accounting of one's life so that the present will be colored by (something like) a putrefying and rotting cadaver.

But, still, the autobiographer as necrographer will not be deterred. He writes on: "Aber man kann doch Manches aus dem Selbst-Erleben schopfen, was einem andern Bewusstsein nicht zugdnglich ist" ["Nevertheless much can be gathered out of one's own experience that is not open to another consciousness"]. While he does return at this juncture to a necrological analysis, it is nevertheless necessary to understand how this conclusion in its essential affirmation of the autobiographical project depends upon necrological considerations. For the condition of possibility for the gathering of one's own experience is opened up by recalling oneself as an other. The self can only reminisce about itself ["Selbst-Erleben"] and constitute itself through the adoption of a specular relationship which addresses itself to and through the other. Or, as Einstein puts it in terms of the Autobiographisches, only "after some reflection …" ["nach einiger Uberlegung"].

In the beginning (if there was such a thing), this reflection is the first law of necrology. This is all. Recasting and inverting the Fortean epigraph through Einstein's autobiographical text, the necrologist proclaims the following law:

Axiom 1. The science of the autobiographer begins with the obituary.

III. NECROLOGIZING THE AUTOBIOGRAPHISCHES

Having set up the basic equation of autobiography and necrology in the opening sentence of the Autobiographisches, one finds that Einstein's text returns to the inscription of the "Nekrolog" in four other instances which call for a necrological reading.

A. Scenes 2 and 3: Necrology's Interruption and Return

When the "Nekrolog" makes its second posthumous appearance in the Autobiographisches, it is linked to the dynamics of interruption. "Nachdem ich mich nun einmal dazu habe hinreissen lassen, den notdürftig begonnenen Nekrolog zu unterbrechen …" ["Now that I have allowed myself to be carried away sufficiently to interrupt my barely started obituary …"]. What has happened to his story? Einstein has interrupted the Nekrolog in order to be carried away by a number of philosophical speculations about wonder. Now he interrupts these interruptions to reflect upon the fact that it has been interrupted and in order to let himself be carried away even further so that the reader will have to excuse him for moving on to his so-called "epistemological credo": "[S]cheue ich mich nicht hier in ein paar Sätzen mein erkenntnistheoretisches Credo auszudrücken" ["I shall not hesitate to state here in a few sentences my epistemological credo"]. Yet, whether he knows it or not, this movement of rupture and drift reveals an Einstein at his necrographic best. He has been exposed to the interruptive force of necrology and to necrology as interruptive force. He thinks that he has interrupted the obituary. He thinks that he has drifted away from the obituary. But this is necrology in the making. It demonstrates the irreducible precedence of the interruption for the accounting of the self. This is the "barely started" space of the autobiographical subject as necrologist. It recalls the specular scene that allows him to become himself or to get carried away with himself.

Indeed, one might say that Einstein's epistemological credo also depends upon such a rupture. For the credo points to how epistemology can be located as a necrological effect. On the one side, there is "die Gesamtheit der Sinnen-Erlebnisse, aufder andern Seite die Gesamtheit der Begriffe und Sätze, die in den Büchern niedergelegt sind" ["the totality of sense experiences and, on the other, the totality of the concepts and propositions that are laid down in books"]. The problem, of course, is how to move from the one to the other—from experience to theory, from the world to the books. How does one open an epistemological space? It is at this juncture that Einstein makes a leap to bridge the gap: "Die Verbindung der letzteren mit den ersteren ist rein intuitiv…" ["The connection of the latter with the former is purely intuitive"]. It is not the place of a necrological approach to judge the truth or to explicate the nature of this intuitive leap. Rather, it recalls how the intuitive leap offers the means to bridge or to efface the necrological gap. After another two paragraphs of epistemological credo—"Nun zurück zum Nekrolog" ["And now back to the obituary"]. In both of these instances ("Nekrolog" 2 and 3), it would appear that Einstein tries to differentiate two parts of his text—a necrological and a non-necrological portion. This is a very odd distinction in light of the opening equation (Autobiography = Necrology) and it is a distinction that Einstein later disavows in the fourth occurrence of the "Nekrolog." Rather than attacking the Einstein text for these logical inconsistencies, this shift in position demonstrates how the necrological border slips through these attempts to set it into place and to master it. When one examines this excluded portion further, one finds that it outlines a history of modern philosophy. It offers "eine Bemerkung zur geschichtlichen Entwicklung" ["a remark as to the historical development"] on the gap between concept and experience in the thought of Hume and Kant. Indeed, these remarks inscribe "historical development" as a necrological effect. Einstein's explanation of causality reveals how the project of historical development is tied to the realm of concepts. "Alle Begriffe, auch die erlebnisndchsten, sind vom logischen Gesichtspunkte aus freie Setzungen, genau wie der Begriffder Kausalitdt, an den sich in erster Linie die Fragestellung angeschlossen hat" ["All concepts, even those closest to experience, are from the point of view of logic freely chosen posits, just as is the concept of causality, which was the point of departure for this inquiry in the first place"]. The theory-experience distinction reiterates and repeats the necrological interruption as the point of departure in the first place. Between the logical concept (e.g., "historical development") and the sensory experience lies the repetition of the interruption. Now, for the constitution of every present moment of now, there is the eternal return of a problematic point of departure:

Axiom 2. Rather than interrupting or returning to necrology, necrology marks the return to the interruption.

B. Scenes 4 and 5: The Necrological Climax, or The Essentially Yes

In the Autobiographisches, the funerary speech is by no means restricted to Einstein himself. The fourth necrological instance is preceded by a paragraph that is something like a eulogy. One imagines at this juncture Albert Einstein sitting by the grave of the gravity master, Sir Isaac Newton. After pages of autobiographical reflections on the merits of the theory of relativity, Einstein backtracks in the following apologia.

Genug davon. Newton verzeh' mir; dufandst den einzigen Weg der zu deiner Zeit für einen Menschen von hochster Denk- und Gestaltungskraft eben noch miiglich war. Die Begriffe, die du schufst, sind auch jetzt noch fihrend in unserem physikalischen Denken, obwohl wir nun wissen, dass sie durch andere, der Sphdre der unmittelbaren Erfahrung ferner stehende ersetzt werden miissen, wenn wir ein tieferes Begreifen der Zusammenhange anstreben.

[Enough of this. Newton, forgive me: you found just about the only way possible in your age for a man of highest reasoning and creative power. The concepts that you created are even today still guiding our thinking in physics, although we now know that they will have to be replaced by others father removed from the sphere of immediate experience, if we aim at a profounder understanding of relationships.]

In this testamentary homage and most intimate apology, Einstein slips into the direct and informal address of the second person ("Newton, forgive me," "you found," "you created," etc.) in his exhuming the dead hero of another physical age. In fact, this address has similarities with necromancy, the art of prediction by means of communication with the dead. This address delivers the reverse side of an encounter with the fiction of the voice from beyond the grave. Far removed from Newton's immediate experience, Albert Einstein—who has reinscribed and remotivated the Newtonian text through relativity physics—assumes the role of the unknown addressee from another age. Given its position in the text, these necrological remarks counterpose Einstein's biographical eulogy of Newton with his own autobiographical necrology wherein the proceeds to put himself into Newton's place in the subsequent paragraph.

The fourth recitation brings the most astonishing results. Appropriately enough, the "Nekrolog" is set up to be spoken through the words of another and in the form of a question. It is rendered as a rhetorical device and placed within quotation marks. This is a singular occurrence in the Autobiographisches and a signal that something out of the ordinary is taking place. The reader is hailed as the unknown addressee in order to ask both the author and the text in this astonished tone: "Soil dies ein Nekrolog sein?' mag der erstaunte Leserfragen" [" 'Is this supposed to be an obituary?' the astonished reader will likely ask"]. But an even more astonished reader will likely ask: "Who asks this question?" Who asks whether this should be ein Nekrolog? For it is the necrological voice itself which has been inserted into Einstein's text to ask whether this is supposed to be necrology.

"Im wesentlichen ja, möchte ich antworten. Denn das Wesentliche im Dasein eines Menschen von meiner Art liegt …" ["I would like to reply: essentially yes. For the essential in the being of a man of my type lies …"]. Here the quotation is cut and the essential answer is postponed. But this is only in order to show how Einstein has already delivered and delimited necrology in its essential structure and in its structuration of the essential. The "Is this supposed to be an obituary?"—the call of and from the necrological voice—marks the questionable ontological status of the science of corpses in the being [Dasein] of a man of his type or in any type. This has nothing at all to do with the privileging of the how and the what of thinking over the doing or the suffering. Moreover, autobiography as necrology enacts or performs the occurrence of the "Is this supposed to be an obituary?"

"Essentially yes." What a puzzling answer! Why not yes, a simple yes, simply yes. What is the difference between yes and essentially yes? Why the insertion of this modifier? Why place what is essential as a modifier or as a supplement? Why this remainder around the yes, this hanging together with the yes? This is supposed to be an obituary. Or, to put it another way, this is how one writes necrologically, in affirming and acknowledging the other in the midst of essence.

In the advanced study of Einstein's Autobiographisches, one approaches the institution of the following principle:

Axiom 3. Necrology affirms the essential and the essential modifies the affirmation.

In the final inscription of the "Nekrolog," there is the attempt to give a limited and definitive definition in a declarative modality: "Also kann der Nekrolog sich in der Hauptsache auf Mitteilung von Gedanken beschrdnken, die in meinem Streben eine erhebliche Rolle spielten" ["Consequently, the obituary can limit itself in the main to the communicating of thoughts that have played a considerable role in my striving"]. Here Einstein seeks to define the autobiographico-necrological equation to the exclusion of marginal or performative effects—the playing out of the inconsiderable or on the sides, the miscommunication of a thought or of a lack of communication in general. At this juncture, it is necessary to read Einstein against himself and to listen to the necrological voice in the unconscious of the text that plays dice with his universe. The play is written on the necrological border of the essentially yes. This reading and role-playing involve the intertwining and the interchange of Streben and Sterben, of striving and of dying. In an autobiographico-necrological interpretation of the text, there comes a superimposition and a doubled exposure in the twists and turns of these two letters. 'Also kann sich der Nekrolog in der Hauptsache auf Mitteilung von Gedanken beschrdnken, die in meinem Streben-Sterben eine erhebliche Rolle spielten."

IV Necrological Opportunistics

In the "Reply to Criticisms" in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, the essay which closes the volume which begins with the bilingual publication of the Autobiographisches, Einstein makes his famous remarks about the proper and improper relations between science and epistemology. While one might consider these remarks far from a biographical or an autobiographical analysis, a closer inspection reveals that these remarks contain another striking self-portrait of/by Albert Einstein. In fact, taking away certain restrictions, these comments might be placed as a supplement to the epistemological credo of the Autobiographisches.

Die äusseren Bedingungen, die fur ihn durch die Erfahrungstatsachen gegeben sind, gestatten es ihm nicht, sich beim Aufbau seines Weltbildes zu stark durch die Bindung an ein erkenntnistheoretisches System einschrdnken zu lassen. Daher muss er dem systematischen Erkenntnistheoretiker als eine Art bederkenloser Opportunist erscheinen.…

[The external conditions which are set for him by the facts of experience do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted in the construction of his conceptual world by the adherence to an epistemological system. He therefore must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist.…]

This description offers a thinly-masked case of prosopoperia in the conferring of a mask onto oneself. Every time that you see "he" in this quotation, you should remember that it is "I" who am speaking to you. Every time that you see "him" or "himself" in this quotation, you should not forget that it is "me" and "myself" to whom "I" am referring. Therefore, I must appear to you as a type of unscrupulous opportunist. Keeping these substitutive equations in mind (he-the scientist = I-Einstein), the remarks might be read and interpreted as an allegory for the autobiographer and for the practice of autobiography as necrography. In other words, using some unscrupulous opportunistics, one could just as easily substitute the word "necrographer" in place of the word "scientist" in an attempt to locate "his" antecedent. In the construction of his and other conceptual worlds, the necrographer should not be restricted to any epistemological system. He is in a similar position to the scientist who experiments upon the "object" so that the facts set for him by experience and by external conditions will be subject only to the practice of an unscrupulous opportunism.

The epistemological self-portrait also establishes another specular relationship. Einstein now reads himself through the eyes of the men who practice science under the adhering label of systematic epistemology. He now imagines the necrological voice in the form of the systematic epistemologist who has come back to condemn his text. It is important to understand that the critique is linked to an inability to accept the dynamics of Einstein's necrological strategies which put epistemological systematics into question. In fact, the systematic epistemologist cannot accept the realization that he will have been made to come back in a necrological guise—as demonstrated in this passage through Einstein's text.

For the purposes of this study, it is important to outline how this brand of unscrupulous opportunism is connected with necrologics. Why is it that the necrologician will have to be an unscrupulous opportunist? This has to do with the adhesive-unadhesive status of the necrological text. As Einstein demonstrates, the autobiographical text as obituary will have been cut off (even ripped off) from the life of its addressor from the first instance. Likewise, it will be picked up in and out of every type of context by any number of unknown addressees for all time to come. In this manner, necrologics reglues the set adhesion factor of systematic epistemology. Like Albert Einstein about to begin his autobiography, the necrological text sits waiting for some speculative opportunist to come along at the opportune moment—at the moment (in) which he makes opportune—and to stake or stick his or her claim upon it. Unscrupulously, he will have found another opportunity to stage the necrological text. At this juncture, one returns to a literal meaning of both opportunist and unscrupulous as unprincipled. As in the relations between Newton and Einstein, there can be no first or final principle when given this unscrupulous structure of the necrological text and the affirmation of an unlimited supply of golden opportunities.

These two forces—the provisionally dubbed, necrologics and unscrupulous opportunism—will make it difficult to maintain the idea of a proper context. It becomes difficult to keep or to hold the autobiographical subject with the acclaimed name of Einstein within a set context. For the necrologics of the text insists upon the detaching capacity to break with every given context and to engender an infinity of new contexts without ever reaching the stuck, or the final sticking point. Necrologics removes the restrictions to the construction of conceptual worlds. It will continue to supply the demands of unscrupulous opportunists to come through its citation and its recitation. In this way, Einstein's unscrupulous opportunist outmaneuvers the fixed principles and the adherence of the systematic epistemologist.

Out of this context—and out from under a seal of approval stamped in New Jersey sometime ago—Einstein's necrological opportunistics affirms (essentially) the most appropriate and inappropriate of (auto) biographical writings. These are offered as necrographical contributions to an unscrupulous science of Einstein studies in the production of effects beyond his presence and beyond his life which no context can ever enclose.