From Peter Weiss, "Convalescence", a journal entry he wrote "two months after a near fatal heart attack in Stockholm, the day after hearing of the death of one of his oldest friends", writes Danny Hayward who translated this piece of text.
Danny continues: "Le roi est mort, vive le roi!, the source of his central repeating refrain, already articulates a type of life that persists beyond or in spite of death, a life-in-death or death-in-life that disdains the reduction of life itself to the merely biological vitality of an isolated human organism. But that those who live on despite death in Weiss's texts are not kings but alcoholics, the forgotten, the prematurely killed, is an expression of more than just hostility to the hierarchical thinking within which conceptions of 'immortality' in Western thought have generally been confined. An articulation of his belief in the centrality of (expanded) class struggle to all forms of human social life, his long litany to the dead, his partisanship and praise for them, is also a partisanship for the upsurge of living experience against the hegemony of denial. As an act of disinhibition, his text opposes the deadening of the social senses that turns progressive optimism into a necropolitics of its own."