Abstract
The book presents a philosophical interpretation of the relationship between consciousness of death and work; on the grounds of analyses of Hegel's, Patočka's, Arendt's and others' works it suggests that in the European intellectual tradition there is a fundamental view which links the human condition to work as the appropriate reaction to consciousness of death. Work in this sense transforms the experience of mortality, it creates the human world whose primary function is to shield man from the burdensome experience of mortality.
The first half of the interpretation is a case study of Mozart's Don Giovanni, and it suggests that the opera portrays Don Giovanni as a presence of liminal, untamed individuality, a presence which disruptively invades the human world, confronting it once again with the unmitigated force of mortality and thus he must be eliminated. Don Giovanni is the incarnation of a pre-human or un-human principle.
Leporello, Don Giovanni's servant, on the other hand represents the human world, which is the unnatural, tamed, disciplined common agreement about what it means to be human. The book presents a Hegelian reading of the relationship between Don Giovanni and the human world, represented here by Leporello, from the viewpoint of the lordship-bondship dialectic.
The relationship between death and work is finally understood as one of the fundamental structures in the European view of man. The book traces this relationship to the most important of anthropological myths, to the myth of the Fall of man, where Adam undergoes a transformation marked by the emergence of consciousness of mortality, resulting in work as his punishment.