This is a phrase resurrected from Max Weber’s essay on disenchantment, “Science as a Vocation” (1946), in which he sardonically offered the bosom of the Church to the modern, disenchanted self. Suggesting that such a return was not feasible, he told his audience that the man of science had to suck it up and stoically continue doing his work despite the meaningless present and the already-obsolete future.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2007).
We are reminded of this in a video piece by the Chinese artist Yang Zhenzhong called I Will Die (2000–2005). It shows a series of faces looking straight and emotionless into the camera, repeating one after the other the same natural fact: “I will die. I will die. I will die.” The seriality of the faces in linear time, each declaring an absolute end, collapses individual subjective time into the eternal time of nothingness, in which none of the people in the video—none of you, none of us—will exist. Under their cumulative weight, the banality of individual finitude turns into a sense of horror in the face of nature’s holocaust.
Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
On public and private religion see José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and Talal Asad, “Trying to Understand French Secularism,” in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, eds. Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006).
See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
See Beth Conklin and Lynn Morgan, “Babies, Bodies and the Production of Personhood in North America and a Native Amazonian Society,” Ethos Vol. 24, No. 4 (1996): 657–694; and Margaret Lock, Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
Some of these ideas, especially in relation to the colonial encounter, were covered by Anselm Franke’s show and comprehensive catalogue Animism (Franke 2010). They were further elaborated in e-flux journal 36 (Summer 2012). See →.
See →.
See Sharon Kaufman, “In the Shadow of ‘Death with Dignity’: Medicine and the Cultural Quandaries of the Vegetative State,” American Anthropologist Vol. 102, No. 1 (2000).
Ray D. Madoff, Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1999).
See Karin Knorr Cetina, “The Rise of a Culture of Life,” European Molecular Biology Organization Reports, Special Issue, Vol. 6 (2005): 76–80.
See, for example, →.
Eugene Thacker, The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
Gillian Beer, “Darwin and the Uses of Extinction,” Victorian Studies, Vol. 51, No. 2 (2009): 321–331.
See Reinhart Kosselleck, “History, Histories and Formal Structures of Time,” The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. T.S. Presner et. al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); and Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (London: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
See William Sims Bainbridge, The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010).
See Samantha Murphy, “World of Warcraft Predicts Future,” New Scientist (March 2010).
See →. I owe this reference to Anna Wheeler.
See Lesley Sharp, Bodies, Commodities and Biotechnologies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
Ibid.
See Madoff, Immortality and the Law.
CyBeRev used to be open to anyone, but now your have to be approved to participate. See →.
See Benjamin P. Best, “Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice,” Rejuvenation Research Vol. 11, No. 2 (2008).
See M. Farstada et. al., “Rewarming From Accidental Hypothermia by Extracorporeal Circulation: A Retrospective Study,” European Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery 20 (2001): 58–64; and B.H. Walpoth et. al., “Outcome Of Survivors Of Accidental Deep Hypothermia and Circulatory Arrest Treated with Extracorporeal Blood Warming,” The New England Journal Of Medicine Vol. 337, No. 21 (1997): 1500–5.
This paper is based on a talk delivered at the 2012 CAA meeting in Los Angeles, on the panel “Live Forever: Currency and Posterity of Performance Art,” organized by Sandra Skurvida and Jovana Stokic. My thanks go to Sandra Skurvida for inviting me to the panel and commenting on the paper. I also want to thank the students in my seminar “Post-Secular Aesthetics?” for helping me to push some of these ideas further.