Abstract
<p>Are we accepting of death, or in denial of it, and what can we learn, that might help us think and act meaningfully amidst the climate emergency, from the different ways death has been imagined, theorized and organized in Western social and intellectual history? Beginning with the role of tragedy, and then philosophy, in Greek antiquity, before exploring the history of European attitudes to death and their increasing entanglement with colonial atrocities and politically organized killing, this interdisciplinary study probes the work of philosophers, sociologists, historians and psychoanalysts to help make sense of mortality in the Anthropocene. Examining the denial of death discourse that was hegemonic in earlier mortality studies, it critically analyses the opposing argument that we are today more reconciled with the realities of death. Drawing on existential philosophy, Levinas’s theory of our responsibility for the death of others, and Harmut Rosa’s account of social acceleration and the catastrophe of resonance, Bowring highlights notable points of contact between anomic feelings of disappointment and missing out, growing climate anxiety and despair over the future conditions of life on earth, and the sense of wasted efforts and lost purposes that is characteristic of the midlife crisis. In response to this malaise he argues that we need to think of mortality as more than just a life of finite time, to recognize instead our shared vulnerability and passivity, and to understand how this makes us both dependent on others and responsible for other equally precarious forms of life.</p>