The men, Blaise Pascal wrote, “having been unable to heal from the death they resolved to live happy, to forget about it.” As contradictory as it sounds, the thought of Pascal still belongs to a wise strategy, that same wisdom that in the fourteenth century, before the advance of the plague, she allowed theologians and artists to develop a consolatory ars Moriendi . Life and death were present together, yet distinct. The death was the limit, the life form. Uncertain omnia, only certain terminals teaching of St. Augustine moreover, that in that certain circumscribed the risk of life and his bet on the way. Today things have changed. We live in what the Canadian sociologist Céline Lafontaine called postmortem society. The company’s post-mortem begins just where the boundaries between life and death mingle and become entangled and not only men, pascalianamente, do not think about, but an entire techno-nihilist system assumes for himself and on himself a delegate in white and work for the expulsion of the limit – all limits – and its lead from the horizon of social and symbolic existence which, sense or no sense, now proceeds to proliferation, rather than generation.
Unlimited
the idea of death, and with it the idea of time and limits, have failed. Today is longer die, you die “something”: death has decomposed, deconstructed, deritualized, fragmented, subtracted from the social sphere. Luciano Manicardi, vice prior of the monastic community of Bose , has thought long and hard about the meaning of this systemic rupture. To him we owe one of the most interesting analyzes on postmortem society. Society characterized by the will to live without aging, to enhance the privatization of death (the case of the Belgian law on euthanasia child is critical to that effect). If death has always been tamed with rites and symbolizations made him a moment of reaffirmation of social cohesion, now, explains Manicardi, “abandoned to the individual and private ritualizzazioni it appears detached from a community and split by the social bond, so that let man not so much for a great freedom of choice, but an anguished despair and loneliness. As Norbert Elias wrote: “Never before have men died so quietly and hygienically and never have been so alone. ‘”
We met father Manicardi, what follows is a long conversation with him. We hope to contribute to the debate.
Every company relies on a bet of immortality. What kind of bet is ours? Never before has death seems removed and at the same time overexposed, exorcised and “normalized”: Is this not “handle death” through hyper apparatus, rather than to question? When
the same in which man discovers himself deadly, elaborates strategies for overcoming of death. Whether it’s giving a future to himself through his children and his descendants, it is a strategy that sees religious life post-mortem , it is a political strategy as happened in ancient Greek democracy in which the hero who died young escaped the ravages of old age and always made sure undying fame sung and narrated from generation to generation by bards, the limit of death has constituted a challenge for humans to accommodate trying to overcome that somehow same limit. If this happens in front of any kind of limit,
The death is the paradigm of the unsurpassable limit, the limit par excellence, the limit of limits. What happens now about death and dying concerns ultimately the challenge that the limit poses to humans.
The challenge of our present Western society is not religious or political, but it is radically secularised and individualistic: it sees the possibility, left flashed impressive arsenal deployed biomedical, can win the war against death, to take away the quality of last word on human life. While biogenetics is trying to create life, the geriatric engineering and regenerative medicine seek to prolong life and to die the death. In this context, the exhibition and the overexposure of death is the other side of its reduction to silence. Never before has actually we talked about death, but also the inflation of words about death can be the form in which it shuts death itself and prevents you from talking. The removing its quality not only of last word, but the original word. And shuts it tells an unpleasant truth:
Life is as it is limited, it has an end, and precisely from this assumption so basic and simple you can live a “happy” and also ethically committed. Assuming an ethic of Limit.
aggressive attitude towards death is thus the post-modern radicalism individualistic attitude that is expressed by saying that death is mine and I run it myself, I pretend “the right” to die how, where and when I want. But besides this, we can not hide the humanizing approach to dying that is gaining momentum in the hospice movement and the development of palliative care, which react to the dehumanization of a biomedical approach that is exclusively used for the lengthening of the biological life . In these areas we try to give word to the dying considering it a constituent part of life.
What does this tell us about the kind of society we live in, the fact that it is perhaps for the first men seem to believe they can win their game with death? It seems a very different challenge from that given by Pascal, where everything was about the way (though I believe that everything makes sense, and I do not have what I lose? But if I believe that nothing makes sense, and instead has … I lose everything) . projected bet in an after, in an infinite (all-zero), crushed more than a present without flow …
It tells us that that dimension of salvation that until today was essentially run by religions and glimpsed a beyond, it is now being replaced by healthy, well definitely more tangible, palpable and accessible to disenchanted men. There are those who speak of the religion of health.
The biotechnology assume a religious role, but radically immanent: the techno-religious promises access to eternal life here and not in ‘beyond. Allied nanotechnologies with genetic engineering make man the subject of a new “creation”: killing death, man eliminates God and do his own creator. Eternity promised in a hereafter heard as no longer credible, replacing the promise of a etherization of life here, in this .
It tells the anguished relationship we have with time. In fact happens is the reduction of the time dimension to the present and immediate. Time becomes an eternal present and the future is seen only as a forward projection of this: there’s more to come, but there is only evolution. The significant paradigm there is provided by technologies that live in constant evolution: the technological evolution invades our daily lives and determines consumption, behaviors and lifestyles. The company that tries to eliminate the death and thinks it can tend to the time control, the elimination of the responsibility for the future and the establishment of a culture of amnesia, which implied defuse innovative and creative positions in the work of memory. It tells us, ultimately, the risk of immaturity, fossilization, that our society runs.
The company that pursues the dream of eliminating the death (and old age, cultured as its premise and close relative) tries to cancel the devastating effects of time, but really get to kill the same time.
Remember
In his of the memory limit. The human condition in postmortem company (Vita e Pensiero, Milano 2011) she insisted on the fact that the consciousness of death is constitutive of the human. Yet, we go to a postmortem society, a society that has lost the memory limit that is. This means that, beyond the sociological fact, it’s all new anthropology to advance?
Yes, this is a radically individualistic anthropology cultivating dell’amortalità thought. Being immortality religious unverifiable hypothesis, what the postmortem company pursues is the indefinite prolongation of life, a life that remains nonetheless deadly because man will always perish by accident or disaster or violent death …
in this anthropology we are trying to reach a “body without death”, a body of silicon, of which we now see only partial advances in prosthetics or in organ grafts and of body parts which are now standard practice in medicine. If these fantasies come true, you can still say that man is his body? Of course, you will have to ask the question in a new way: Who is man?
Another consequence of the anthropological view underlying the postmortem is its a-political dimension in favor of a radical individualism. Already, national policies become more and more bio-policies, centered on themes of the body, of birth, of death, of health and disease. Add to this the indifference towards future generations: If thinking about the future and future generations implies to reckon with his own death, then you absolutizes the present as is the space-time ego, the only subject worthy of attention . A trendy ultra-liberal American philosopher puts it this way: “Older people are not required to die to make room for a new human being” (Christine Overall).
If death has always been tamed with rites and symbolizations, with gestures and words that made him a moment of reaffirmation of social cohesion, now abandoned to the individual and private ritualizzazioni it appears detached from a community and separated from the social bond, so let man not so much for a great freedom of choice, but an anguished despair and loneliness. As Norbert Elias wrote: “Never before have men died so quietly and hygienically and never have been so alone.”
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