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Mortality: Promoting the interdisciplinary study of death and dying

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Sociology, mortality and solidarity. An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman on death, dying and immortality
Michael Hviid Jacobsen & Foreword by Douglas J. Davies
a a b

Department of Sociology and Social Work, Aalborg University, Denmark

b

University of Durham, UK Version of record first published: 09 Nov 2011.

To cite this article: Michael Hviid Jacobsen & Foreword by Douglas J. Davies (2011): Sociology, mortality and solidarity. An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman on death, dying and immortality, Mortality: Promoting the interdisciplinary study of death and dying, 16:4, 380-393 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13576275.2011.614445

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Mortality, Vol. 16, No. 4, November 2011

INTERVIEW

Sociology, mortality and solidarity. An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman on death, dying and immortality
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MICHAEL HVIID JACOBSEN

Department of Sociology and Social Work, Aalborg University, Denmark

Foreword by DOUGLAS J. DAVIES

University of Durham, UK

Foreword In offering a Mortality-focused foreword to Michael Hviid Jacobsens valuable interview with the distinguished sociologist Zygmunt Bauman on, death, dying and immortality, I want to speak of boundaries, imagination and of older age. Boundaries are relevant because their negative capacity often divides knowledge into isolated academic domains with many sociologists paying scant attention to issues of death. It was interesting, for example, that in a three-page interview with Bauman for the British Sociological Associations newsletter, the issue of death is entirely absent even though the sad death of Pierre Bourdieu becomes the occasion for comment on that scholars role as a public intellectual in France (Blackshaw, 2002). And it is with an eye to such intellectual activity that boundaries link with the theme of imagination, one that also has a place in the BSA interview with its allusion to a sociological sixth sense. Bauman glosses this with the statement that learning sociological methods may guarantee a job, but not wisdom and insight (p. 2). He explains that he has learned much from insightful novelists even when compared with the books of oft quoted sociological authorities. Here his commitment to a sociological imagination raises an intriguing question over the role of imagination, not only in our creative work within the detail of our usual academic boundaries or professional vocation but also in our shared ventures across disciplines. And it is just such an imagination that our Mortality journal has sought to expand through its exploration of many approaches to death in its articles, invited special editions and in its alliance with the Death,

Correspondence: E-mail: mhj@socsci.aau.dk ISSN 1357-6275 (print) ISSN 1469-9885 (online) 2011 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13576275.2011.614445

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Dying and Disposal Conferences. Jacobsens interview, too, provides its own form of boundary skipping and imaginative engagement through its own choice of questions. Finally, I simply note my third topic, that of older age. This signposts an awareness of life-passing and the retrospective capacity that sees the limits of boundaries and senses a wisdom of accumulating insight. For it should not be forgotten that Bauman was already 68 years old in 1992 when his MortalityImmortality was published and 85 when this interview was conducted by Jacobsen.
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REFERENCE TONY BLACKSHAW. Interview with Professor Zygmunt Bauman. Network. Number 83. October 2002: 13.

The idea behind and background of the interview Polish-English sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (born 1925) is undoubtedly one of the most prolic, widely read, discussed, celebrated and recognised of contemporary social thinkers. There are few sociologists and scholars working in related disciplines today who are unfamiliar with his work and ideas. In Baumans work, which now spans more than half a century, he has continuously critically confronted and deconstructed many of the classic themes of sociology such as inequality, rationalisation, community, globalisation, individualisation and identity. Simultaneously, he has been instrumental in paving the way for novel and thought-provoking understandings and diagnoses of themes often neglected by other sociologists such as the Holocaust, morality, freedom and last but not least death. Finally, he has coined the colourful term liquid modernity that has by now increasingly captured the sociological imagination of many of his contemporaries as a fertile concept to capture the present state of social development. Despite Baumans international reputation as a key social thinker, if one looks through the many books published every year on death, dying and bereavement, his name still remains a surprisingly infrequent reference. There might be many reasons for this. First of all, Baumans explicit work of death and dying is predominantly contained within one single book (Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies from 1992) with a few scattered discussions and analyses in subsequent book titles. As such, there is therefore no coherent body of ideas and no systematic theory on death and dying to consult, as Bauman has always made a virtue of pursuing the fragmented and the non-systematic. Second, Baumans texts may be read as theoretically abstract verging on the philosophical, especially his thoughts on death and dying, and make it difcult to transfer his ideas to empirical research or practical problem-solving in relation to death and dying. Finally, most of Baumans writings on death and dying are dated back to the early 1990s, which to some may seem dusty or outdated. However, some topics (including death) never age and Baumans ideas on death and dying remain as vital and important today as when they were rst conceived. So despite any such

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reservations, those who venture into Zygmunt Baumans universe of ideas and interpretations will nd a sociological and thoroughly humanistic source for understanding the presence of death in society. For example, Bauman in his work writes about a deconstruction of mortality in modernity and of immortality in postmodernity, of various life strategies and survival strategies in contemporary society, the disappearance of death and daily rehearsals of death as well as death, responsibility and morality. All in all, Baumans contribution to studies of death, dying and immortality illuminates the socially constructed nature of mortality and the unmistakable moral aspect involved in living (and dying) with and not least living and dying for others. I wanted to highlight some of the important ideas for scholars and practitioners working in death and dying found in the work of Zygmunt Bauman. Thus, the interview should provide food for thought for those interested in engaging with some of the big issues regarding human mortality, solidarity and the sociological status and importance of death, dying and immortality. Apart from the rst question below, taken from an earlier interview with Bauman, all others were posed in late 2010 and early 2011 via email as a weekly ping-pong between Aalborg and Leeds. I am grateful to Zygmunt Bauman for generously taking the time and effort to delve into the topic of death and dying which, although he never entirely left it behind, by now is something he originally dealt with in detail many years ago. The interview Michael Hviid Jacobsen: Let me start out by posing perhaps a trivial, perhaps a tricky question. Why is death relevant to sociologists? In The World as Will and Representation (1966) Arthur Schopenhauer once mused that there would be no philosophy without death. Does the same line of reasoning really apply also to sociology? Zygmunt Bauman: Oh yes, it does! Were it not for mortality (not so much mortality itself, as its discovery by our distant ancestors), there would be no philosophy, but neither there would be culture as such (the uniquely human transgression of nature), and most certainly there would be no sociology (what its subject-matter could be?!) nor obviously our conversation (who could conduct it?!) and no Arthur Schopenhauer voicing opinions. Culture is the sediment of the on-going attempt to make the living with the awareness of mortality liveable. And if by any chance we were to become immortal, as sometimes (foolishly) we dream, culture would grind to a halt, as found out by Jorge Luis Borgess Joseph Cartaphilus of Smyrna, indefatigable searcher for the City of the Immortals, or Daniel 25th, cloned and bound to be re-cloned no end, the hero of Michel Houllebecqs Possibility of an Island. As witnessed by Joseph Cartaphilus: having once realised his own immortality, knowing that over an innitely long span of time all things happen to all men, and so for that very reason it would be just impossible that the Odyssey should not be composed at least once, Homer couldnt but revert to troglodyte. And as Daniel 25th found out, once the prospect of the end-of-time had been removed, and innity of being

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had been assured, the sole fact of existing was already a misfortune and temptation to voluntary surrender the entitlement to further re-clonings and depart thereby into simple nothingness, a pure absence of content turned impossible to resist. It was precisely the knowledge of having to die, of the non-negotiable brevity of time, of the possibility or likelihood of visions remaining unfullled, projects unnished and things not done, that spurred humans into action and human imagination into ight. It was that knowledge that made cultural creation a necessity and turned humans into creatures of culture. Since the beginning and throughout its long history, the engine of culture was the need to ll the abyss separating transience from eternity, nitude from innity, mortal life from immortality. Or the propulsion to build a bridge allowing a passage from one edge of the abyss to the other. Or the urge to enable us mortals to engrave our continuous presence on eternity, leaving on it an immortal trace of our, however brief, visit. Death is relevant to sociology because without death sociology would have no subject-matter to study; though, to be sure, we wouldnt know it as there would be no sociologists to nd it out and bewail. And in case some visitors from outer space visited the Earth and tried to enlighten the earthlings on that subject, the troglodytes wouldnt know what they were talking about. MHJ: In 1992 you published a book entitled Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies. Why did the interest in death as a topic deserving sociological attention occur to you at that particular time? Were there any particular reasons? ZB: I believe that it was not a thought of death that prompted me to reach for the typewriter (but then I might be mistaken about what made me do it, as authors all too often are). I believe that my true focus of interests was as always (following the guidelines of sociological hermeneutics) the unpacking social facts as products of human strategies. This book was to me a case study of sorts but a case of what? Of liminal situations, of strategies designed to deal with issues that by their nature cant be dealt with tackle what cant be tackled, respond to challenges that pre-empt responses. In short, strategies bound to be ineffective and ultimately defeated. Efforts known in advance to be vain; pursuits of unreachable goals to avoid/postpone the disaster that couldnt be wished away, wouldnt go away, and couldnt be pushed away whatever one did or desisted from doing (not unlike the victims of the Holocaust attempting to carry favours with their murderers and wary not to provoke their wrath, hoping to earn in such manner a stay of execution, as the quashing of sentence was beyond their power). Which case can conceivably be more blatantly, radically liminal in that sense, than strategies to defeat, postpone or disarm death; strategies of immortalisation, designed to cope with the fact of mortality, one fact that is both denitely immune to all coping but making non-coping all but unthinkable and impossible? As noted by Michel Montaigne at the threshold of the modern era, if death were an enemy which could be avoided, I would counsel borrowing the arms of cowardice

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(meaning, presumably, attempts to run away from trying or shoving your head in sand ZB). But it cannot be done. And so, he adds, we must learn do stand rm and ght it however hopeless the ght may be, and however fully we may be aware of it. In a perverse and convoluted fashion, such engaging in ghting a fully and truly hopeless struggle was, as Montaigne suggest, the ultimate act of emancipation: A man who has learned how to die (ghting ZB) has unlearned how to be a slave. I hoped that from this admittedly doomed and yet unlike to be ever stopped struggle I could learn quite a lot about the life-logic of humans, those not-by-theirchoice indefatigable ghters for freedom of choice. At any rate it seems to me that I did. MHJ: In your 1989 book Modernity and the Holocaust in your writings chronologically a sort of precursor to Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (1992) death is also present almost by its absence; a theme, as it were, touched upon, but never really explicated, a topic hiding somewhere between the lines in the shape of the almost anonymous deaths of millions of people, made possible by modern technology and bureaucratic procedures coupled with ill-intended ideologies. Although Modernity and the Holocaust is obviously a book about many other themes (e.g. morality, modernity, inhumanity and human responsibility), how do you see this book as a book of modern mass-made death? Can the Holocaust be seen as a metaphor for modern death? Can we learn something about death in general from this text? ZB: Technology of killing is as old as humanity; its beginnings could be traced to the earliest stages of the Palaeolithic era. Originally however killing was accomplished with the help of artefacts of much wider applications; a stone axe or hammer could be used on occasion to kill, though its prime ordinary, daily uses rested in the household and food-supply chores. For many subsequent millennia, the weapons technical implements designed and produced with killing in mind were combat weapons: tools intended to be used in armed confrontations, in which all sides aimed at killing their adversaries and all were expected to resort to similar killing techniques: combat is essentially a symmetrical affair even the weapons used in its course could be also, and often were, deployed to kill an adversary caught armless or by hook or by crook prevented from reaching for his sword or sabre. It was only with the start of the modern era that technical tools dedicated to murder, that is to the intentionally a-symmetrical, one-sided killing that leaves to the adversary no chance of responding in a similar manner, of reciprocation or contest, began to be designed and went into production: weapons meant not for combat, but for denying the adversary the very possibility to resist, let alone to return the blow. It all started from the eighteenth century guillotine. The twentieth century brought electric chair, and rst the mobile while shortly after stationary gas chambers, complemented with high-tech crematoria. It also brought carpet bombing, napalm, nuclear bombs. Towards the end of that century, remotely controlled drones and self-steering smart missiles were invented and put into use.

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The twenty-rst century took off with the prognosis of nano-technological weapons of murder. Not that the old-fashioned killing implements, once upon a time meant to be deployed in combat, fell out of use in our era despite it being marked by the tendency to substitute mass annihilation for armed confrontation and mass execution for armed contest. Modernity and the Holocaust was, at least in its authors intention, a study of industrialised/bureaucratised murder; more exactly, of the two formidable, intertwined and interpenetrating modern modes of organised/structured action, industry and bureaucracy, that in their combination allowed to cut the link between killing and passion and so made it possible to conduct killing in a typically modern, purposeful and instrumental-rational, fashion. But also, and perhaps in the rst place, it was to be a study of the modern spirit that put all that in place and set in operation, thus laying the technological foundation for the audacious project of changing reality by design and re-making it to order: a project that given the grandiosity of its ambition had to accommodate mass murder among the means routinely deployed to a steadily rising variety of set ends. Finally, Modernity and the Holocaust aimed to be a study of the phenomenon of adiaphorising, that is ethically neutralising mass murder, which followed its transfer to the realm of means-to-an-end, thereby subjecting it to solely instrumental-rational evaluation. MHJ: In your 1992 book Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies, you initiate the book by declaring which seems important to you that the book should not be regarded as a contribution to the sociology of death and dying. You write on the rst pages that it is a book with an immodest intention . . . to unpack, and to open up to investigation, the presence of death (i.e. of the conscious or repressed knowledge of mortality) in human institutions, rituals and beliefs (pp. 12). How do you see the eld or the sub-discipline termed the sociology of death and dying? Is death too general and too comprehensive a topic to be meaningfully subsumed under or monopolised by a sub-disciplinary branch of sociology? ZB: I had in mind something different from what you suggest. To start with, I fully recognise raison de tre of the sociologies of death, dying, mourning, commemorating. They all have their own (wide and important!) territory, seldom visited and hardly ever systematically explored by others; if those branches of sociology have not existed, they would need urgently to be invented. But they do exist, and thrive. The territories to which I refer here comprise quite complex while eminently alterable arrangements of the social settings in which our approaches to death and the event of death itself is put: elaborate rites de passage, socially and historically standardised procedures of seeing off the dead and dealing with variety of impacts which the loss, bereavement or orphaning may exert on people affected (on the near and dear, or in the case of a public person dying also those physically distant, emotionally uninvolved, or both), the structure and etiquette of mourning, techniques of memory-preserving (cemeteries, gravestones, obituaries, memorials, monuments, anniversaries etc.). Indeed, a wide research area for

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sociologists but also for the ethnographers and historians. This is an area with the event of death in the centre and in focus. Whereas the book called Mortality & Immortality (as its title itself, placing them in the family of life strategies, suggests) is not concerned with the event of death, its handling and its effects but with the anticipation of its unavoidability, and the impact of that anticipation on the areas of life not explicitly connected. One can put it, in the nutshell, this way: the subject matter of Mortality & Immortality is the presence of death as a ghost haunting the totality of life. In particular, that study is an attempt to scrutinise arguably the most salient and seminal facet of that invisible or indirect, ghostly presence: the obsession of all cultures and religions with bridge-building between admittedly brief biological life and life-after-death, and the access to bridgeheads having been made into one of the most prominent trappings and indices of social stratication, one of the major stakes of power struggles, and one of the major trophies of victory. MHJ: For decades it has been fashionable for existential writers and philosophers to claim that life is ultimately absurd and that mans search for meaning is utterly futile. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1955), Albert Camus famously proclaimed that suicide posed the most basic philosophical question. However, he stated that suicide (or death) was not the answer to the absurdity of life, but that revolt is. Since life before death living life with the continuous and nagging presence of the ghost of death is apparently absurd, what is the purpose of life then is it, as Camus would have it, revolt, or is it, as the myth of Sisyphus tells us, endless toil, or is there possibly another answer to such existential musings? ZB: Yes, indeed, this is Camus message (at least as I read it): our presencein-the-world is totally without foundations and therefore meaningless and absurd, yet the same facilities that allow us or force to be aware of that absurdity make of us obsessive meaning-makers. We are, simultaneously, victims of absurd and its indefatigable ghters/conquerors. Several years ago I was asked by Keith Tester to summarise my concerns in a paragraph. I could not nd a better shorthand description of the purpose of a sociologists effort to explore and record the convoluted paths of human experience, than a sentence borrowed from Camus: There is beauty and there are the humiliated. Whatever difculties the enterprise may present, I should like never to be unfaithful either to the second or the rst. Many a radical and selfcondent writer of recipes for happy humans would decry that profession of faith as a blameworthy invitation to straddle the barricade; Camus has shown however, in my view beyond reasonable doubt, that taking sides and sacricing one of those two tasks for (apparently) the sake of better fullling the other would inevitably end in casting both tasks beyond reach. Camus placed himself, in his own words, half way between misery and the sun: Misery kept me, he explained, from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasnt everything. Camus confessed to be pessimistic as to human history, optimistic as to man man being, as he insisted, the only creature that

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refuses to be what he is. Mans freedom, Camus pointed out, is nothing else but a chance to be better and the only way to deal with an un-free world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. As youve already implied, Camus portrayal of human destiny and prospect is located somewhere betwixt and between the likenesses of Sisyphus and Prometheus, struggling in vain, yet obstinately and indefatigably towards the reunion and merger of the two. Prometheus, the hero of LHomme re volte , chooses life-forothers, life-of-rebellion-against their misery, as the solution of that absurdity of human condition that drew Sisyphus, overwhelmed by and preoccupied with his own misery, towards suicide as the sole answer to and escape from his human, all-too-human plight (faithful to the ancient wisdom spelled out by Pliny the Elder, presumably for the use of all practitioners of amour-de-soi coupled with amour propre: Amid the miseries of our life on earth, suicide is Gods best gift to man). In Camus juxtaposition of Sisyphus and Prometheus, refusal was made in the name of afrmation: I rebel, as Camus would conclude, therefore we exist. It is as if humans have invented logic, harmony, order and Eindeutigkeit as their ideals only to be prompted, by their predicament and their choices, to defy each one of them through their practice. We wont be conjured up by the lonely Sisyphus having a stone, a slope, and a self-defeating task for their sole company. But even inside the apparently hopeless and prospect-less plight of Sisyphus, faced as he is with the utter absurdity of his existence, there is a room, an abominably tiny room to be sure, but all the same wide enough for Prometheus to step in. Sisyphus lot is tragic only because it is conscious aware of the ultimate senselessness of labours. But, as Camus explains, La clairvoyance qui devait faire son tourment consomme du me me coup sa victoire. Il nest pas de destin qui ne se surmonte par le me pris. Pushing the morbid self-awareness away and opening himself to Prometheus visit, Sisyphus may yet turn from a tragic gure of a slaveto-things into their joyous doer. Happiness and the absurd, Camus points out, are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. And he adds: to Sisyphus, this universe without a master seems neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral ake of that night lled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to ll a mans heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy (emphasis added). Sisyphus is reconciled to the world as it is, and that act of acceptance paves the way to rebellion; indeed, makes rebellion if not inescapable, then at least a most likely outcome. That combination of acceptance and rebellion of concern with and care for beauty, and the concern/care for the miserable are meant to protect Camus project on both fronts: against resignation pregnant with suicidal impulse, and the self-assurance pregnant with indifference to the human cost of revolt. Camus tells us that revolt, revolution, and striving for freedom are inevitable aspects of human existence, but that we must watch the limits to avoid these admirable pursuits ending in tyranny. MHJ: You quoted Albert Camuss wonderful words that also end your book Postmodernity and Its Discontents (1997): There is beauty and there are the

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humiliated, and in your book you commenced with rephrasing or perhaps rather extending this dictum by stating: There can hardly be any beauty without solidarity with the humiliated. Could this dictum or manifest also and perhaps particularly pertain to our solidarity with the dying and the bereaved? ZB: Let me add two more sonorous, resounding voices to those of Camus. First Jacques Derrida: with every death, a world disappears. Meaning: no ones life is repeated or repeatable - every human, whatever kind of vehicle carried her or him to the land of immortality, and even were s/he have missed or been denied a seat in each, takes with her or him to the grave a whole world the world of her or his own, die eigene Welt: a unique world, with no other world exactly like it, and such as will never return to the land of the living. That world, with all its riches and all as yet un-exploited seams of precious ore, vanishes once for all. Paul Ricoeurs ipseite is our lot in death and as much as it has been in life. In the result, we are all orphaned or bereaved by the death of an-other, with the death of every Other the estate of humanity shrinks whereas every death is a vociferous reminder of the incurable loneliness of dying. We are all impoverished poorer than we were a moment ago. And all are warned. And so the second voice, that of John Donne drawing the inescapable conclusion: Any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. We could go on citing without end similar locutions; when it comes to death and dying, consensus about irreversibility, indeed the nality of what has happened, is astonishing even if predictable; as already Miguel de Cervantes pointed out, there is a remedy for everything except death. It is because of that no-leave-to-appeal irrevocability the like of which even the most ruthless among tyrants would not have managed to secure for their verdicts however hard they might have tried, that (as Jean-Jacques Rousseau opined), he who pretends to look at death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species will soon be destroyed. This is, I guess, why every death of an-other is a lesson in solidarity offered to the living. Sad solidarity to be sure, solidarity in futility, in miserable and prospectless frailty but one and only fully and truly solid solidarity among irreparably fragile human bonds: one and only bond non-negotiable and denitely unbreachable. The one an only solidarity which is, simply, always there without asking. All other solidarities are dreamed of, fantasised about and patched together after its pattern, though all and any of them are doomed to remain but its pale copies. Just a thought: is this not the reason for our pigheaded inclination to go on submitting those dreams and fantasies to the test of re in which they are bound to perish? MHJ: In several of your books throughout the last couple of decades e.g. Mortality, Immortality and Other life Strategies (1992), Postmodernity and Its Discontents

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(1997) and In Search of Politics (1999) you have touched substantially upon the topic of immortality. In many ways, it seems as if you regard immortality as a sort of doppelganger of humanitys merciless awareness of death and humans striving to avoid death. It also seems as if you regard the human striving for immortality as something potentially dangerous or unhealthy because it detracts from our recognition of death. How do you see the role of immortality in society? ZB: Immortality may be a heavenly idea, but its practice could not be but hell as Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, and most recently Michel Houllebecq (in the Possibility of an Island) have vividly and shockingly shown. By the way - I guess that what we really yearn for when (if) dreaming of immortality, is prolongation of life and postponement of death, not eternity. A prospect of no end is all-too-often no less odious a nightmare than the end itself: living forever one can only in inferno wherein Faust had been promptly expedited by Mephisto when imprudently wishing a beautiful moment to last forever. Today, we hardly need Mephisto to make us aware of that truth, and to run for shelter from (and better still never come close to) everything remotely reminiscent of an eternal duration. We may wish Erlebnisse and/or Erfahrungen to last longer, but forever?! Liquid life, sliced as it cant but be into episodes and projects, teaches us to appreciate the nishing as much, if not more, as we do the new starts. In fact, to seek assurance of the temporality of the affair before we agree to start it; and the attractiveness of being born again inevitably presumes the decease of a previous incarnation. What I said thus far applies to the notion of bodily, esh-and-bone immortality; not necessarily it does, though, to its sublime forms forms of ethereal living, in the sense of continuing to be present in human memory and never disappearing from it without chance of resurrection; not being un-dead is here at stake, but being un-forgotten reminding ourselves to the living through the (durable, perhaps even indestructible) traces of our presence. The nature of such traces is, as I repeatedly tried to show (most recently in my book Liquid Fear), class-specic: personal presence for the chosen, anonymous presence for the rest. One can travel to immortal memory by a private car, or board a publicly supplied, scheduled and run train or bus in case none of the currently available brands of private vehicles are within ones means. But whatever the means of transportations, their socially arranged and culturally advertised purveyance is the principal engine and the ying wheel of cultural creativity and societal survival and arguably their main raison de tre as well. I do not remember ever suggesting that striving for immortality is something potentially dangerous or unhealthy. What I did suggest and go on suggesting (taking a leaf from Elias Canetti) is that dangerous and unhealthy is the survival instinct (raised in our times to the rank of survival obsession). Survival, as Canetti pointed out, is not about immortality or eternity: it is about surviving others and when brought to its radical, but also logical extreme, the survivalist obsession may well lead, as it all-too-often does, to murder as the surest means to that purpose. I discussed some of the recipes for that devils

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brew when considering morbid, indeed potentially (and often practically) murderous re-presentations of the lessons deriving from the Holocaust: representations suggesting explicitly or in a round-about way that surviving others was what the Holocaust tragedy and the lot of its victims was about. Such lessons are particularly fraught with danger because of chiming well with our own Zeitgeist; for the reason of such elective afnity they throw powerful light on that Zeitgasts, otherwise cravenly covered up, murderous potential. The one-upmanship having been proclaimed the main road to life successes, why not to choose the same road when seeking that ultimate, most successful of successes prolongation of life? MHJ: In many ways, such ideas of immortality and survivalism seem to constitute perpetual utopias of human existence. Almost 20 years ago you wrote a piece on Survival as a Social Construct (1992) on the various so-called survival strategies. In this piece you mentioned notions of God, Love, the Common Cause and Fitness as examples of such strategies. In Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (1992) you also hinted at postmodern ideas of the eternal now, carpe diem or the majestic moment as ways to experience a sense of symbolic immortality in a mortal world. How do you see mans yearning or quest for immortality today? Has it changed since then? ZB: The ethereal immortality, immortality-through-other-people-memory, remains astonishingly steady in its form over centuries. It undergoes quantitative changes only, consisting mostly in multiplying the numbers of available designs, marks and brands of private vehicles as political leaders, generals, inventors and artists are being joined and crowded by footballers, pop-singers, TV personalities, serial killers and other celebrities. The novelty, if any, is the promise (thus far untested) of merging a one-off experience of instant (for onthe-spot consumption) immortality with the hope for its eternal duration; the (transient) state of being a celebrity is an exercise (I repeat: yet untested) in such merger. Survivalism (one could say: in a mimicry with the condition it stands for) remains alive and well and is incessantly, and on steadily growing pace, supplied with new varieties of nourishment to feed on: namely, alarms portending the arrival or announcing the discovery of new menaces from which to draw its selfcondence and the strength needed to ght them back, disarm or conquer. Every once and again new carcinogenic or otherwise deadly threats are uncovered and new categories of people as well as new human habits are declared carcinogenic or deadly in their intentions or consequences. Though no longer virgin lands, the inventing and ghting life-threatening dangers, as well as the catering for and servicing of the security obsessions they trigger and inate, turn nowadays into exceptionally rich and seemingly inexhaustible mines of commercial prots and are indeed assiduously and most ingeniously exploited in most if not all stalls of the present-day consumerist bazaar. Perhaps the most radical departure that has occurred (though there is no knowing how long it will stay) has been in the images of bodily immortality. Stem-

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cell research, and their tentative deployments in medicine, feed into an image of human body as an assembly of exchangeable parts; when diseased or ill functioning, each part can, so to speak, be removed and replaced, extending thereby to humans the capacity ascribed until recently to knives only: one can replace rst the blade and then, after a while, the handle, and then change the blade once more, and so ad innitum and all the time enjoy the possession of the same knife. Though in case of humans, the associated identity question is bound to be sharpened (as it was in sci- literature in the brief yet stormy life-time of the cyborg craze): just which and how many of bodily parts may have been replaced while still remaining the same person? In addition, that question is bound this time to play havoc with our orthodox views of identity, personality, self and the plethora of associated traits of the human being and perhaps throw the whole of philosophy back to the drawing-board stage. If, of course, the stem-cells affair delivers on the hopes currently invested in it. The other, yet more seminal departure in the same eld: cloning. As shown luridly in Michel Houllebecqs dystopia, a possibility opening before neo-humans the prospect of personal bodily immortality (while degrading by the same token the relics of old-style humanity to the status of savages). One trie issue barring the passage from the already available technical possibilities and rendering that prospect feasible is the way of including in the cloning-process the accumulated memory of the re-cloned person and so by-passing the thorny issue of immortality of identity (as the Houllebecqs story progresses, that challenge is at some point successfully met, just like in other sci- stories the way to bring the longevity of cosmic travels closer to the life-expectation and life rhythm of humans is already known and practiced through the simple, even if unexplained expedient of timewarp). Because those technical sophistries are not yet available at the time I write these words, I must however leave it to you to nd out some time in the future inaccessible to me whether, and in what way, the above breath-taking departures will have managed to revolutionise human-way-of-being-in-the-world as you and I currently know it, or whether they will have been but added to the volume of the already sky-high heap of abortive and still-born ideas. MHJ: Late Danish novelist Villy Srensen once wrote the wonderful words: There is life in death and death in life, but probably more life in life if death is part of it. Do you agree with this understanding? How do you see it? Can death actually provide us with the ultimate meaning of life? ZB: Memento mori: admittedly, a two-edged sword. Some people say that remembering our own mortality would (does?) make mortal life liveable. Others believe that it would (it does?) make life un-liveable. This particular querelle goes on already for millennia and will continue to go on for as many millennia as will take humanity to vanish. Neither of the two camps has any reason to complain of the dearth of arguments in its favour, though no new arguments seem to have been added to their arsenal since antiquity and the obstinacy with which they are

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repeated generation after generation, identical in their essence and only wrapped in slightly modied wordings (how much new contents has Villy Srensen managed to add to Montaignes let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it, let us get used to it?), testies if anything to the shortage of their convincing power. As for the practices that follow each of the two stands: again, their assortments change over the years whereas the effects sought and the intentions behind them remain remarkably steady though the technologically enabled and assisted ingenuity of forms may hide from view the stubborn continuity of contents and purposes (Aldous Huxley expected the children of the Brave New World to be offered sweets when gathered around beds of dying elders; into the Lebenswelt of our children, watching innumerable varieties of Tom and Jerry killing each other and promptly rising unscathed from each successive of their own deaths, death enters in the attire of deathertainment and seldom if ever changes its dresses since). Most commonly told/shown moral tales in our days try to inoculate us against fear of death by banalising and de-toxicating the sight of dying. But why do we, humans, need all those arguments and practices to avoid falling into that Camusian abyss of absurdity that waits in ambush for those who in a moment of inattention or despair step out of the shelter laboriously nailed together of precisely those arguments and practices? Death is so unbearably fearful (one is tempted to say: mother of all fears) because of its quality unlike any other qualities: the quality of nality, that is of rendering all other qualities no longer obtainable and/or negotiable. Each and any event we know or know of except death has a past as well as a future. Each event except death has a promise written in indelible ink, even if in the smallest of prints, that the plot is to be continued. Death carries one only inscription: Lasciate ogni speranza (though Dante Alighieris idea to engrave that no-appeal sentence over the gate to Hell was not really legitimate, since all sorts of things went on happening after crossing the hells gate). Only death means: nothing will happen from now on, nothing will happen to you, that is nothing will happen that you could see, hear, touch, smell, enjoy or bewail. It is for that reason that death is bound to remain incomprehensible to the living; indeed, when it comes to drawing a truly impassable limit to human imagination, death has no competitors. One and only thing we cant and never will be able to visualise is a world that does not contain us visualising it. But: and this is, allow me to put it this way, the most butty but of them all. Maurice Blanchot went as far as to suggest that whereas humans know of death only because they are human they are only human because they are death-in-the process-of-becoming. It is living-towards-death that makes life human. It is the awareness of nality that endows every moment preceding the end with awesome (because bound to be irretrievably lost if not attended to) signicance. It is not that, as you ponder, death provides us with the ultimate meaning of life; it is, rather, that death (or rather knowledge of its inevitability) prods us and forces to ll our lives with meanings. It is the awareness of nality that sends us to search for

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new beginnings. It is the awareness of living on borrowed time that prompts us to use each morsel of time wisely and so to seek/construe knowledge of good and evil, of reason and unreason, of use and waste. And so weve come full circle back to where our conversation started. Namely, to the fact that there is as much in life no more, yet no less either as death managed to sow into it. MHJ: Thank you for your time and for sharing your ideas.
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Biographical Notes
Douglas J. Davies is Professor in the Study of Religion at Durham University and Director of its Centre for Death and Life Studies. He trained in both anthropology and theology and has published numerous books on death, ritual and beliefs, on Mormonism, Anglicanism, and on Religious Studies. He holds the Oxford Doctor of Letters degree, an Honorary Dr.Theol. from Swedens Uppsala University, and is an Academician of the UK Academy of Social Sciences. Michael Hviid Jacobsen is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Social Work, Aalborg University, Denmark. He has written and/or edited the following titles on the work of Zygmunt Bauman: Zygmunt Bauman: Den postmoderne dialektik (2004), Bauman Before Postmodernity (with Keith Tester, 2005), Bauman Beyond Postmodernity (with Sophia Marshman & Keith Tester, 2007), and The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman (with Poul Poder, 2008).