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Mortality: Promoting the

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Sociology, mortality and solidarity. An

Interview with Zygmunt Bauman on

death, dying and immortalityMichael Hviid Jacobsen

a& Foreword by Douglas J. Davies

b

aDepartment of Sociology and Social Work, Aalborg University,

Denmarkb

University of Durham, UK

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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

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INTERVIEW

Sociology, mortality and solidarity. An Interview with

Zygmunt Bauman on death, dying and immortality

MICHAEL HVIID JACOBSENDepartment of Sociology and Social Work, Aalborg University, Denmark

Foreword by DOUGLAS J. DAVIESUniversity 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 knowledgeinto 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 frominsightful 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

Mortalityjournal 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: [email protected]

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

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 beforgotten that Bauman was already 68 years old in 1992 when his Mortality-

Immortalitywas published and 85 when this interview was conducted by Jacobsen.

REFERENCE

TONY BLACKSHAW. Interview with Professor Zygmunt Bauman. Network. Number 83. October2002: 13.

The idea behind and background of the interviewPolish-English sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (born 1925) is undoubtedly one of

the most prolific, 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 oftenneglected 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 OtherLife 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 difficult 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 first conceived. So despite any such

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reservations, those who venture into Zygmunt Baumans universe of ideas and

interpretations will find 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 contemporarysociety, 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 firstquestion 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 trickyquestion. 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

infinitely 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 atleast once, Homer couldnt but revert to troglodyte. And as Daniel 25 th found

out, once the prospect of the end-of-time had been removed, and infinity 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 brevityof time, of the possibility or likelihood of visions remaining unfulfilled, projects

unfinished and things not done, that spurred humans into action and human

imagination into flight. 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 fill the abyss

separating transience from eternity, finitude from infinity, 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 find 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 unreachablegoals 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 definitely 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 firm

and fight it however hopeless the fight may be, and however fully we may be

aware of it. In a perverse and convoluted fashion, such engaging in fighting a fully

and truly hopeless struggle was, as Montaigne suggest, the ultimate act ofemancipation: A man who has learned how to die (fighting 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-their-

choice indefatigable fighters 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 tracedto 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 preventedfrom 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 first the mobile while shortly after stationary gas

chambers, complemented with high-tech crematoria. It also brought carpetbombing, 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-first 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 first 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 themeans 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 first

pages that it is a book with an immodest intention . . . to unpack, and to open up toinvestigation, 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 field

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 detre 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 ofsociology 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 ofmourning, 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 areasof 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 stratification, 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 presence-

in-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 fighters/conquerors.

Several years ago I was asked by Keith Tester to summarise my concerns in a

paragraph. I could not find 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 thereare the humiliated. Whatever difficulties the enterprise may present, I should like

never to be unfaithful either to the second or the first. Many a radical and self-

confident 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 sacrificing one of

those two tasks for (apparently) the sake of better fulfilling 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 methat 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 revolte, chooses life-for-

others, 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

affirmation: I rebel, as Camus would conclude, therefore we exist. It is as ifhumans 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 faireson tourment consomme du meme coup sa victoire. Il nest pas de destin qui ne se

surmonte par le mepris. Pushing the morbid self-awareness away and opening

himself to Prometheus visit, Sisyphus may yet turn from a tragic figure of a slave-

to-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 flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The

struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill 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 notinescapable, 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 theestate 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 finality of what has happened, isastonishing 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 prospect-

less frailty but one and only fully and truly solid solidarity among irreparablyfragile human bonds: one and only bond non-negotiable and definitely un-

breachable. 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 fire 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. Howdo you see the role of immortality in society?

ZB: Immortality may be a heavenlyidea, 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 lastforever. 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 finishing 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, flesh-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 bookLiquid Fear), class-specific:

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 sociallyarranged and culturally advertised purveyance is the principal engine and the

flying wheel of cultural creativity and societal survival and arguably their main

raison detre 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, thesurvivalist 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 withour own Zeitgeist; for the reason of such elective affinity 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 ofsuch 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, inventorsand 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 on-

the-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 self-confidence and the strength needed to fight 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 fighting life-threatening dangers, as well as the catering for and

servicing of the security obsessions they trigger and inflate, turn nowadays into

exceptionally rich and seemingly inexhaustible mines of commercial profits 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 first the blade and then, after a while, the handle, and then change theblade once more, and so ad infinitum 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-fi 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 field: cloning. As shownluridly 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 trifle 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-fi stories the way to bring the longevity of

cosmic travels closer to the life-expectation and life rhythm of humans is alreadyknown and practiced through the simple, even if unexplained expedient of time-

warp).

Because those technical sophistries are not yet available at the time I write these

words, I must however leave it to you to find 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 islife 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 ofthe 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 modified 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?), testifies 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 daystry 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 finality, 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 apast 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 onlything 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 finality that endows every moment preceding the end with awesome

(because bound to be irretrievably lost if not attended to) significance. 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

fill our lives with meanings. It is the awareness of finality 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 deathmanaged to sow into it.

MHJ: Thank you for your time and for sharing your ideas.

Biographical Notes

Douglas J. Davies is Professor in the Study of Religion at Durham University and Director of itsCentre for Death and Life Studies. He trained in both anthropology and theology and has publishednumerous books on death, ritual and beliefs, on Mormonism, Anglicanism, and on ReligiousStudies. He holds the Oxford Doctor of Letters degree, an Honorary Dr.Theol. from SwedensUppsala 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 ofZygmunt Bauman: Zygmunt Bauman: Den postmoderne dialektik (2004), Bauman BeforePostmodernity (with Keith Tester, 2005), Bauman Beyond Postmodernity (with Sophia Marshman& Keith Tester, 2007), and The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman (with Poul Poder, 2008).


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