7/30/2019 13576275.2011
1/15
This article was downloaded by: [b-on: Biblioteca do conhecimento online UA]On: 26 December 2012, At: 09:25Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Mortality: Promoting the
interdisciplinary study of death and
dyingPublication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cmrt20
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
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
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representationthat the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of anyinstructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primarysources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings,demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or
indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditionshttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditionshttp://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cmrt20http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditionshttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditionshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13576275.2011.614445http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cmrt207/30/2019 13576275.2011
2/15
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
7/30/2019 13576275.2011
3/15
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
Sociology, Mortality and Solidarity 381
7/30/2019 13576275.2011
4/15
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
382 M.H. Jacobsen
7/30/2019 13576275.2011
5/15
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
Sociology, Mortality and Solidarity 383
7/30/2019 13576275.2011
6/15
(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.
384 M.H. Jacobsen
7/30/2019 13576275.2011
7/15
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
Sociology, Mortality and Solidarity 385
7/30/2019 13576275.2011
8/15
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
386 M.H. Jacobsen
7/30/2019 13576275.2011
9/15
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
Sociology, Mortality and Solidarity 387
7/30/2019 13576275.2011
10/15
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
388 M.H. Jacobsen
7/30/2019 13576275.2011
11/15
(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
Sociology, Mortality and Solidarity 389
7/30/2019 13576275.2011
12/15
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-
390 M.H. Jacobsen
7/30/2019 13576275.2011
13/15
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
Sociology, Mortality and Solidarity 391
7/30/2019 13576275.2011
14/15
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
392 M.H. Jacobsen
7/30/2019 13576275.2011
15/15
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).
Sociology, Mortality and Solidarity 393