The Instant of My Death

Maya Pettersen

The Articulation of Mortality: Solar Death in the Ṛgveda

Pettersen’s presentation examines solarity, form, time, and death in early Vedic thought, and the paradoxes that arise between them. Focusing on Mārtāṇḍa, Uṣas, Vivasvat, and Yama, Pettersen will discuss how, in the Vedic cosmology, the Sun does not symbolize the cyclical rise and descent from life into death as rebirth, but inaugurates mortality by making existence visible, measurable, differentiated, and finite. 

To expand on the Vedic philosophy of solar finitude, Pettersen refers to systems theory and notions of sacrifice and solar excess. In this logic, death is not life’s opposite, but a condition latent in organisation itself: the boundary that allows something to become itself is also the precondition of all dissolution. The birth of the sun is also the birth of death, and thus the beginning of all time and mortality within Vedic myth and metaphysics. 

Jacob Phillips

Cultivating Death in Life

Countries which have legalised assisted dying usually begin with tight regulations around the practice, which are gradually weakened until it becomes a major cause of death within their populations.

Phillips’s talk explores how attempts to soften death’s sting invariably result, paradoxically, in a similar amplification of death’s power.  

On this evidence, it must also be true that an honest acceptance of the uncontrollable reality of death amplifies life’s power, which, in turn, means that cultivating a sense for one’s death bears much promise for learning how to live. 

Rose Lyddon

Martyrdom and eschatology

The persistence of martyrdom in early medieval theology was the definitive sign of eschatological escalation. A march towards ‘the end’ required the transformation of martyrdom into new types of sanctity. It gave rise to notions of ‘white martyrdom’ or ‘living martyrdom’ of virginity or asceticism after state persecution of Christians ceased.

This association extended into the temporal realm, with homilists around the end of the first millennium preaching that the sufferings of those on earth would be intensified relative to the remaining time in the world’s sixth age. The world to come was imagined as being populated entirely by martyrs or by saints who had demonstrated suffering or renunciation in life equivalent to martyrdom. 

This sanctity reveals the Kingdom of God itself. What is it in the nature of the martyr and the love they embody that allows their entry into the Kingdom? What sort of person is the saint and what does it mean for a person to transcend self-preservation but retain a particular and distinct self?

David Roden

The Death of Posthuman Life

Posthumanism is often presented as a philosophy of life — life considered not from the perspective of the privileged human subject, but a vital process, extravagantly mutant, alive to joyful new affiliations and ‘cyborg’ couplings. Posthuman life, according to Rosi Braidotti, is intense and joyful. 

Understood this way, Posthumanism promises an egalitarian approach to our planetary existence, a basis for interspecies justice for which humans are no longer the privileged players on Earth. 

However, Roden will argue that our posthuman condition is perversely negative and death-driven, but, maybe, that this is a good thing. 

Roden will unpack this posthuman death drive by looking at some of its avatars in artists such as J G Ballard (Crash), Katy Mongeau (Apostasy), Julia Ducournau (Titane) and his own writing (Snuff Memories and Xenoerotics).