The Instant of My Death

Contemporary attitudes to death range from denying its inevitability — in transhumanist quests for immortality, as exemplified by millionaire Bryan Johnson’s Don’t Die movement — to expediting death as one rational option among many — visible, for example, in moves to legalise assisted suicide. If these are two sides of the same coin — one offered to Charon for his ferrying the soul across the Styx, perhaps — the moment of death itself is a void in our understanding. Drawn as it might be to the idea of death, the conscious mind today cannot comprehend the thing itself, rendering it a black hole that consumes all imagination.

The traditions of memento mori and ars moriendi have been exiled from the cultural horizon. Yet death refuses to go gently and reasserts itself in our self-annihilatory unconscious pursuits, practised by individuals and cultures alike. Even as a black hole, the instant of death is solar, hovering on the threshold of ecstasy at which the drive towards survival is overcome, abandoned, or dispossessed by force. 

What can standing at the threshold of death, when its immediacy is certain yet indeterminate, tell us about living? What will the human look like when death has been destroyed, when we are no longer individuated by our relentless drive to preserve our lives? How does self-destruction reveal death’s supernatural potential? And how can we speak about death at all when our lives, those spent in peace and safety, are ordinarily distant from its reality?

The symposium brings together multiple contemplative traditions, ranging from Vedic myth to accelerationism and from posthumanism to Christian eschatology. Between them, they grant the unthinkable instant of death a before and after.

The Instant of My Death is organised with Rose Lyddon.