João Tziminadis presents a working paper on ‚Responding to Finitude: The Problem of Death between Ontological Insecurity and Technical Security‘

In this text, I would like to argue that one is able to identify two parallel trends in the sociological and cultural-critical accounts of modern society’s relation to death. On the one hand, modern subjects seem to be deprived from overarching and socially bonding interpretations of their mortality. However, on the other hand, differently from many who defend that modern society displaces death from public discourse and make it a hidden subject to which no more cultural answer is produced, it seems that later-modern society actively invests in a particular relationship with death: a technical one.. The unprecedented rise on life expectations worldwide is an indication of that. For most of the time these gain in technical control over death has been an indirect consequence of general improvement in life conditions. Nonetheless, it is observable that, in recent times, more direct and intentional attempts to transform mortality into a technical problem come to the fore. The general argument of this contribution is that it is possible to conceive of the technical taming of mortality as an active cultural response to the problem of death in modernity and, more explicitly, in late modernity. As religion, philosophy or the arts, technology constitutes a form of responding to the awareness of our inescapable finitude. But, differently from them, a technological response does not promise any transcending projection beyond death.