The necrophile self: contemporary attitudes towards death and its new visibility

Abstract

Critical voices have long pointed out that contemporary Western civilization has a twisted relationship with death. Many scholars seem to agree on one point: we are living in a culture of death denial, death phobia and death illiteracy. Death has the gravity to break the cultural hypnosis of living a life without limits; thus it plays a central cultural role in the meaning-making and identity-forming processes. However, the argument that a death-phobic culture has removed death from everyday life is not wholly accurate. At the same time that physical death has been removed from everyday life, representations of death have become pervasive in contemporary cultural representation, with seemingly endless depictions of graphic violence and death. This cultural phenomenon of death in the media brings into question the consensus that death denial is a central cultural attitude. Our relationship with death and violence and their interplay points to a schism between the private and public handling of death. Psychoanalytic theories of the death drive — or Thanatos — first introduced by Sigmund Freud and then further developed by scholars such as Herbert Marcuse and Jacques Lacan, offer an explanatory framework for understanding the ambivalent role of death and violence in our culture and how this cultural framework shapes identity. Building on the psychoanalytic theory of the death drive, I argue that this schism in our relationship with death produces a trait within the individual that is constituted by the inability to think about death, coupled with an obsessional relationship with violent death and an excessive materialism. The constant reciprocity of the anxious individual and a death-phobic society creates a status quo in which the absence of mortality contemplation accelerates selves that yearn to generate meaning through materialism and yet are unable to meet the existential limits of life and environment. I argue that consumerism is the prevalent death drive in contemporary culture and that it entails marginalizing authentic awareness of mortality for the sake of symbolic immortality. For Erich Fromm, the death drive is a character trait of malignant aggression, or what he calls necrophilia. In this thesis I put forward the idea of the necrophile self — the cultural trait of death phobia within the individual. I argue that the sense of self in late capitalist society is constituted by the very thing we deny and most fear; death (deadness) becomes us.