This course examines and critically analyzes the history of concepts about death and dying. We examine the various definitions of death through the study of concepts of life, which are invariably tied to our ideas of death and dying. We will come to understand the historical, religious, and social dimensions of death and dying as well as the economic components that inform these various set of ideas. After a philosophical discussion of death, we will survey a history of death since prehistoric times to the modern world. The course will conclude with close examinations and analyses of our contemporary (and future) ideas about death and dying in light of our technological developments within the Posthuman world. What is meant by the Political Economy of Death will be discussed throughout the course: the notion that there is a distribution of death and concomitant concepts of death, as well as the mechanisms for death, that are dispersed according to historical, religious, economic, and cultural variables.
Lectures
1. Life: Bios and Zoe
2. Life and Death: Humans
3. Life and Death: Animals
4. Life and Death: Nature
5. Life and Death: The Sacred
6. A Short History of Death:
The Birth of Death
Death and Nature
Civilization and Death
Death in Ancient Egypt
Death in Ancient Greece
Death in Rome
Death and Judaism
Death and Christianity
Death and Islam
7. Modern Concepts of Death:
Death and Science
Death and Romanticism
Death and Technology
Death and Industrialization
Freud and Death
Death and Existentialism
8. Death in the 20th Century:
WWI
WWII
The Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Genocide
Death and fundamentalism
9. The Ethics of Death:
Death and Disease
Death and Punishment
Death and Biopower
Death and Biopolitics
10. Death and the Posthuman
11. The Future(s) of Death:
Necropower and Necropolitics
12. Conclusions: On the Political Economy of Death
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