Secular immortal
Item
-
Title
-
Secular immortal
-
Identifier
-
d_2009_2013:0df281fb622f:11305
-
identifier
-
11668
-
Creator
-
Farman Farmaian, Abou Ali,
-
Contributor
-
Talal Asad
-
Date
-
2012
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Social research | Immortality | Secularism | Technoscience
-
Abstract
-
A study of groups in the United States trying to achieve immortality or radically extended lives through cryonics, biogerontology and artificial intelligence, this ethnography defines Immortalism as an active commitment to transcending through technology the limitations that bring about the biological end of a person. Although long life and avoidance of death are considered universal ideals, Immortalism's imaginaries, practices and subjectivities have been shaped by a contingent confluence of American histories and specific techno-utopian practices and assumptions about life, death and personhood.;The research identifies four key dispositions in immortalist practices, concepts and ideologies: i/ techno-utopian orientations towards the future in which human problems are solved not through socio-political rearrangements but the rearrangement of matter by biotechnology and the informatic sciences; ii/ shifts in secular temporality to counter the sense of human life (individual and species) as a finite, incomplete and purposeless trajectory; iii/ understandings of personal identity in terms of information, producing an "informatic self", a self understood, managed, preserved and improved via the notion of information through strategies like cryopreservation or mind-uploading; iv/ the further use of "information" as a transontological concept bridging numerous domains to construct "informatic cosmologies" that portend to address the issue of universal purpose.;The broader analysis engages largely ignored tensions between science and the secular, which are overlapping but not coterminous domains. The encounter between Immortalism and the institutions of law and science highlights the inability of secular epistemology (mainly scientific materialism) to fix key metaphysical categories such as personhood, life and death, on which secular politics depends. This points to a general sense of existential fragility that has shaped secular life-death regimes. Immortalism's appeal is partly related to the possibility of addressing such existential issues, but from within the domain of science.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
2009_2013.csv
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
-
Program
-
Anthropology
