Mortality, time and embodied finitude

Abstract

This quote from the French philosopher Françoise Dastur speaks to a style of thinking about mortality encountered in John Carroll’s “metaphysical sociology”. Indeed, the tragic-comedy of modern life is a theme in much of Carroll’s work (2001, 2008). Carroll reminds us that death is at the heart of modern tragedy as the perennial search for meaning in myths, religion and art. These forms of storytelling and aesthetics both represent and expose our ongoing struggle with mortality. And while life expectancy particularly amongst globally economic advantaged classes has been extended due to advances in health care, nutrition, disease control and medicine, it can have the effect of psychologically distancing death’s reality inevitability lurking beneath the “surface” of our everyday lives (Carroll, 2014: 562). Moreover, what is perhaps felt even more acutely in a first world where consumerist comforts and life-extending medicines buffer death’s immediacy is the need to salvage meaning and beauty out of the fleeting and fragile (Carroll, 2008).