ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the ideas of death and immortality in the writings of Zygmunt Bauman, primarily relying on his magisterial book Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies, as part of his more comprehensive analysis of the transformation of modern society and its most recent postmodern and liquid-modern incarnations. It focuses on the different ways in which society, according to Bauman, continuously constructs and entertains changing understandings and visions of immortality that are intimately linked to how society understands and seeks to make sense of life and death. As Bauman often quotes Robert Louis Stevenson's famous maxim: 'to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive'. Immortality, like utopia, is thus an integral part of our human-being-in-the-world. Without it, we would be unable to live meaningful lives and to carry on living with the annoying and gnawing awareness of death. A world without such immortal hopes would indeed be almost impossible to imagine.