ABSTRACT
What does it mean to live in an age of spectacular death if you are confronted with the death of someone close, or the perspective of your own imminent death? In order to answer this question, the five characteristics of the age of a spectacular death will be analysed against the background of modernity. Following this analysis, it will become clear that the way we deal with death and dying in our culture comprises a number of paradoxes. Underlying all these paradoxes is the basic tension between human freedom and the existential unavailability of death and dying. North Atlantic culture hardly has any tools to deal with these tensions and paradoxes at a personal level, unlike previous centuries in which people could fall back upon an art of dying. Therefore, the chapter subsequently discusses what such a contemporary art of dying might look like, and how it might deal with the basic tension between human freedom and the existential unavailability of death in a fruitful way. Finally, the five characteristics of the age of spectacular death will be revisited in order to discuss how a contemporary art of dying is both supported and complicated by societal developments in late modernity.
