ABSTRACT
Humanism is haunted by the skull Holbein’s Ambassadors will have to tread upon as soon as they move (Carroll, 2004). The project of a metaphysical sociology, treating the key questions of meaning questions, suggests we can–and ought–to draw on the deep truth humanism sought to deny, walk over the skull and Be. The fear of death can be overcome, or at least mollified, through the existential assertion I am. But can it, in these unchosen circumstances of what Anders called the ‘Last Age’, in which there can no longer be any assumption of a continuity from life and the individual might die as no more than a specimen? The chapter takes up this issue and explores it through a discussion of one of the most important cultural texts of the Last Age, Michelangelo Antonioni’s film L’eclisse (1962).
