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Book

(Inter)Facing Death

Book

(Inter)Facing Death

DOI link for (Inter)Facing Death

(Inter)Facing Death book

Life in Global Uncertainty

(Inter)Facing Death

DOI link for (Inter)Facing Death

(Inter)Facing Death book

Life in Global Uncertainty
BySam Han
Edition 1st Edition
First Published 2019
eBook Published 4 November 2019
Pub. Location London
Imprint Routledge
DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315446769
Pages 174
eBook ISBN 9781315446769
Subjects Humanities, Social Sciences
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Han, S. (2019). (Inter)Facing Death: Life in Global Uncertainty (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315446769

ABSTRACT

In modern times, death is understood to have undergone a transformation not unlike religion. Whereas in the past it was out in the open, it now resides mostly in specialized spaces of sequestration—funeral homes, hospitals and other medical facilities. A mainstay in so-called traditional societies in the form of ritual practices, death was usually messy but meaningful, with the questions of what happens to the dead or where they go lying at the heart of traditional culture and religion. In modernity, however, we are said to have effectively sanitized it, embalmed it and packaged it—but it seems that death is back. In the current era marked by economic, political and social uncertainty, we see it on television, on the Internet; we see it almost everywhere. (Inter)Facing Death analyzes the nexus of death and digital culture in the contemporary moment in the context of recent developments in social, cultural and political theory. It argues that death today can be thought of as "interfaced," that is mediated and expressed, in various aspects of contemporary life rather than put to the side or overcome, as many narratives of modernity have suggested. Employing concepts from anthropology, sociology, media studies and communications, (Inter)Facing Death examines diverse phenomena where death and digital culture meet, including art, online suicide pacts, the mourning of celebrity deaths, terrorist beheadings and selfies. Providing new lines of thinking about one of the oldest questions facing the human and social sciences, this book will appeal to scholars and students of social and political theory, anthropology, sociology and cultural and media studies with interests in death.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

chapter |24 pages

Introduction

The (inter)face in an era of pervasive death

chapter 1|22 pages

Beyond finitude

The place of death in the modern human sciences

chapter 2|14 pages

“Let’s die together”

Online suicide pacts in East Asia (with Nurul Amillin Hussain)

chapter 3|19 pages

Rethinking personhood

Death selfies, digital remains and dividuals

chapter 4|13 pages

The coronation of Choi Jin-sil

Celebrity death, media events and civil religiosity

chapter 5|18 pages

Terror as death regime

The spectacle of beheading

chapter 6|17 pages

The state, death and memory in the work of Ai Weiwei

chapter 7|21 pages

Image-ing the tragic

The metapicture of banal suffering

chapter 8|14 pages

Life in an uncertain era

Biopolitics, thanatopolitics and necropolitics
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