ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the intricate connections between celebrity, mortality and immortality, and specifically the phenomenon of the 'death of celebrity'. It provides an exhaustive analysis of processes of self-constitution in the age of celebrity nor a systematic treatment of key issues and debates about the politics of celebrity, although both of these topics are touched on throughout. The chapter also focuses on the way in which mediated symbolic materials function as objects of identification in the framing and perpetuation of daily life and the fabrication of identity. It focuses on the social drama surrounding celebrity death, recast, displace, and transform personal and political self-understandings. As many commentators have stressed, social theorists need to recognize the influence of ambivalence in the cultural reception of new technologies and rapid globalization of media cultures. Against both psychic reductionism and social determinism, as a complex, contradictory social-historical interweaving of cultural crisis and psychological mourning.
