Resisting Intimations of Immortality: Aubrey de Grey’s Science and Saramago’s Novel
In: Death, Dying, Culture: An Interdisciplinary InterrogationSearch for other papers by Susan M. Behuniak in
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In contrast to thanatology’s acceptance of death and dying, within molecular biology there are serious efforts to significantly extend life and even to thwart death. In particular, Aubrey de Grey’s SENS project (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) has posited the likelihood of repairing all human age-related damages within the next 50 years. As such, de Grey argues that old age is a disease that can be ‘cured.’ That SENS undermines many of the principles of thanatology is unsurprising, but interestingly, some of the criticisms of SENS also help to resuscitate understandings of aging, illness and death that thanatologists have attempt to put to rest. A more promising critique of SENS and immortalism is Death with Interruptions, a novel by José Saramago that depicts the cultural chaos that would take place should death take a holiday. Saramago suggests an approach to analyzing SENS that emphasizes the connection between life and death and that avoids getting tangled in the knots that thanatology has already untied. This paper urges thanatologists to take seriously, however, the immortalist movement and to construct a careful basis for its resistance that is inspired by Saramago’s fable.