Zygmunt Bauman's Thesis

Understanding of Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis that postmodern culture is based on deconstruction of immortality
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This essay provides my understanding of Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis that the culture of the postmodern world is based upon the deconstruction of immortality. Immortality implies to survive beyond mortality and deny the moment of death its ultimate say thereby taking off some of death’s dreadful and threatening implication. In the postmodern society, death is no longer a single incident that has everlasting outcomes. It does not have the sting of finality; things will only vanish from view for a time but would reappear again some other time. In the postmodern world, everyday life has become an eternal rehearsal of death as people rehearse the evanescence and ephemerality of things that they may obtain and the bonds they may weave. Nothing seems to last forever in the postmodern society. For instance, marital partners, residences, careers, occupation and skills usually come and go, and they become off-putting or boring when they remain for a long time. Nothing in the postmodern society is truly irreplaceable. People in postmodern society have played and rehearsed the drama of mortality severally and it is not easy to tell between the rehearsals and the real performance.
Keywords: immortality, transience, death, deconstruction, eternal, rehearsal, postmodern society
Understanding of Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis that postmodern culture is based on deconstruction of immortality
In his book, Zygmunt Bauman formulates a new theory of how human mortality is reacted to and dealt with in both culture and social institutions. Bauman explores the hypothesis that people’s necessity to live with the invariable awareness of death explains the critical facets of the social organization of every known society. The postmodern strategy deconstructs immortality; this means that life is transformed into an incessant rehearsal of reversible demise, a substitution of impermanent disappearance for the irreversible death (Bauman, 1992, p. 10). In this paper, my understanding of Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis that postmodern culture is based on deconstruction of immortality is discussed. Zygmunt’s analysis of postmodernity as a life strategy that involves the deconstruction of immortality is examined exhaustively in this paper.
Deconstructing immortality implies the alteration of life into a repeated rehearsal of the death and transience of everything, the celebration of instances or moments of short-lived notoriety or fame, and effacement of the opposition between the durable and the transient. This notion – with its indication that everything, even life itself, loses significance and meaning, and that the striving for durable effects becomes outdated – is found to be morally and logically incoherent. Death is something that cannot be perceived; it is an absolute nothing and the cessation of the very acting subject, and with it, the ending of all perception (Brown, 1985, p. 19). Immortality, as Bauman pointed out, is essentially to survive beyond mortality and deny the instant of death its ultimate say thereby taking off some of death’s h...