الربيع ٢٠٢٢، القاهرةمقرر موضوعي

How do we talk about Death?

التسجيل مغلق

تفاصيل المقرر

الدورة: الربيع ٢٠٢٢، القاهرة
المدة: ١٠ جلسات
طريقة الحضور: عبر الإنترنت
لغة التدريس: الإنجليزية

ناقشه مع الذكاء الاصطناعي

اختر مساعد الذكاء الاصطناعي الذي تفضّله.
ستُفتح علامة تبويب جديدة، وستجد النص التوجيهي جاهزًا للاستخدام.
اضغط على إرسال لتبدأ استكشاف الصفحة من خلال الحوار، على طريقة سيلاس.

عن المقرر

Nothing can be more unsettling than pondering one’s mortality. Death is ubiquitous, and yet never really spoken about. It remains a powerful taboo. And although we are definitely better off than our ancestors were, two hundred years ago, death can still find ways to rattle us and disrupt our lives, the current pandemic being a case in point. In this course, we try to look at the “history of death” and the fundamental questions that death raises about who we are and what we do. Through using philosophical, anthropological and scientific methods and approaches, we collectively try to develop a language that would allow us to begin to think about it. Using a feminist lens that centres gender as a dividing line in the experience of life and death, the course will privilege feminist experience and contribution to understanding death as a phenomenon. Participants will be invited to build on their subjective experiences and broader cultural milieu to engage with and enrich the debate and deepen class discussions and course reflections.

We usually don’t think or meditate on death in our modern culture, with its obsession with youthfulness and longevity, there is a taboo around death. Aside from religious convictions about the inevitability of death, we don’t think much about death in our everyday life unless we encounter it personally, as when someone we know dies or collectively as in a state of war or, like now, during a global pandemic. It is then that death becomes what it always is, an essential experience for all living things. Death then goes from the personal, individual experience to something that has to be managed, monitored, combated and even legalized (as with euthanasia, for example). When is it legal to end someone’s life, or when to punish those whose actions resulted in the death of someone.

Death as many would say is essentially an individual experience, it's inevitable, irreplaceable and terminal. No one escapes it, no one that has died has “come back from the dead” (long after they died, and not just with clinical and medical support/intervention when their vital functions are affected). And yet we lack the terms to be able to talk about it, how to understand it and understand our history in dealing with it and what can the inevitability of death mean for us, practically, philosophically but also ethically.

In this course, we will try to explore the general contours of death as a phenomenon, we will look at historical, anthropological, scientific, religious and philosophical sources that tried to examine and understand death, and what that says about the human experience. The course will centre a feminist understanding and conception of death and its meaning. Despite the fact that death is the great equalizer, gendered notions of death persist in ways that most of us would still find difficult to fathom.

Through discussion and reflection, the participants collectively with the instructor would develop their own lexicon and terms in understanding and dealing with death. A central aspect of the course, that the participants relate what they read to their own subjective experience and are then able to have a meaningful engagement with the readings on hand and with their own everyday experience on the other.

مَن يقدّم المقرر

Ismail Fayed is a writer and researcher based in Cairo. He has been writing and researching contemporary artists practices in Egypt since 2007. He was part of the Critics-In-Residence for the KunstenfestivaldesArts in Belgium, Arts-Lab Critic and Festival’s Blogger for “In Transit Festival- Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt”- Germany. He is currently the associate editor of "Arab Art in the Twentieth Century: Primary Documents" published by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2017). His writing appeared in ArteEast, Nafas Art Magazine, Mada Masr and Ma3azef.

مسار المقرر

يُعرض ١٠ جلسات

جلسات بلا تاريخ

- A Brief History of DeathCh. 1, 2 and 3. Douglas Davies, Wiley-Blackwell, 2005.
- Charting Death's Evolution and Life's ExtensionChapter 2, in Stanley Shostak, The Evolution of Death: Why We Are Living Longer, State University of New York, 2006.
- On Motherhood and ViolenceIman Mersal, Makhzin, Issue 2: Feminisms, September 2015.
- Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in BrazilChapter 8: (M)Other Love: Culture, Scarcity, and Maternal Thinking, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, University of California Press, 1992.
- The Bureaucratic Professionalization of Funeral Rites in Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra CemeteryZohreh Bayatrizi and Hajar Ghorbani, from Across Cultures: Death and Dying in Non-Western Cultures (2019).
- Feminist Philosophers Turn Their Thoughts to DeathSamantha Brennan (2006), in Samantha Brennan and Robert J. Stainton (eds.), Philosophy and Death: Introductory Readings, Broadview Press, 2009.
- DeathThomas Nagel (1979), in Samantha Brennan and Robert J. Stainton (eds.), Philosophy and Death: Introductory Readings, Broadview Press, 2009.
- Antigone and the Deadly Desire for Sameness: Reflections on Origins and DeathVigdis Songe-Møller, Ch. 9, in Birth, Death and Femininity: Philosophies of Embodiment (2019).
- The Sexed Self and the Mortal BodySara Heinamaa, Ch. 4, in Birth, Death and Femininity: Philosophies of Embodiment (2019).
- Being Towards DeathSara Heinamaa, Ch. 5, in Birth, Death and Femininity: Philosophies of Embodiment (2019).
- Death (Central Problems of Philosophy)Geoffrey Scarre, Ch. 4 and Ch. 7, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007.
- Death and PhilosophyCh. 1, in Death and Philosophy, Jeff Malpas and Robert C. Solomon (eds.).
- Death and AuthenticityOptional: Ch. 11.
- Problems of Post-Mortem IdentityCh. 2, in R.W.K. Paterson, Philosophy and the Belief in a Life After Death, Palgrave, 1995.
- The Concept of the AfterlifeCh. 6, in R.W.K. Paterson, Philosophy and the Belief in a Life After Death, Palgrave, 1995.
- Death and Dying in Comparative Philosophical PerspectiveChapter 1, Introduction, by Timothy D. Knepper, in Timothy D. Knepper, Lucy Bregman, and Mary Gottschalk (eds), Death and Dying in Comparative Philosophy of Religion, 2019.
- The Ritualization of Death and Dying: The Journey from the Living Living to the Living Dead in African ReligionsCh. 8, in Death and Dying in Comparative Philosophy of Religion, 2019.
- The Hour of Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death over the Last One Thousand YearsPhilippe Aries, Ch. 3 and 4, Vintage Books, 2008.
- The Islamic Understanding of Death and ResurrectionCh. 2, in Jane Idelman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Oxford University Press, 2002.
- Responses to PlagueCh. 5, in Frank M. Snowden, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present, Yale University Press, 2019.
- Plague in Medieval Islamic SocietyCh. 11, in Joseph Byrne, Daily Life During the Black Death, Greenwood Press, 2006.
- Eternity Calling: Modernity and the Revival of Death and the AfterlifeRaymond L. M. Lee, in Helaine Selin and Robert M. Rakoff (eds), Death Across Cultures: Death and Dying in Non-Western Cultures, Springer, 2019.
- Biopolitics and the Philosophy of DeathCh. 5, Paolo Palladino, Bloomsbury, 2016.