TY - JOUR
T1 - "Spectacular Death"
T2 - Proposing a New Fifth Phase to Philippe Ariès’s Admirable History of Death
AU - Jacobsen, Michael Hviid
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - This article revisits, reviews and revises the much cited and magisterial description of successive historical death mentalities from the Middle Ages to modern society as proposed by now several decades ago by French historian Philippe Ariès. The article first outlines Ariès’s position starting out with the medieval ‘tamed death’, then moves on to point to several inherent limitations in his history-writing, before suggesting a revision and update of it. Whereas Ariès ended his history-writing with modern ‘forbidden death’, the author suggests that contemporary death mentality in Western society rather be labelled ‘spectacular death’ in which death, dying and mourning have increasingly become spectacles. Moreover, the author proposes that what is currently happening in contemporary Western society can be interpreted as an expression of a ‘partial re-reversal’ of ‘forbidden death’ to some of the characteristic features of previous historical death mentalities, which – coupled with contemporary scientific and technological possibilities – creates several paradoxical tendencies which makes death linger uneasily between liberation and denial as well as between autonomy and control.
AB - This article revisits, reviews and revises the much cited and magisterial description of successive historical death mentalities from the Middle Ages to modern society as proposed by now several decades ago by French historian Philippe Ariès. The article first outlines Ariès’s position starting out with the medieval ‘tamed death’, then moves on to point to several inherent limitations in his history-writing, before suggesting a revision and update of it. Whereas Ariès ended his history-writing with modern ‘forbidden death’, the author suggests that contemporary death mentality in Western society rather be labelled ‘spectacular death’ in which death, dying and mourning have increasingly become spectacles. Moreover, the author proposes that what is currently happening in contemporary Western society can be interpreted as an expression of a ‘partial re-reversal’ of ‘forbidden death’ to some of the characteristic features of previous historical death mentalities, which – coupled with contemporary scientific and technological possibilities – creates several paradoxical tendencies which makes death linger uneasily between liberation and denial as well as between autonomy and control.
KW - Philippe Ariès, death mentality, tamed death, forbidden death, spectacular death, partial re-reversal
U2 - 10.3390/h5020019
DO - 10.3390/h5020019
M3 - Journal article
SN - 2076-0787
VL - 5
SP - 1
EP - 20
JO - Humanities
JF - Humanities
IS - 2
ER -